All your Stranger Things 5 ending questions, answered. And did the Duffer Brothers kill off Millie Bobby Brown's Eleven?
Warning: Major spoilers for the Stranger Things season 5 ending ahead. It’s the inevitable end of an era for Netflix ’s biggest tentpole show. Stranger Things season 5 marks the end of the smash coming-of-age sci-fi mystery series, which first hit the streamer nearly a decade ago back in July 2016, and we’re feeling both nostalgic and hopelessly emotional about it.
So much has happened both in and beyond the small, fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, since we first met Eleven, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, and company in season 1. We’ve watched this group of plucky ‘80s kids transform into strong, brave heroes as they’ve battled terrifying monsters, Russian spies, psychic entities, corrupt government officials, and other nasty bad guys, protecting their friends, families, and town despite the odds stacked against them. Alas, like a D&D session that’s dragged on far too long, every great adventure must come to an end. After season 5 parts 1 and 2 rolled out on Netflix on November 26 and Christmas Eve, respectively, the final episode of Stranger Things premiered on the streaming service at 8PM ET sharp on New Year’s Eve. The 2-hour-and-8-minute-long episode titled “The Rightside Up,” which also had a limited theatrical run, marks the longest episode in the series’ history, and it concludes the Duffer Brothers’ story with an epic, action-packed finale. We laughed, we cried, and we resisted the urge to check social media for spoilers as we embarked on one final journey into the Upside Down. Considering how jam-packed that finale was, though, you may have some lingering questions or be looking for clarification regarding certain scenes, outcomes, and plot points. If so, grab your Walkman, toast up some Eggos, and join us below as we dig into the Stranger Things season 5 ending, including all the major character deaths, final relationship statuses, shocking backstory revelations, and that ambiguous finale. What was Vecna’s grand plan in Stranger Things season 5? At the end of season 4, we learned that Vecna, AKA Henry Creel, AKA One, has succeeded in opening four gates between the Upside Down and Hawkins via the deaths of Chrissy, Fred, Patrick, and Max . Upon the opening of the fourth gate, the cracks all converged, resulting in a massive earthquake that weakened the barrier between the two planes, allowing the Upside Down to bleed into Hawkins. Season 5 reveals that Vecna’s plan wasn’t just to merge Hawkins with the Upside Down, but rather to merge the Earth with a dark planetary dimension called the Abyss, which is where the Demogorgons and other monstrous creatures originated from. The Abyss is actually connected to Hawkins via the Upside Down, which it turns out isn’t its own world but rather the inside of a wormhole that’s been kept stable by a swirling sphere of exotic matter hidden above Hawkins Lab. The sphere was discovered, or perhaps created, through government experiments decades earlier. Using 12 kidnapped children, including Mike and Nancy Wheeler’s little sister Holly, as pure psychic “vessels” to charge his power, Vecna plans to merge the Abyss and the real world to create a new reality in the pursuit of his own twisted salvation. However, we discover that Vecna isn’t the true mastermind behind this dark convergence, but rather a vessel in his own right for an even greater evil: the Mind Flayer. The Mind Flayer, it turns out, isn’t a shadow creature from the Upside Down, but rather a giant, ancient, kaiju-like alien entity that has been controlling Vecna all along, even back when he was Henry Creel. During flashbacks, it’s revealed that Henry was a normal little boy when he accidentally stumbled upon a rogue scientist in a cave near a secret military base in Nevada. During this encounter, he became infected by the Mind Flayer’s otherworldly particles after handling a mysterious object he found in the scientist’s briefcase, and he gained a permanent link to the Mind Flayer, as well as his own psychic powers. Throughout the years the Mind Flayer manipulated Henry and twisted his mind, later leading to Henry’s massacre of his family and ultimately sending him down a dark, unforgivable path despite his initial victimhood. By the end of season 5, Vecna and the Mind Flayer have become one, having converged into a singular, symbiotic force of darkness and rage. How does Stranger Things ultimately end? The Stranger Things finale finds the group facing off against Vecna in an epic, final battle for the fate of the world. After traversing to the Abyss by climbing the WSQK radio tower—and nearly dying in the process—Joyce, Will, Steve, Nancy, Jonathan, Robin, Lucas, Mike, and Dustin make their way to Vecna’s lair to save the children. Back in the Upside Down, Eleven enters the water tank at the lab to fight Vecna