The following article contains spoilers for Stranger Things season 5.

They say that good things come to those who wait. And, at least in the case of Stranger Things’ final season, it turns out they were right. Sure, the first batch of episodes was probably too long, more than a little bit repetitive, and often straight-up self-indulgent, but that’s probably to be expected when any show of its size (and cultural prominence) is trying to figure out the best way to wrap things up for good. But despite its flaws, season 5 volume 1 absolutely nails the most important moment in its four-episode run, putting Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) firmly back at the center of the story the show is telling and giving him the sort of Big Damn Hero moment that rewrites almost everything we can expect from the series’ conclusion. Yes, we had to wait an awful long time (maybe too long)  to see Will take center stage in this way, but, wow, was it ever satisfying to watch. 

Despite his initial disappearance serving as the inciting incident for pretty much every bizarre, weirdo event that has taken place in Hawkins since the show started, Will hasn’t been a particularly central character in Stranger Things’ recent seasons. Sure, he’s hovered around the show’s edges, clearly affected by his time in the Upside Down and trying to figure out a way to move past what happened to him. But his coming-of-age journey has largely been overshadowed by Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown), his screentime reduced to serve popular (and, at the time, often more interesting) newcomers like Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) or Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn). At least, until now. 

Stranger Things season 5 not only remembers that Will exists as a character in his own right, but it gives him a pivotal role at the very center of everything in these final episodes. His visions and strange behavior become evidence of his ongoing connection to Vecna and the hive mind within the Upside Down; his longstanding struggle with his own misery is suddenly the key to not just his understanding and self-acceptance but to unlocking the power that has seemingly lain dormant in him for so long. (Or, his ability to manipulate the power that Vecna has unwittingly given him access to. We’re not entirely sure on this point.) 

No matter where said power is coming from, there’s really no more triumphant moment in this season — possibly in the entire series, if we’re honest — than Will standing amidst the flaming wreckage of the Hawkins military base, holding back horrific monsters from those he loves with little more than the power of his own mind. That nosebleed? Iconic. And so earned. Will Byers has officially leveled up. And for what may well be the first time in Stranger Things history, we’re all eager to see what’s next for him. (Don’t believe me? There are already a metric ton of fan edits on TikTok and X, racking up millions of views. Will’s time to shine is here.)

For much of Stranger Things’ run, we’ve only really gotten to see Will be reactive to the many bonkers and unexplained things that have happened to him. In season 5, that’s not what’s happening. He’s making his own choices — the second most satisfying moment of the season might have been his decision to finally get out from under Joyce’s (Winona Ryder) particularly smothering brand of parenting — and deciding for himself not just who he is, but who he wants to become. Whether that means acknowledging his clearly less-than-platonic feelings for his BFF Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) or rejecting the idea that the things that have happened to him somehow mean he’s weak, Will’s big moment isn’t just about kicking some serious demogorgon ass, Will is finally figuring out how to accept himself and let go of the fear that he’s been carrying pretty much since the show started.

Where the character goes from here is anyone’s guess, and given everything we’ve seen so far, it could certainly involve everything from a fight to the death with Vecna himself to a face-off with one of his own friends after his connection to the hive mind gets too strong. But season 5 has already proven Will’s hero’s journey is one that’s worth following, even if we might have all forgotten that fact for far too long. 

The first four episodes of Stranger Things season 5 are available to stream on Netflix now.

The following article contains spoilers for Stranger Things season 5.

A lot happens in the first four episodes of Stranger Things’ final season. Vecna’s back to his old, overly complicated tricks, rounding up a gang of (now even younger!) kids in the service of some nefarious plan to remake the world. Max is still in a coma, but her mind is hiding in a cave in the midst of Henry Creel’s memories. Will finally gets his big hero moment, tapping into the Upside Down’s hive mind, literally crushing his enemies with his newfound powers, and wiping blood off his nose, Eleven-style. And of course, there’s a surprise return — though it’s probably not one that anyone was really hoping for. 

Season 5 reveals that Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) and her fellow military scientists have developed some sort of weapon that seems to weaken Eleven and neutralize her powers. Hopper refers to it as her “kryptonite,” because this show is nothing if not obsessed with pop culture references, but no one’s really sure what it is or how it works. As the dad-daughter duo infiltrate Kay’s military base in the Upside Down, El steals a glimpse from a soldier’s mind that something — someone — powerful is being kept behind a locked door. She assume’s it’s Vecna, and that he must have something to do with the supposed kryptonite that renders her helpless almost as son as she enters the mysterious lab.

But it’s not Vecna waiting for her behind that super secret door. Instead, she discovers Kali Prasad (Linnea Berthelsen), otherwise known as “Eight,” one of her fellow experiments from the Hawkins lab that El had always viewed as her sister. Sporting a shaved head and hooked up to a bunch of ominous-looking medical equipment, the girl definitely doesn’t look like she’s been living her best life since the last time we saw her back in season 2. 

