‘Stranger Things 5′ Stars Sadie Sink & Caleb McLaughlin Dissect Vol. 1 From That Finale Reveal About Max To Lucas’ Enduring Love: “He Would Die For Her”

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains major plot details from the first four episodes of Netflix‘s Stranger Things 5.

In the eighteen months since nearly succumbing to Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) is still in a coma. Or, at least, that’s how it appears when audiences first catch up with the Hawkins crew at the beginning of Stranger Things 5.

Episode 4, titled “Sorcerer,” provides some clarity on what’s actually been going on with Max when Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) finds her in the depths of Henry’s mind. It appears that’s where she’s been laying low, at least mentally, since Vecna killed her in order to open the fourth gate between Hawkins and the Upside Down. While Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) was able to revive her physically, she was not able to bring her back to her right mind. El hasn’t been able to find her in the Void, either.

Sink tells Deadline that she started to learn more about where her character arc was headed while she was filming Season 4, lest she be worried that Max wouldn’t make it.

“I didn’t know exactly what the plot was going to be, but they kind of just had to warn me. Matt and Ross called me. They’re like, ‘You’re gonna get the final episode of Season 4, and it’s gonna say that you died, but don’t worry. You’re in a coma, and we do have a plot for you in Season 5.’ So that was kind of all the information I had for a while,” she explained.

Since viewers last saw Max, it turns out she’s been hiding out in a set of caves inside Henry’s mindscape. For some reason, he won’t venture there, which has kept her safe all this time (if you’re looking for more on the caves and what they could mean, we’ve got you covered). When she unites with Holly toward the end of Vol. 1 after luring her to the caves, Max tells Holly they’re “in a memory, which exists inside a world of 1,000 memories.” And that world, she explains, is Henry’s prison.

Trying to figure out who this version of Max would be after holing up in Henry’s twisted mind for a year and a half was “the most exciting to come up with,” Sink says.

“Obviously, she has been in a dark place for a while, all of Season 4. Just kind of throwing her into this next battle, and then keeping her there for so long, it was fun, which seems like the wrong word, but it was fun to kind of think about how that would affect her,” Sink tells Deadline. “For a minute, I was like, ‘Is she just totally nuts? Has she gone absolutely crazy?’ But I think the thing about Max, and what she’s always been, is she’s just super resilient, and even under the toughest circumstances, she just has this very ‘this is the card I was dealt’ kind of attitude. So if anyone was gonna get stuck in her plot line, it’s her. She’s gonna handle it the best, I think.”

So, how did she end up there in the first place? Max tells Holly the story with “a nice balance of fear and desperation,” Sink says. “Her outlet is, like, this 12-year-old girl, and this is the first person she’s seen, and that’s a dynamic that we kind of get to explore a little bit more as the season goes on.”

Basically, Max tells Holly that she doesn’t know how long she was out after Vecna sacrificed her, but eventually she heard something calling to her. She wakes up in the rainbow room at Hawkins Lab, where she witnesses the aftermath of the massacre from Season 4. As she tries to escape, she makes her way through multiple scenes that appear to be from Henry’s memory, including one from Hawkins High in 1959, where Joyce is promoting the school’s production of Oklahoma. She realizes quickly that she was a mere observer, trapped inside Henry’s mind.

She says she kept moving from memory to memory until she got lost. She eventually finds herself back in the rainbow room when she suddenly hears Kate Bush singing “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).” She tried to follow the music, but then “everything went wrong” when it led her to a new memory of the day that Henry first cursed her. She continued moving toward the music, until she finally found herself in a memory of the night that Vecna killed her. Through the Creel house, she finds “the way out,” via the stormy, red-tinted mind lair that the monster had been tormenting her in during Season 4.

In the distance, she can see Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin) sitting in the hospital, playing the song as he sits next to her. She says she was so close she could almost feel his presence touching her. Before she can escape, though, the tape ends and the doorway back to the real world closes abruptly. Among the big revelations here is the acknowledgement that Max is at least somewhat aware that Lucas hasn’t given up on her.