from within his mind with the psychic assistance of Kali and Max, while Hopper watches over them and Murray rigs an explosive device under the exotic matter sphere, which is keeping the wormhole intact. The plan is to kill Vecna, save the children trapped in his lair, and escape the Upside Down before blowing it up remotely, thereby destroying the bridge between worlds for good. While these things are ultimately accomplished, things go sideways when Vecna escapes. His lair suddenly “wakes up,” as it’s revealed he’s been hiding inside the dormant husk of the Mind Flayer’s true, corporeal form all along. After a massive and tense battle, the gang destroys the reawakened Mind Flayer, El and Joyce kill Vecna once and for all, and everyone flees the Abyss and the Upside Down before it all explodes, severing the connection between worlds. An epilogue, which comprises most of the second half of the finale, takes place in the spring of 1989 and reveals where all the characters have ended up 18 months after the defeat of Vecna and the destruction of the Upside Down. Joyce and Hopper are closer than ever, now living together and sharing their lives as Hopper appears to have become a father figure to both Jonathan and Will after integrating into their family. Hopper is also chief of police again, while Joyce finally seems relaxed and settled after years of trauma and worry for her boy. The younger teens’ high school days come to a close as they finally graduate, with Dustin valedictorian. After he delivers a rousing speech about the power of friendship and non-conformity, he snatches his diploma and flips off the principal in tribute to his late metalhead pal Eddie, who planned to do the very same before his death in season 4. Lucas, Will, Mike, and Max also all graduate, with their families proudly watching in the audience along with Murray and the kids’ beloved science teacher, Mr. Clarke, who finally learned about the Upside Down this season. Most of the older teens have moved away for college or to pursue their careers. Jonathan is now attending New York University, where he’s working on an experimental film, while Nancy has dropped out of Emerson for a trainee job at The Boston Herald newspaper. Robin has moved to Massachusetts to attend Smith, a private women’s liberal arts college, while Steve still happily lives in Hawkins, where he is now a baseball coach and gym/sex education teacher at Hawkins High School. The episode ends with Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas, and Max partaking in one final, emotional, triumphant game of Dungeons & Dragons in the Wheelers’ basement. After his friends leave, Mike watches as Holly and her friends, including Derek, excitedly bound downstairs to play their own game of D&D, implying a symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation. Does Kali, AKA 008, come back for the end of Stranger Things? Remember Eleven’s long-forgotten sister, Kali? After being totally MIA since season 2, episode 7, “The Lost Sister,” the eighth child victim of Dr. Brenner’s experiments makes her shocking return in part 1 of the final season. In episode 4, 'Sorcerer,' it’s revealed that Dr. Kay and the military are not holding Vecna at their laboratory base in the Upside Down, but rather 008, who can manipulate others by casting powerful psychic illusions. After being rescued by Hopper and El and reuniting with her telekinetic sister, Kali reveals she was captured sometime after Eleven left her in Chicago. Dr. Kay murdered her friends and trapped Kali in a special device that suppressed her powers. Immobilized, she was forced to undergo a series of blood transfusion experiments meant to infuse the fetuses of a group of captive pregnant women with psychic abilities. It’s a horrifying discovery made even more terrible by Kali’s revelation that the transfusions failed and made the women sick because, unlike Eleven, she was an imperfect copy of Henry Creel. While recounting her experience, Kali insists that because Eleven is the closest biological match to Henry in terms of her abilities, if captured the government will use El’s blood to restart Dr. Brenner’s secret government program program, thereby continuing the cycle of pain and child abuse. Her proposed solution? For Eleven to sacrifice herself in the Upside Down, as she believes even if Vecna is stopped, the military will never give up trying to hunt El down. Who dies in Stranger Things season 5? Major deaths are surprisingly far and few between in the final season of the Netflix series. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in the lead-up to the finale, the Duffer Brothers warned fans not to expect a Game of Thrones-style bloodbath. “We’re not in Westeros. I love Game of Thrones, but it’s just a very different type of show than that. There’s not going to be a Red Wedding situation,” Matt Duffer shared. “I think some things happen in the finale that are very surprising, but we’re not trying to shock or upset anyone. I hope by the time people get to the end of the finale that it just feels like there’s something inevitable about what happens, and that it doesn’t feel painful but feels satisfying.” True to their word, while there are technically many deaths during the final season of Stranger Things, most come by way of unnamed military bad guys, Demogorgons, and Demodogs. However, there are a handful of standout, impactful character deaths, including both villains and heroes. Dr. Kay’s vicious right-hand man Lt. Akers is killed at the lab in the Upside Down when Eleven uses her telekinesis to force him to shoot himself, but not before Kali has already been mortally wounded by his gunfire. El’s sister eventually dies from the shot, comforting El before falling unconscious by telling her that her “story was always going to end here.” If it wasn’t obvious, Venca bites the dust in the series finale. The corrupted entity once known as Henry Creel is ultimately killed by an enraged Joyce, who decapitates Vecna with an axe after Eleven impales him on a giant fang inside the Mind Flayer. Speaking of the latter, the Eldritch horror is also finally destroyed—taking the Hive Mind down with it once and for all—during a tense standoff with the gang on The Abyss. During the battle, Eleven fights Vecna inside the core of the giant spider-like creature while outside Dustin, Lucas, Mike, Steve, Nancy, Jonathan, and Robin attack it with various weapons, shooting it up and lighting it on fire. For his part, Will taps into his connection with Vecna to help weaken the villain for El, while Joyce lends her youngest son support. But there is one final devastating death in the series, and that would be Eleven’s demise... maybe. What happens to Eleven at the end of Stranger Things? Eleven appears to die in the Stranger Things finale. Her apparent death comes when she stays in the Upside Down as it collapses permanently, a sacrifice she makes in an effort to stop Dr. Kay and the government from using her to restart their program with other kids using her blood. After rigging a bomb to destroy the exotic matter holding the wormhole together, the gang—Eleven, Hopper, Joyce, Murray, Steve, Robin, Nancy, Jonathan, Will, Lucas, Dustin, and Mike—flee the Upside Down and are suddenly stopped by a military barricade, where Dr. Kay is waiting for them. However, Eleven slips away back into the Upside Down, where she is seen standing just past the portal on the other side, making her intentions clear: Like Kali suggested to her in an earlier episode, she plans to vanish along with the Upside Down when it’s destroyed for good. Before she sacrifices herself, she briefly reunites with Mike on the psychic plane, where the young couple tearfully embrace. As Mike pleads with her to come back with him, to save herself, she maintains her resolve. “None of this will ever end, not if I’m still here,” she tells him, asking him to thank the others for her, for “teaching me what it means to be a friend.” The two share a passionate kiss before Mike is thrown back into reality and the Upside Down implodes spectacularly, seemingly destroying El along with it. However, not all hope is lost. During the finale’s epilogue, while Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, and Max are wrapping up a game of D&D in the Wheelers’ basement, Mike suggests that Eleven may still be alive. According to his theory, from inside the Upside Down lab a dying Kali projected an illusion of El inside the portal to the Upside Down before it collapsed, leading everyone to believe El had died in the implosion. Mike determines that El actually secretly snuck away using one of the nearby tunnels leading to the Hawkins underground, making her escape unbeknownst to the military. He theorizes that this was El’s only way to keep both herself and her loved ones safe and to prevent Dr. Kay from relentlessly pursuing her. His proof? The simple fact that El couldn’t possibly have used her psychic powers to contact him if she was truly standing in the portal, as she would have been too close to Dr. Kay’s active high-frequency devices, which suppress her abilities. As Mike tells his hopeful story to his teary-eyed friends, he makes it clear they will never know the truth for sure, but that he’d “like to believe she’s in a beautiful land, somewhere far away.” Meanwhile, we see Eleven trekking up a gorgeous landscape marked by three waterfalls—an idyllic place Mike promised earlier that they would escape to together someday—as she finds a small village in the distance, implying she has survived and found a peaceful fresh start for herself. It’s left up to the audience to decide whether Mike’s theory is correct, and that Eleven is alive somewhere, finally free, or if his story is simply a coping mechanism meant to comfort himself and his grieving friends. While Max, Dustin, Lucas, and Will all choose to believe Mike’s story, its