For those who don’t remember — which I have to assume is probably most viewers at this point, thank god for the quick flashback that reminded us all who this kid even is – Kali was introduced back in season 2 episode “The Lost Sister.” Like Eleven, she was one of the many psychic children taken by Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), with the unique ability to project illusions and cause people to see what’s not there. She eventually broke out of the Hawkins lab, ending up as the leader of a gang of teen misfits and eager to take revenge on those who wronged her. Though she helped her adopted sister learn to use her own rage and trauma to tap into her powers — and her introduction foreshadowed many aspects of Vecna’s origins — Kali wasn’t interested in helping Eleven save her friends back in Hawkins, and the two parted ways. We haven’t heard from (or about) her since. 

How she fits into the series’ endgame is… well, let’s just call it an open question. On some level, Eight’s return makes sense. The Duffer brothers have been insistent that this final installment of the series is all about going back to the beginning — closing loops, answering lingering questions, filling in all the gaps they’ve left for viewers to speculate over along the way. But while almost everyone is certainly eager to find out the answers to things like “why Will Byers was taken in the first place,” or “is Max ever going to wake up,” it’s hard to imagine that anyone was all that eager to see Kali again, given that the episode in which she originally appeared is almost universally considered to be one of the series’ worst. 

It also doesn’t help that the whole “kryptonite” angle really doesn’t make any sense. Sure, Kay and her goons appear to have some sort of… something that can neutralize Eleven’s powers, but it’s not entirely clear what it actually is. Is it Kali herself? Is Kay using the girl’s abilities to somehow suppress Eleven’s? Or was Eight simply experimented on so much that the military finally hit on some kind of universal psychic suppressant? And why does any of this require Kali to be strung up in a sealed room in a position that so deliberately mirrors Vecna’s pose in the Upside Down last season? 

It seems likely that Eight is going to have a fairly key role to play in the series’ final episodes — whether we want her to or not. Is she the kryptonite that can stop Vecna? Who will somehow neutralize Will’s newfound, vaguely dark abilities when they go too far? We’ll have to wait for Christmas to find out. 

The first four episodes of Stranger Things season 5 are available to stream on Netflix now.

This article contains spoilers for Stranger Things season 5 and Stranger Things: The First Shadow.

Early in “Sorcerer,” the fourth episode of Stranger Things‘ fifth season, viewers get a familiar sight: Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink), digitally de-aged to look like she did when she nearly died fighting Vecna at the end of season four. As part of a flashback explaining how her mind lives trapped in Vecna’s memories while her body remains comatose in a Hawkins hospital, Max takes us to another location, at once familiar and slightly off. Max walks out of a darkened high school gym into a busy hallway, where people she knows as adults are now high school students, including future Mrs. Byers, Joyce Maldonado (Birdy).

The scene lasts only a couple of seconds, and exists just to establish that Max is in the mind of Henry Creel, who will later become Vecna. But for those who saw the play Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the flashback is a chilling reminder of how Vecna came to be, and the tragedy of the boy called Henry.

Written by Kate Trefry and directed by Tony winner Stephen Daldry (based on a story by Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer and Jack Thorne), The First Shadow takes place in 1959, back when Joyce was just a high schooler hoping to get out of Hawkins, Jim Hopper’s only sleuthing involved animal killings (alongside Joyce’s future boyfriend Bob Newby), and Henry Creel was the new kid in school.

Even more than the occasional flashbacks in the series, The First Shadow shows how Henry was a normal kid who began to change after finding abandoned technology in a Nevada cave. Left there by Russian spies, who were stealing from the Nevada Project established by Dr. Brenner (portrayed by Matthew Modine on the show), the technology sends the young Henry to what the U.S. government called Dimension X, but what we know as the Upside Down.

Gifted with psychic powers, but disturbed by his interactions with the Mind Flayer in the Upside Down, Henry tries to live a normal life when he moves with his family to Hawkins. There, he manages to befriend Bob’s sister Patty, and even gets a part in the production of The Dark Side of the Moon that Joyce stages. But he’s constantly under attack by the Mind Flayer and pursued by Brenner, whose own father was changed after a visit to Dimension X in World War II.

By the end of the play, Henry has killed his mother and sister—murders blamed on his father Victor—and is taken to Brenner’s lab. From there, Brenner transfers Henry’s blood into young test subjects, most notably the girl known as Eleven.

But the real focus of The First Shadow is on the way Henry is treated. Despite the monster that he’ll become, Henry is not pure evil. He was a troubled kid who had some bad things happen to him, things made worse by the way people feared and judged him. Max’s trip through these memories only touches on the events that shaped Henry, but they may be enough to help her, an oft-misunderstood kid herself, escape his fate.

The same may not be true of Max’s friend Will, the boy at the center of the entire show. “Sorcerer” ends with Will standing up to Vecna and taking control of the demogorgons attacking Hawkins. Voiceover replaying Robin’s monologue about coming out frames Will’s control as a good thing, as if he’s finally becoming the person he’s supposed to be. But the actual imagery—Will’s eyes glazing over with white and the strange contortions he makes with his body—suggest something more sinister.

