Vecna might have a plan, but the Party has a plan to protect Hawkins from whatever he might throw at them.
Photo: COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Stranger Things friends, doesn’t it feel like just yesterday we were watching Big Baddie with a desperate need for some skin care, Vecna, mind-murdering a bunch of teens to split open Hawkins and leave it vulnerable to the monsters of the Upside Down? Just kidding; it feels like at least a decade ago. Have you seen how tall these children are now? In reality, we watched Vecna’s four-gate assault on Hawkins over three years ago in the summer of 2022. In the show, the remaining citizens of Hawkins have been living under U.S. military quarantine for a little over a year and a half — we find them making the best of things (and secretly monster hunting) on November 3, 1987. All of which is to say, let’s take a moment to reacclimate ourselves to the situation — and threats — at hand.
When we left Hawkins at the end of season four, it was the first time our team more or less “lost” to the evils of the Upside Down. Don’t get me wrong, the three-pronged approach taken to stop Vecna definitely hurt the guy. Between Eleven’s mind-fight with Vecna; Hopper, Joyce, and Murray roasting and beheading the demogorgons and Mind Flayer particles in Russia; and Nancy, Steve, and Robin torching, shooting, and forcing Vecna out a three-story window while he’s supposed to be in his serial-killer trance, I imagine Vecna skulks off as an injured party, both physically and emotionally speaking. Yet still, as he tells El in their mind-fight, she and her friends have already lost. This is simply the beginning of the end. While they thwart Vecna for now, his plan to kill four teens and open four gates in order to crack open Hawkins comes to fruition when his final target, Max, dies in Lucas’s arms. Sure, El uses her powers in the void to bring her friend back to life — albeit in a coma — but the damage is done. The fourth gate opens, and with it, Hawkins is ripped apart by the Upside Down. We ended the season with that familiar Upside Down snow falling in the real world and a dark, fiery cloud hanging over the town. In short, a real low.
A year and a half later, and anyone who didn’t hightail it out of town immediately following the big rip, if you will, has been under quarantine courtesy of the U.S. military. Now, this is alarming for a few reasons. Obviously, no one is super-jazzed about being quarantined for any amount of time, and certainly no one wants to be quarantined in a town that could be swallowed up or blown to bits by a bunch of monsters and their asshole boss. (Most Hawkins citizens believe the story about an unprecedented natural disaster causing the need for quarantine, but we know the truth.) On top of that, we know that the military, and more specifically Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan, believe with all their little hearts that Eleven is the real villain here — remember when they came after her in the Nevada desert and she, uh, crashed their helicopter? — and will do just about anything to capture her. It does seem insane that it’s been a year and a half, and the very large military presence in Hawkins hasn’t been able to track her down yet. Sure, she travels through tunnels (thank you, Upside Down vines!), but, like, no one thought to just follow the Byers or Wheelers around until they eventually led them to her? And how secret is Hopper’s cabin? Hawkins isn’t that big! Also, is Hopper in hiding too? The general public believes he died at Starcourt Mall in 1985, and the new bushy beard he’s rocking does scream “Don’t look at me!,” so let’s assume yes, but this remains unclear. Anyway, Sullivan and his men are very bad at their jobs, and I wish and hope and pray that they find themselves sucking face with a Demogorgon in the near future.
El doesn’t seem the least bit flustered by the fact that not only is the U.S. military hoping to cage her (at best) but that the evil wizard from the Upside Down bent on killing them all is her archnemesis from Dr. Brenner’s lab (let’s not forget season four’s big reveal that Vecna is Henry Creel, who is One), who wants to make her watch as he kills all of her friends. In fact, she seems focused. Hopper is training her (with moral support from Joyce) to be faster, stronger, and sharper than ever. She’s jumping over buses now like it’s nothing, so the Jim Hopper Training Plan for Youths with Superpowers is clearly working. El isn’t scared, but she does seem annoyed. Vecna has been in hiding since their showdown in season four (she can’t even track him down in the Void), and she wants to get into the Upside Down to find and defeat Vecna once and for all, but Hopper won’t allow her to until she finishes his obstacle course in under 12:30. This, of course, is an arbitrary time Hop selected — he doesn’t want her to risk her life in the Upside Down until it is absolutely necessary. She hits her target time, but he pretends not to see it and forbids her from joining him in the crawl he’ll be heading out on that very night. He just loves her so much, okay?