validity is ambiguous. Like so many of the choose-your-own-adventure games popular in the ‘80s, Eleven’s ultimate fate is up for you, the viewer, to decide. Which couples end up together by the end of Stranger Things? While Stranger Things has never been firmly focused on romance, a number of compelling relationships between characters have developed throughout the seasons, and more than a handful of couples are shown to go the distance by the finale. The epilogue reveals that Lucas and Max are still together and their love is stronger than ever following the latter’s full recovery following her injuries sustained in season 4. Despite their marital tension in the first half of the season, Karen and Ted Wheeler appear to be a united force following their respective recoveries after the Demogorgon’s attack at their house. Perhaps most excitingly, Joyce and Hopper get engaged during the epilogue, bringing their slow-burn romance full circle. Hopper also proposes they move to Montauk—a subtle nod to Stranger Things’ original title and location from the Duffer Brothers’ initial pitch deck—where he’s been offered a new job. It’s unclear if Robin and Vickie are still together, though it appears not considering Robin is now attending college far away on the East Coast. Meanwhile, Steve is still dating in hopes of someday finding the dreamgirl he’ll have six little nuggets with. Jonathan also appears to be single. In a refreshing twist, Nancy’s arc sees the bad*ss teenage sleuth end the series single as she resolves to explore what she really wants out of life following her and Jonathan’s emotional split in episode 6, “Escape From Camazotz.” The subtle yet powerful breakup comes after Nancy shoots a mysterious sphere composed of exotic matter that’s floating above Hawkins Lab in the Upside Down. After disturbing the sphere, which it turns out is the energy source keeping the wormhole from collapsing, the two teens are knocked unconscious and eventually find themselves trapped in a slowly flooding room as the building melts around them. Faced with their apparent impending deaths, the couple begin to confess their true feelings: they’ve basically stayed together due to their shared trauma bond, out of a sense of guilt and camaraderie. Jonathan uses the engagement ring he planned to propose to Nancy with for an ironic “un-proposal,” and the two tearfully agree to go their separate ways but stay close friends. Does “Byler” happen in Stranger Things season 5? Sorry to break your hearts, Byler shippers: Will and Mike do not end up together in the final season of the series. Though Will finally comes out to his friends and loved ones at the end of episode 7, “The Bridge,” it’s less an admission of his longstanding feelings toward Mike and more him accepting who he is and refusing to live in fear of ostracization, which would make him more vulnerable to Vecna’s influence. While it may be firmly platonic, Will and Mike do love and care about each other deeply. After Will comes out to everyone and subtly admits he had a crush on his friend, in the finale Mike apologizes to Will for not being there for him sooner. “I guess I was just so self-absorbed that I couldn’t see it,” Mike tells Will, referring to him previously being aloof to his friend struggling. “I needed to find my own way. But what matters is that you’re still here, and you still think we can be friends,” Will says, to which Mike replies, “Friends? No thanks. Best friends.” Is Stranger Things really over for good? As far as we know, the main story of Stranger Things has finished with season 5. However, the finale’s epilogue revelation regarding Eleven’s somewhat ambiguous ending does leave the door open three inches for a potential future sequel, though it’s unlikely considering how neatly and poetically the Duffer Brothers tie up all the characters’ arcs and story lines. According to Ross Duffer, ' is the end of the story for these characters of Hawkins, for the Upside Down.” However, this isn’t the end of the Stranger Things universe at large. Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 is an ‘80s Saturday morning cartoon-inspired animated series that will premiere in 2026. The animated show will take place in the winter between seasons 2 and 3 of the main series, and will see Eleven, Mike, Will, Lucas, Dustin, and Max take on new monsters as they dive into an untold paranormal mystery. In addition to the animated show, the Duffer Brothers and Netflix are also developing a live-action spinoff set in a different decade with new characters in a “completely different location.” Plus, there’s also the Tony award-winning Broadway stage play Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which dives more into Henry Creel’s childhood backstory and Vecna’s ultimate origins.
Netflix Millie Bobby Brown Caleb Mclaughlin Gaten Matarazzo Sadie Sink Finn Wolfhard Noah Schnapp
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