Summary
Stranger Things Season 5 ends Volume 1 with an action-packed finale featuring a surprising return and giving Will his big moment.
Let me be the first to say that I’m no fan of Netflix releasing its big shows in volumes. Splitting up a season kills a lot of the narrative momentum, and while it’s warranted given just how long the episodes are in Stranger Things Season 5, there’s still something a bit weird about Episode 4 being considered the “end” of anything. It is, though. It’s the ending of Volume 1, which means it’s the ending of this initial climactic arc, including a surprising return and what may be talked about as one of the best “coming out” scenes in television history.
But it’s not the end of the show overall, not yet, which means a fair amount of this “explanation” will inevitably be theorising about what’s to come in Volumes 2 and 3 over the Christmas period (if you can consider a single closing episode to be a “volume”, but that’s another matter entirely.) Luckily, “Chapter Four: Sorcerer” does give us plenty to theorise about, especially regarding Vecna’s endgame, Will’s powers, and the significance of the mysterious “Eight”, who it turns out Linda Hamilton’s Dr. Kay is holding in her Upside-Down lab.
Will’s Awakening
Volume 1 of Stranger Things Season 5 has largely teamed Will Byers up with Robin, and this turns out to be for an interesting reason. Early in Episode 1, Will spotted Robin making out with Vickie, and the sight of a same-sex relationship out in the wild leaves him pondering his own obvious feelings for Mike for the next three episodes.
Cleverly, this is woven in with Will’s connection to Vecna and the Upside-Down, which has been ongoing since he was kidnapped in Season 1. During the mission to save the stolen children in “Chapter Four: Sorcerer”, the gang is thwarted by the military, a coterie of Demogorgons, and, eventually, Vecna himself, who clutches Will with one of his tentacles and gives him a vague outline of his plan to use the “weak” children as vessels to remake the world in his own image.
Vecna is gloating about having “broken” Will fairly easily, but the scene stirs something in Will that unlocks the full breadth of the powers afforded to him by the connection that Vecna established. In his mind, he cycles through fond childhood memories, almost all of them involving Mike, who is about to be killed by a Demogorgon. Robin’s voice reminds him of her own “coming out” story, essentially, the moment she came to terms with who she was. In experiencing that same kind of epiphany, Mike is able to control the Demogorgons who are about to kill his friends and tear them apart with his mind.
Tellingly, Will’s nose bleeds like Eleven’s when she uses her powers. But his eyes turn white like Vecna’s. This puts him in a slightly different position, perhaps able to control the Demogorgons in whatever way he likes, maybe even turning them against Vecna. But while Will’s romantic feelings for Mike are still unspoken, the show is not at all ambiguous about what the implications of this scene really are.
The Return of Kali, aka Eight
In Episode 3, Eleven had sensed that Dr. Kay was keeping someone prisoner in her lab who was equally as powerful as she was. She assumed it was Vecna, but the finale reveals the captive to be Kali, aka Eight, one of the fellow test subjects experimented on in the Hawkins lab. Since Dr. Kay doesn’t seem to have any real idea what’s going on in Hawkins – she thinks that El is responsible for kidnapping the children – it’s difficult to say what she has been using Kali for.
We haven’t seen Kali since Season 2, when Eleven tracked her down in Pennsylvania during her self-discovery tour on the run. Kali has psychic powers of her own, but it was never made especially clear how powerful she was relative to Eleven. Given that she escaped the same lab and has been targeted by Dr. Kay since, we can safely assume that she probably has an important part to play.
With Will, that now makes three characters who have the power to interact with the Upside-Down and its denizens, which definitely evens the odds against Vecna and his cronies. Thus far, though, we haven’t seen anyone even come close to exhibiting the kind of power that Vecna can, so it’ll still be an uphill struggle.
Max Is Trapped In Vecna’s Mind
For reasons thus far unexplained, Max Mayfield’s consciousness has a physical form inside the mind and memories of Vecna, which she explains to Holly at some considerable length. Max is uniquely trapped between worlds – her ruined physical form is in a coma in Hawkins General, but her mind, with its own physical form, exists in that weird, idyllic simulacrum of Vecna’s past.
It seems possible for Max to escape, since she has almost done so several times by following the music that Lucas has been using to try and communicate with her in the hospital. However, Vecna doesn’t want her to leave and keeps pursuing her through his own memories. Her only protection is a cave which, for some reason, he seems too terrified to enter.
In subsequent volumes, it seems very much like Max and Holly will work together to try and take on Vecna from within his own mind.
Vecna Still Has the Children
As was probably quite predictable, the ending of Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 1, isn’t exactly a win for the good guys. Sure, the emergence of Will’s powers means that all the main characters are saved from Demogorgons, but the children that Vecna was having kidnapped in the first place all remain unaccounted for, since the Demogorgons were able to spirit most of them away through portals.
Based on what Vecna said to Will, his intention for the children is to use them as easily controllable vessels to reshape the world in his image. I’m not entirely sure what this might entail, but I’m also fairly confident the plan isn’t going to work, given how difficult to target and control the kids have been thus far. Even a deplorable runt like Derek Turnbow ends up joining the gang and fighting back, so it’s clear the kids won’t be going down without a fight.
And, if Vecna keeps storing the kids back in the Creel house with Holly, might we be looking at Max Mayfield leading an army of children from within Vecna’s mind? We don’t have long to wait to find out.
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