First 5 Minutes of Stranger Things Season 5 Reveal Will’s Time in the Upside Down

Though the final season of Netflix juggernaut Stranger Things won’t arrive until just before Thanksgiving, the streamer has already helpfully given us plenty of material to get the wheels of speculation turning. The season 5 trailer promised a finale that will bring everything full circle, as the small town of Hawkins, Indiana is placed under military quarantine by an army looking to turn the dark recesses of the infamous Upside Down into a weapon, and a rebuilt Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) lurks in a new form, plotting his ultimate final attack. Now Netflix has dropped the first five minutes of the Season 5 premiere, a clip that takes us right back to the beginning of the story—literally.

The first season of Stranger Things began with the disappearance of a young Will Byers (Noah Schnapp). It was an event that kick-started all the wild events that would ultimately follow, which have included everything from telekinetic kids and creepy Russian scientists to literal resurrection. But if this initial clip is anything to go by, no matter how outlandish the series’ story has gotten in the years since its debut, its ending is going to be grounded in the harrowing fallout from that central mystery. Because while Will eventually came home, he didn’t come back the same as he was when he left. Now it appears we’ll finally find out why. 

The clip, which features a de-aged Schnapp and offers an uncomfortable reminder of just how much older all these preteens have become in the years since the show premiered, takes us back to that initial disappearance in November 1983, and fills in the gaps surrounding moments we’ve seen before. Titled “The Crawl,” the episode opens in the Upside Down’s forest where Will is hiding in the makeshift fort known as Castle Byers, just as we’ve seen previously. 

We watch him flee a  vicious Demogorgon—surprise, they can climb trees now—before he is ultimately captured and taken to the Upside Down’s version of the Hawkins library, where he’ll eventually be rescued by Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Hopper (David Harbour) in the season 1 finale. But apparently not before he has an ominous run-in with none other than Vecna, who uses vines to pump him full of an unidentified but presumably very bad…something that almost certainly has to connect with that larva-like slug creature he throws up once he’s back home. 

“You and I, we’re going to do such beautiful things together, William,” Vecna intones ominously, a startling confirmation that something more terrifying than a Demogorgon has been lurking in the shadows of this story for an awfully long time. 

What that means, precisely, and how these events have impacted Will’s actions since the series’ first season are questions that only this final run of episodes can answer. But it’s enough to remind viewers that perhaps we don’t actually know everything about what we’ve seen, and to recontextualize some of the things we thought we already knew. Why did Will survive the Upside Down when fan favorite Barb (Shannon Purser) didn’t? Because his death was never the Demogorgon—or, as it turns out, Vecna’s—ultimate goal. Something larger is at work here, and it’s Will’s story that is still central to Stranger Things’s larger endgame. Beautiful things, indeed.