Summary
Stranger Things Season 5 tees up a spectacular bumper finale in “Chapter Seven: The Bridge”, leaving everything still to play for.
This is it. The last big brainstorming session before the bumper finale. The last chance for every character to get a few things off their chest. All those broken bonds have to be repaired, trust needs to be renewed, and a plan must come together. Stranger Things Season 5 is going to end, of that there can be no doubt. And to avoid a Game of Thrones situation, it’s the job of Episode 7 to ensure it has the best possible foundation to end properly.
In this, if nothing else, “Chapter Seven: The Bridge”, performs precisely as advertised. It’s a very solid, quintessentially on-brand episode with a couple of big character moments and that fizzing excitement of the endgame approaching. I really liked it, since I really like the characters, and a lot of the criticisms I’ve seen floating around online are quite bizarre. But we’ll get to that.
In the meantime, let’s break everything else down.
Holly’s Great Escape
You’ll recall we left things on a cliffhanger, with both Max and Holly rushing towards freedom from Vecna’s mind palace. We’ll get to the former in a minute, since she fares slightly better, but Holly’s escape is a big rug-pull. She manages to come to in the spire and free herself from Vecna’s Cthulian contraption, but the area she’s in doesn’t look like Hawkins as Max had claimed it would. A later revelation will explain why this is, but in the meantime, Holly disappears into a hole as Vecna pursues her, and she emerges in the sky above the Upside Down Hawkins Lab, hurtling towards the ground.
Luckily, as we know, this is right on top of Nancy, Steve, Dustin, and Jonathan, who have all been newly reunited. Max, now awake in the real world, conscious but too weak to move under her own steam, reveals the instructions she gave Holly. With help from the newly recruited Mr. Clarke – who swallows the explanation about a dark wormhole connecting Hawkins to another world with barely a shrug, continuing the show’s ongoing themes of dorks inheriting the Earth – the above-ground team can locate and reunite with the others. But when they get there, Holly isn’t with them, and Nancy looks shellshocked.
It turns out that Vecna reached out and snatched Holly back to the spire moments before she landed. Before long, she’s back in his mind, being gaslit by the other children into believing that Max was lying about everything, and Henry plans to save the world. Guys, we need another rescue mission, stat.
The Abyss
With everyone now reunited and assembled at the radio station, Dustin gives everyone a crash course in what he learned through Dr. Brenner’s notes and journals. This is as short and simple as I can make it:
The Upside Down isn’t a dark alternate dimension as we had all initially assumed. Instead, it’s a wormhole held together by exotic matter connecting to another world, one of chaos and pure evil, which, to tie in with all the Dungeons & Dragons theming, Dustin nicknames “The Abyss”. His theory is that this world is the true home of the Demogorgons and dogs, and the Mind Flayer, and is where Eleven sent Henry when she flung him out of the Rainbow Room. He has been hiding out there all this time, which explains why they were never able to find him during the crawls, and why El can’t locate him telepathically. This is also where the spire is located, hence why Holly didn’t recognise anywhere when she woke up.
So, Vecna has been biding his time and creating rifts in the Abyss and in Hawkins, bringing the monsters back and forth through the Upside Down, and kidnapping the kids to use as vessels to enhance his abilities so that he can pull the worlds closer together. With all the rifts, the two worlds will merge in his image. That’s the idea, anyway.
Operation Beanstalk
As usual, the gang needs to come up with a daring plan to stop this, which is a harder sell than usual since it involves somehow flying 2000 feet up into the air (the Abyss is technically above them) and killing Vecna before he can enact his plan. Oh, while also safely rescuing all the kidnapped kids. No pressure.
It’s Steve, of all people, who comes up with the plan, which is eventually dubbed “Operation Beanstalk”. A flippant comment about a magic bean gives him the idea. See, they already have a beanstalk – the radio tower. That silly bit of peacocking during the premiere was actually Stranger Things Season 5 cleverly setting up the ending. Since Vecna is already pulling the planets closer and closer together, they just have to bide their time until the radio tower in the Upside Down is sticking through one of the rifts connecting to the Abyss. Then they can simply climb in. But it’ll give them an extremely limited amount of time to carry off the remainder of the plan.
The remainder of the plan involves El getting into the bath in Hawkins Lab so she can project herself into Vecna’s mind, while the others rescue the kids and then blow up the Upside Down with a bomb to sever any connection with the Abyss. Kali will also enter Vecna’s mind through Eleven’s mind (I think?), which is ostensibly to help kill him, but is really a deeply suspicious offer that only me and Hopper seem to recognise as worrying.
Suicide Pact
On the subject of Kali, she presents a bit of a problem even without any potential betrayals. She’s wackily hung up on the idea that she and El both need to die with Vecna in order to prevent anything like this from happening again, the theory being that if they die, people like Dr. Kay can’t use them to create more monsters. Eventually, Eleven agrees to this plan, and they both decide to remain behind in the Abyss as the bomb goes off.
Hop isn’t going to have this, obviously, so I suspect this is teeing up a heroic self-sacrifice sequence where he has to manually detonate the bomb or something, but only after getting Eleven to safety through the power of love. It’ll be something like that, I feel sure. And let it be said that I don’t love Kali’s inclusion in all this, since it feels a bit needlessly contrived.
Jamie Campbell Bower as Vecna in Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025
Will Doesn’t Like Girls
The biggest moment of Stranger Things Season 5, Episode 7 involves Will, who is stewing in guilt after learning that it was really him who created all the tunnels while being used by Vecna. He needs to be able to put his powers to siphon Vecna’s abilities to good use, but to do that, he needs to not be vulnerable to Vecna’s defences. This means abandoning the core fear that Vecna might use against him – that if he embraces his true self, he’ll lose his friends.
What this equates to is an overwritten but relatively effective “coming out” sequence, wherein Will gathers all of his friends and family to tell them he’s gay. It occupies a weird spot in the episode where nobody really has time for any of it logistically, but it’s a very important and worthwhile scene that it’s really bizarre people have been consistently making fun of. For one thing, it shouldn’t be anything resembling a surprise. Will’s sexuality has been a fundamental part of his character arc for several seasons, even if it hasn’t been stated explicitly. And secondly, you have to consider the context here.
Vecna showing Will a terrible potential future in which all of his friends abandon him and he ends up alone if he’s honest with them about his sexuality, isn’t some wacky diversity message. It’s a villain playing on someone’s deepest fear and insecurity. And of course that would be his deepest fear. This is the 1980s. Was something happening in the gay community in the 1980s that might have made a closeted young boy fearful to come out? Just use your brains. Not everything’s an agenda.
All Systems Go
Anyway, we’re off. It’s time. Operation Beanstalk is underway. Dr. Kay and the military are definitely going to interfere with it in some way, which is annoying because they’re still none the wiser as to what’s actually going on, so their whole plot feels pointless, but it’s an additional layer of jeopardy if nothing else.
Vecna, meanwhile, has gathered all of the kids, including Holly, and hypnotized them around his table so that they can all contribute to his plan. It’s November 6th. It’s the endgame.
Can Stranger Things stick the landing?
