Summary
Stranger Things Season 5 kicks into gear in “The Vanishing Of…” with a great opening and a stellar cliffhanger, proving no punches are being pulled in this final outing.
You could make a case, if you were so inclined, that the Season 5 premiere of Stranger Things felt every second of its runtime because it was trying a bit too hard to settle us back in. It had great moments, sure, but it wasn’t until the very end that things went a bit gonzo and ventured into what felt like final season territory. Episode 2 isn’t messing around, though. “The Vanishing Of…” picks up where we left off a bit more dramatically than expected, by letting a Demogorgon loose in the Wheeler house. And I mean really loose.
This isn’t a near-miss. It isn’t a tension-building close shave. Despite Karen heroically holding herself and Holly under the sudsy water of the bath she was running and stabbing the Demogorgon repeatedly in the maw with a broken bottle of Chardonnay, and despite Ted whacking the thing with a golf club – Ted being proximate to all of this show’s goings-on but never quite knowing what’s happening is one of its most underrated recurring gags – the Demogorgon badly wounds both parents and spirits Holly away. Ted is left in a coma; Karen is on death’s door.
Nancy and Eleven arrive in the nick of time, and while Nancy tends to her mother, El slips through the portal the Demo opened into the Upside-Down, separating most of the cast into their own little subplots – there’s a bit more of this later, too – as they try to figure out what’s going on. It’s an extremely good opening, operating at a level of spectacle that is only possible thanks to Netflix’s bottomless coffers and emotional impact that you only get from a show five seasons in. Karen, Ted, and Holly aren’t even major characters, but they’ve been charming supporting players for so long that this whole stretch feels like the final season of Stranger Things calling us all out.
In the Upside-Down, El almost immediately reunites with an injured Hopper, who is furious that Nancy drove her to the Wheeler house wearing only a hoodie as a disguise, and he’s right, since it means the military now has a snap of her and knows she’s in the Upside-Down. But I don’t see what else she could have done, and after a while, neither does Hop. He even takes a moment while she patches his wounds to explain at length why he’s so protective of her, a sequence including dead daughter flashbacks and emotional breakdowns that would feel like overkill if David Harbour didn’t sell it so completely. I have a bad feeling, folks. There’s a heroic self-sacrifice on the horizon.
Hop and El follow the Demogorgon’s trail of blood – it’s still wounded from Karen shanking it – to what seems to be a giant, living wall in the middle of Upside Down Hawkins. It’s a bit like the Game of Thrones wall, indeterminably high and wide, and since Holly’s boot is still lurking at the base of it, the implication is that the Demogorgon took her through it. Eleven theorizes that this wall is perhaps the reason why she can’t sense Holly or Vecna. Whatever’s behind the wall must be insulated from her powers.
The key to this might be Will, who has now suddenly reconnected to the hive mind and been treated to even more terrifying visions than the ones he typically has, now embodying the Demogorgon itself in his own mind. Robin – side note, but I have never seen someone look as much like both of their parents as Maya Hawke does – suggests he might work like a radio receiver, picking up the Mind Flayer particles that Vecna uses like radio waves more keenly the closer he is to the source. Joyce is too determined to keep him safe to pay this theory much mind, but both Will and Robin are into it, and the latter sneaks him away from the Squawk and into the woods where Will had his previous vision to try and isolate the source (and make sure he doesn’t tell anyone about seeing her with Vickie, this being the late-’80s).
(L to R) Noah Schnapp as Will Byers and Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley in Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025
In the woods, Robin points out the sort of mandala made by Mrs. Harris’s fifth-grade class, which reminds Will that during his spinning sky vision, he could hear kids laughing, as if playing. It’s the missing piece to the jigsaw in his mind. There’s a nearby elementary school with a nearby merry-go-round. Since Vecna attacks his victims by entering their minds, it stands to reason that he was in the mind of a child on the merry-go-round – Holly. But then, it also stands to reason that Will was seeing through the eyes of Vecna himself. I don’t know about anyone else, but this seems less like a breakthrough – Will realises he can see what Vecna is up to – and more like an incredibly risky surveillance technique that is all but certain to backfire.
The third and final narrative thread of Stranger Things Season 5, Episode 2 finds Nancy and Mike at the hospital with Lucas, angrily brainstorming about why Vecna would go after Holly in this precise way, leaving both Karen and Ted alive. Nancy’s theory that it’s to inflict as much suffering on them as possible doesn’t really ring true, since if that was the goal, Vecna could have just turned up in person and killed everyone. For the Demogorgon to be sent to do the dirty work, to leave both Ted and Karen alive, and for Holly’s disappearance to so closely resemble Will’s, which occurred on the same date four years prior, something else must be afoot.
To find out what, Nancy and Mike disguise themselves as doctor and patient so that they can get access to Karen, who can’t speak but is the only person who knows anything about Holly’s “imaginary friend”, Mr. Whatsit, who might not be as imaginary as everyone thought. Alarmingly, Karen describes — in writing — Mr. Whatsit as being tall, wearing a vest and a pocket watch, and going by the name Henry. For anyone who can still remember the events of Season 4, the implication is pretty obvious. Mr. Whatsit is Henry Creel, aka Vecna.
And thus, “Chapter Two: The Vanishing Of…” ends with the dapper Henry taking Holly to the well-appointed Creel House, somehow in its opulent heyday. He promises her that he has room for all of her family and friends, whom he similarly plans to “save”. But to what end? Whatever Vecna’s up to, it’s giving Will goosebumps. He’s not the only one.
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