“I think it means a lot to her, and we don’t know how much of it she actually hears,” Sink admits. “Like, what moments can she sense that he’s there? Does it just have to be like, just right? I think for Lucas, it’s like there’s just this major disconnect. But also, they’ve never been closer and more in need of each other.”

While Max did see Lucas by her bedside, playing “Running Up That Hill,” the one time, he actually visits her regularly in the hospital, where he plays the song that helped her evade Vecna in the first place, in the hopes that it might lead her home.

McLaughlin says that Lucas’ loyalty is central to his character, but even he admits that, with Max, things are different.

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“The passion, the love that he has for his friends, that’s where it started from, just looking for Will in Season 1. When Eleven was introduced to the group, he was like, ‘Alright, cool. Whatever that is, we need to find Will,’ right?” he told us. “But then we see a different level of that with someone that he connects to on a deeper level, someone that scratches his brain a certain way, and their relationship is so, so deep to me, honestly.”

Max and Lucas began developing their bond all the way back in Season 2. Reminiscing on the early days of their growing connection, McLaughlin adds: “When they’re up on the bus and she’s talking to him, telling him about her past, in a way, he connects with that.”

Before her final battle with Vecna in Season 4, Max wrote letters to each of her friends for them to open in the event that she died. Since she is, technically, still alive, it seems no one has opened those notes, but Sink says she did spend a lot of time thinking about what would’ve been in them — and, in particular, what she might’ve wanted to say to Lucas.

“I think she would have been really, really honest. Yeah, I mean, she said it was like a fail safe, and that was like her last chance. So, yeah, there’d be some good material in there for sure,” she said, adding: “I feel like I definitely wrote out some letters in Season 4. I don’t know where they are — actually, you know what? I think my mom found them, and it’s really embarrassing, because she’s cleaning out the garage, and I had an old desk of mine in there, and I have pages of journals for whatever character I play. I guess Season 4 Max was in there, and she was like, ‘I read this journal that you had.’ I was like, ‘Oh God no.’ So they’re around, but it’s my version of it.”

There are still many unanswered questions, specifically regarding Max, by the conclusion of Vol. 1. If the promotional materials for the final season are indication, things are going to get worse before they get better.

Netflix previously released a trailer for Stranger Things 5 that included a shot of Lucas carrying a comatose Max through the hospital as he runs from a Demodog. We now know that the scene isn’t in the first four episodes, and the Vol. 1 finale makes it clear that Vecna’s reign of terror has only just begun. McLaughlin can’t confirm or deny whether that scene will be in the second half of the season, but what he will say is that Lucas is willing to risk his life to keep Max safe, especially while she can’t defend herself.

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“I think, honestly, just long story short, he would die for her. He really would. He’s found someone that he could connect to, someone that sees him, someone that understands his plight,” he says. “When you really see their real love is when their back is against the wall, that moment where, ‘Wow, Max is gone.’ Or at least for him, he doesn’t know what to do at that moment.”

It’s been nearly a year since the Stranger Things cast wrapped production on the final season in December 2024. For Sink, though, it doesn’t really feel like she’s said goodbye to Max just yet.

“Maybe it has to be out to really feel that, because on the final day of filming, I didn’t really feel like I was saying goodbye to Max. In a way, I think it’s just like she’s just a huge part of who I am, too. So, I don’t know. I think I’ll always have her, if that makes sense,” she says. “But there is a slight fear that once the final episode is out, I’m just gonna be like, ‘Well, that’s it.’”

While it’s hard to wrap her head around the idea that the show truly is coming to an end, she tells Deadline that she thinks the Duffers stuck the landing with the finale, which will premiere on December 31.

“I was satisfied with the whole thing. I think everyone’s really — the Duffers did an amazing job. I think we all got the closure that we wanted,” she teased.

No spoilers, of course, but when asked about what she wanted most for Max this season, Sink said she thinks she and her character are on the same page: “She’s grown up a lot, and she’s tired, and I think what she wants, really, is just normalcy. It’s that simple. I think she just wants peace, or at least, that’s what I wanted for her, too.”