So, what is this crawl? It’s the crux of our season-five premiere. Apparently, over the past year and a half, our crew — yes, all of them, Hopper, Joyce, El, the whole Party except for Max (who is still in a coma), Nancy, Steve, Jonathan, and Robin — have been fine-tuning a methodical search through the Upside Down looking for Vecna. The giant gate created at the intersection of Vecna’s four snack-size gates is currently the only way into the Upside Down — the military covered the fissures those gates ripped across Hawkins with giant slabs of metal because, sure, that’ll keep the monsters out — and it always happens to be right in the middle of the MAC-Z, the Military Access Control Zone, which means it is heavily guarded. Every so often, the military sends big cargo trucks into the Upside Down, and they have to burn back part of the giant gate to do so. It’s the perfect cover for Hop to sneak into the Upside Down for a few hours. Our crew waits to hear when a burn is coming — their man on the outside who feeds them intel? Murray Bauman — and then they prep their crawl.
The first step: Murray, pretending to be a Hawkins grocery delivery truck driver, alerts the team at the Squawk that a burn is scheduled for that night. What’s the Squawk? Great question. It’s the Hawkins radio station that, since the quarantine, I guess Robin, Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan have taken over. It’s nice to see that Robin found the perfect job for her — motormouths make great radio DJs; this is science. The Squawk’s Rockin’ Robin will then take the news from Murray (he also delivers grenades, telemetry tracking devices, just so many bullets) and signal the rest of the crew with “Upside Down” by Diana Ross and a little intro chock-full of the info they need about the imminent burn.
Then we get a montage of our various groups running through the plan for the crawl. Clearly, this is all for the audience, because if these people have done 37 crawls so far, they know what they’re doing. You know what, honestly? I don’t care. Stranger Things can make silly choices and I will look the other way as long as it’s fun. This is fun. I’m in. Anyway, the basic plan is everyone meets at the Squawk, Hopper travels through more tunnels to get in position at the MAC-Z, Lucas and Mike will be his eyes in the sky, giving confirmation when it’s clear to jump in a cargo van, and once Hopper travels into the Upside Down — or is “flipped,” a nifty new term we’re using this season — Dustin and Steve follow him in the real Hawkins using the telemetry tag and a fancy communication system they’ve set up in a van. Hopper will search the area for traces of Vecna, then hop back in the cargo van for a ride through the exit. As Bob Newby would say (and now Dustin, it seems), easy-peasy.
But the moment more than one person brings up the fact that the section of the Upside Down Hopper will be searching is “boring” and not really “Vecna-y,” you know things are going to go wrong. Ugh, guys, never complain that your search for a superpowered megalomaniac serial killer is a snoozefest. You are asking for trouble.
And trouble they receive. Aside from Dustin not showing up at the Squawk (we’ll get into that below), everything goes as planned. That is, until the cargo vans Hopper is traveling with make a sudden, screeching stop, and Hop goes flying around in the back. They’re being hunted by a demogorgon. There’s gunfire — Hopper is grazed in the mêlée — the military guys try to drive away, but the Demogorgon gets them all and the van slams into a tree. Hop is alive and flees the scene into the woods, but in the chaos, he loses communication with everyone in the real Hawkins. He’s out there alone.
Now, it’s chaos because of the Demogorgon and everything Hop’s going through in the Upside Down, but there’s also chaos happening in the, uh, Rightside Up. All day, our resident Upside Down alarm system, Will Byers, has been feeling weird. And not just because his mother refuses to let him out of her sight or because he’s still in love with Mike and doesn’t know what to do about it, but because he’s feeling Upside Down things. Vecna things. As Steve Harrington puts it, his goosies are back. But it’s not just a feeling this time — suddenly, he is seeing through the eyes of the demogorgon. Remember his Now Memories from season two? It’s those on steroids. Will is seizing, the lights in the place are going crazy, and suddenly the fuse box explodes, cutting off all communication.
When Will finally comes out of it, he’s trembling as he looks over at Nancy and tells her, “He’s coming for them.” Inside the Upside Down, the Demogorgon is approaching the Wheeler house. He’s getting ready to attack.
