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There aren’t too many TV events in this fractured age of streaming that demand our collective attention, but the arrival of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things surely counts as one. Water coolers were made for moments like this.
But if you’re late to the party, or your recollection is a little patchy, a refresher might be in order. After all, it’s been 9½ years since the show debuted, and almost 3½ since the season four finale, so we could all use a little help.
Where and when is it set?
The hub of the action is the small town of Hawkins, Indiana, a kind of Everytown slice of middle America. Season one (debut: July 2016) opens in November 1983; season two (debut October 2017) in October 1984; season three (July 2019) in July 1985; season four (aired May 2022) in March 1986; and the final season, which drops on November 27, is set in late 1987. So, from beginning to end, it’s a narrative time span of four years.
The gang in season one.Credit: Netflix
So it all takes place in this one little town?
Hell no (so to speak). There are many other locations, especially as the series progresses. It goes to Russia, the American desert, California; to prison camps and high schools and secret laboratories and haunted houses. Most importantly, it goes to the Upside Down, an alternate realm that is the dark mirror of the seemingly sunny world of Hawkins, a hellscape in which nightmares come true and demonic figures run wild.
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What’s the central premise?
Scientific experiments carried out by a shadowy government-funded and military-backed organisation have produced a small group of kids with psychokinetic abilities, the most powerful of whom is Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown). But these experiments have also opened a gateway to another dimension, and it is beginning to leak through to the “real” world, bringing with it terrifying creatures.
They include Demogorgons (humanoid creatures with flower-shaped heads full of teeth, and a ravenous appetite for human flesh), Demodogs (their attendant hounds), and the Mind Flayer (a giant spider-shaped creature that grows by taking over the minds and then the bodies of humans). Worst of all is Vecna, the all-powerful humanoid lord of this netherworld, who feeds off people’s secrets, fears and guilt and is hellbent on opening four gateways between his realm and ours and thus ushering in the apocalypse that will destroy first Hawkins and then the world.
Eleven’s powers have been tapped and developed in an experimental psychokinetic program run by Dr Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine).Credit: Netflix
Can nothing save us?
Well, we do have Eleven, whose powers are quite extraordinary. And we also have the gang of geeky teens who discover her wandering through the woods in torrential rain one night and adopt her. There’s Mike (Finn Wolfhard), whose bond with El, as the kids call her, is instantaneous and grows over the series into love; there’s Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who is the child genius of the gang; there’s Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), initially wary of El, and pining to move from the geek column to the cool, but ultimately loyal to his pals; and there’s Will (Noah Schnapp), who disappears into the Upside Down, as the kids call this other dimension, and never quite shakes off the ill effects.
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There are plenty of other, older characters helping out, too: gruff cop Jim Hopper (David Harbour), who adopts El as his own; single mum Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), who never gives up believing that Will is still alive; Will’s older brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), his sometime girlfriend Nancy (Natalia Dyer), her sometime boyfriend Steve (Joe Keery), and new kid Max (Sadie Sink).
There’s also Eddie (Joseph Quinn), the metal-loving head of the Dungeons and Dragons-playing Hellfire Club at Hawkins High, who becomes the prime suspect in what the locals take to be a satanic murder cult, but who ultimately emerges as a paragon of self-sacrifice and decency. We love Eddie (incidentally, the name of Iron Maiden’s monster-zombie mascot).
But it’s the gang of five (which becomes six when Max joins) at the heart of everything.
The fate of Max (Sadie Sink) hangs in the balance.Credit: Netflix
So, where did we leave things at the end of season 4?
Vecna’s plan was to open four gateways, each of them tied to the site of a human kill. His fourth victim was to be Max, and he seemed to have succeeded after a showdown with El and the gang that simultaneously played out in the Upside Down and the real world. But at the end of it all, Max was still alive (just), in a coma in hospital, while Vecna was gone. Not dead – can the undead ever be truly dead? – just regaining his strength and plotting his final assault.
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Hawkins, meanwhile, had been ripped apart by a cross-shaped tear in the earth. Officially an earthquake, it was of course the first indication that the netherworld is about to come pouring through to ours.
By the end of season four, Dr Brenner (Matthew Modine), the cold-hearted scientist behind the experiments, was dead, the Russian attempt to harness Demogorgons and Demodogs as weapons of war was in tatters, and a semblance of normality had settled over Hawkins. But with the hairs on the back of Will’s neck standing up again, it was clear something wicked would soon this way come (again).
On the upside, El’s powers had been restored, and strengthened. The gang’s knowledge of the Upside Down had never been greater. And, crucially, their understanding of Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) was close to complete.
Their nemesis had begun life as Henry Creel, the son of a family brutally murdered in their home. The perpetrator was seemingly the patriarch, but in truth it was young Henry (apart from the old man, the sole survivor) himself.
Vecna, the all-powerful demon from the Upside Down.Credit: Netflix
The semi-orphaned child then became One, the first subject in Brenner’s experimental program, which enhanced his powers and fuelled his sense of superiority and disdain towards ordinary people.
As a young adult, Henry/One was a warder in Brenner’s program, ostensibly there to protect the young charges, but ultimately responsible for the deaths of all of them bar Eleven. He spared her because he saw in her a potential equal, and partner in his dark ambitions.
In flashbacks, El recovered her repressed memories of the lab slaughter, and came to believe she had been its architect. Only at the very last did she realise One was the murderer. And because Brenner had created One, she rightly concluded that the scientist was the real monster in all this.
The young Eleven (Martie Blair) in a flashback scene in which she appears to be responsible for the deaths of her fellow lab rats. Credit: Netflix
El wasn’t entirely off the hook, though. Her defeat of One/Henry in the lab sent him crashing out of this realm and into the Upside Down, where he encountered the dark forces that would fuel his rebirth as Vecna.
So, while El may offer the best chance of getting out of this mess, she is also a key reason everyone is in it as well. No wonder she’s a bit of a sulk.
What comes next?
The final season will unfold in three caches: the first four episodes on Thursday, November 27 (our time); the next three on Boxing Day; and the movie-length finale on New Year’s Day.
So far, we’ve seen a trailer that shows Hawkins under military occupation. We’ve also seen the first five minutes of the season, in which Vecna gets up close and personal with Will.
Flashing back to the night he disappeared in season one, we finally see what happened.
Will is pursued by a Demogorgon through the desecrated forest of the Upside Down. But it doesn’t eat him, it takes him to a lair, where Vecna emerges.
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Shoving a tentacle into his mouth and pumping him full of whatever it is that comes out of that thing – black widow spiders, perhaps, or the evil looking slug Will coughed up at the end of the first season, or just some vague embodiment of evil – Vecna growls menacingly.
“We are going to do such beautiful things together, William,” he says. “Such beautiful things.”
Beautiful? I don’t think so. Stranger things more like, with the older Will cast as unwitting sleeper agent for this grim harbinger of doom. Bring it on.
Are you looking forward to the final season of Stranger Things? Or has too much time passed? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
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