Is Will like Henry, a boy who went to the Upside Down at a young age and was changed for the worse? Or will Will’s friends be able to save him from becoming the next Vecna? We’ll have to wait for the last four episodes of Stranger Things to know for sure, but The First Shadow sure doesn’t fill us with hope.

Episodes one through four of Stranger Things season 5 are now streaming on Netflix.

There are lots of questions that the final season of Stranger Things needs to answer. What, exactly, is the Upside Down? Why was Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) taken in the first place? Will Max (Sadie Sink) ever wake up from her coma? How does Eleven’s (Millie Bobbie Brown) mysterious sister Eight (Linnea Berthelsen) fit into all this — if she even still does? But the thing most viewers are most immediately concerned with is likely to be the question of who will manage to survive until the end.

Stranger Things hasn’t shied away from dark storytelling, and its world full of monsters, Mind Flayers, and shadowy government agents has already come with a body count. (R.I.P. forever faves Barb Holland and Eddie Munson.) But while its core cast of charismatic young teens has managed to dodge some serious bullets over the series’ four seasons to date, it seems more than likely that they won’t all be able to do so forever, if only to raise the stakes for the gang’s final encounter with the monstrous Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower). But maybe the better question is who should be left — not alive necessarily (although also that), but who’s truly earned the chance to make a final stand against the darkness at the heart of Hawkins. 

From the very beginning, it’s Eleven who’s been the linchpin around which much of the series’s larger narrative turns. From the secrets surrounding her origins and the depth of the trauma she’s endured to her steadily growing, occasionally near-magical psychokinetic abilities, she’s always been the designated superhero of this story, the Chosen One who must eventually face off against the encroaching forces of evil. But in the world of the show, she’s treated as a puzzle to solve as often as she is a real person, and while the mystery surrounding her origins can certainly be thrilling to watch, hers is not actually Stranger Things’ most satisfying narrative journey. That honor belongs to one Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), who deserves to only to survive whatever horrors are waiting at the end of this story, but to conquer them. 

Steve’s admittedly something of a strange choice for Stranger Things’ ultimate Final Girl. He’s a guy, for starters, which isn’t exactly what you might call traditional. He also begins the series as a complete d-bag, slut shaming his own girlfriend and bullying those he considers beneath him. He’s essentially the sort of selfish, self-centered jerk that often exists solely to be cannon fodder in stories like this, a cautionary tale for other characters meant to inspire them to do better, be smarter, or change in some way. This initially tracks, given that the the Duffer Brothers have been fairly forthright about the fact that they originally intended to kill the character back in season 1, but that’s mercifully not what happens. 

Instead, Steve survives. Not just monster attacks (of which there are many!) but the person he used to be, recognizing and confronting his own flaws in a way that allows him to both learn and grow from them. Where many of the core Stranger Things characters are forged into heroes by virtue of being forced to face actual demonic threats, Steve does so by first being asked to confront the monsters within himself. 

In a world full of pointless Russian sidequests, government psychobabble, and extended power training montages, Steve’s journey is Stranger Things at its most deeply human. His redemptive transformation is so enjoyable to watch precisely because it is the show’s most realistic, the one thing that could actually maybe happen in the world we all live in. Of course, someone like Eleven turns out to be a hero. She’s got superpowers. It’s precisely what we expect her character to do. Steve… not so much. It’s one thing to face off against monsters when you can fly or break their bones or throw a car at them with the power of your mind. All Steve has, essentially, is a baseball bat and a dream. And yet he still steps up, in a way that none of us would have ever initially expected. 

Most importantly, Steve’s rehabilitation isn’t sudden or immediate. It’s earned, through countless moments of selflessness and self-awareness across seasons’ worth of story, as he becomes Dustin’s (Gaten Matarazzo) babysitter (and protector), Robin’s (Maya Hawke) best friend, and the group’s most reluctant of leaders. He becomes a genuine ally and friend to those he’d have previously dismissed as not worth his time, learns to listen and learn from those he’s harmed, and thoughtfully considers what it means to want a future of his own choosing. That, as the kids say, is growth. 

Season four went a long way to establishing Steve’s Final Girl bona fides. The de facto leader of the Hawkins contingent that’s left to try and thwart Vecna’s small-town murder spree, he’s at the center of the season’s most intense story arc, and fully comes into his own as a result. Eager to stretch himself beyond the role of designated babysitter, he’s grappling his feelings for Nancy and yearning for a genuine connection in a way we’ve not really gotten the chance to see before. No matter how you feel about the potential rightness of the two for one another, romantically speaking  — and I will go to my grave insisting that Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) is genuinely terrible boyfriend material — it adds a sweet and complicated new layer to their relationship. (And one that’s completely down to the fact that Steve has remade himself into excellent boyfriend material.)

While it may seem crazy on the surface, Steve’s evolution from toxic jerk to reluctantly fierce mother hen and surprisingly lovable hero puts him in a unique position to triumph. Or, admittedly, also to sacrifice himself in the name of saving the kids who’ve come to mean so much to him. But he’s earned a better ending than that — and he more than deserves the chance to shine.