The Demogorgon coming for the Wheelers is certainly not ideal, but it’s also not altogether surprising. First of all, in season four, when Vecna had Nancy in his clutches, he showed her visions of his plans to destroy Hawkins, and that included seeing her entire family dead. (Well, she doesn’t specifically mention her dad, but who does?) These people spent all this time building trick entrances to secret headquarters, you think they’d beef up some of the protection around the Wheeler house.
But it’s not just Vecna’s vision — something’s up with Holly Wheeler. She has an imaginary friend named Mr. Whatsit (she’s reading A Wrinkle in Time), but there’s something off about him. When Holly’s teacher catches her chatting with Mr. Whatsit during school, there’s no one there — she’s talking to thin air, quite animatedly. When we see this interaction through Holly’s perspective, we catch Mr. Whatsit’s arm in a nicely tailored brown suit jacket. He has apparently promised Holly that he will protect her from all the monsters in Hawkins. When Holly tells Mike about what Mr. Whatsit said, he tries to assure her that there are no monsters in Hawkins, and he even gives her a gift to give her courage — her very own D&D figurine, Holly the Heroic. But the way Holly talks about her friend, he feels very real. Does he know something about the monsters that we don’t? Because when the Demogorgon breaks through the Wheeler house, he’s aiming for Holly.
Now, if Holly being targeted by a Demogorgon is giving you déjà vu, that’s what Stranger Things wants, and it’s not subtle about it. Even after everything that has happened in Hawkins, the premiere episode of the final season actually takes us back to the beginning. While we all know Will Byers was taken on November 6, 1983, we find ourselves with a terrified little Will hiding in Upside Down Castle Byers on November 12, 1983, until he’s captured by the Demogorgon, dragged to the library, and paid a visit by our old pal Vecna. That’s right, Vecna was there all along, and it was Vecna who hooked Will up to the vines that pump Mind Flayer particles and other Upside Down treats into his body. Even from the jump, Vecna had plans for Will. “You and I, we are going to do such beautiful things together, William. Such beautiful things,” he whispers to his first victim. Okay, even I have goosies now.
• Most changed from last season goes to Dustin, who is letting his grief over Eddie’s death eat him alive. He refuses to stop wearing the Hellfire Club shirts, even though Hellfire has been branded a satanic cult and everyone still believes Eddie murdered Vecna’s victims. He seems to welcome the remaining members of the basketball team violently harassing him. He’s not afraid to fight back (or leave snakes in their lockers). Unfortunately, when four of them — now led by Andy, he of getting kicked in the balls by Erica Sinclair fame — jump him at Eddie’s grave, he has no shot at fighting back. They kick the shit out of him and leave him in a bloody heap.
• The imminent destruction of the world has only made the angst within the Steve/Nancy/Jonathan love triangle grow. Nancy and Jonathan are still together — and Murray’s mention of the Coltrane tape he brings Jonathan being “engaging” feels intentional — but he’s clearly jealous of how close Nancy remains with Steve, and Steve is definitely still pining. I’m Team Steve forever, but let’s be honest, neither one of them could actually make it up that radio tower alive.
• Speaking of love, Mike and El are being very cute despite … everything. He promises her that once she defeats Vecna — and he knows she will — they’ll have a happy ending, somewhere far away from Hawkins.
• Oh, more couple news: Robin and Vickie are officially together, even if they have to sneak make-outs in open patient rooms at the hospital where Vickie works. They’re not that sneaky, though: While visiting Max, Will peeps the two kissing, and it clearly stirs something up in our deeply closeted friend.
• What’s in that bag Hopper carefully removes from his secret hiding spot in his room? He packs it for the crawl, but he clearly does not want anyone to know about it.
• Apparently, Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan isn’t the one at the top calling for El’s head — instead, it’s our new human big baddie, Dr. Kay (also a major general). She’s running the show at the lab studying the creatures of the Upside Down … which happens to be located within the Upside Down. And she is fucking furious they haven’t been able to track down Eleven yet. They need her to … move forward with whatever vague plans they have going on down there.
• Between Holly’s love for A Wrinkle in Time and the introduction of The Terminator’s Linda Hamilton as Dr. Kay, is Stranger Things dipping into time travel this season? Are we getting wormholes? If so, I’m requesting visual aids.
