‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Ending Explained – Breaking Down the Bumper Finale

Ending a series isn’t an easy thing to do, and ending a series like Stranger Things is almost impossible. Originally conceived as a one-off, the fact that we’ve made it to Season 5 after a decade of freestyled lore development and the child cast reaching middle-age is a minor miracle. So let me just be up front about this: I really do think the Duffer Brothers nailed Episode 8.

“The Rightside Up” is a massive, dense, operatic finale, full of expansive action that must have cost a fortune to produce and, more importantly, extremely earnest sentiment. It has its silly bits, obviously, and since it has become trendy this season to hate on the show for every little thing, there will doubtlessly be people who have some hyperbolic claims to make about how this finale compares to the One That Shall Not Be Named. But those people are joyless.

Given the finale is over two hours long and contains not just the final showdown with Vecna but also a really extended Return of the King-style epilogue, there’s a tremendous amount to go over and break down. So, let’s just get on with that and hopefully justify why all this works (in my view, anyway).

Operation Beanstalk Is Underway

The highlight of the Volume 2 finale was Steve “The Hair” Harrington conceiving the most brilliant plan in the series’ history – to climb into another world via a giant radio tower and fight Vecna on his own turf. But there’s much more to the plan than this, so excuse me for a moment as I lay out some logistics.

“The Rightside Up” divides the gang into a couple of key groups. Eleven, Kali, and Hopper enter the Hawkins Lab in the Upside Down to get El into the tank that Brenner used to turbo-charge her powers. The idea is that she can then use her powers to project herself into Vecna’s mind, with Kali coming along to bolster her abilities and Max’s consciousness helping them navigate. Meanwhile, Murray plants a bunch of C4 so that when Vecna is taken out, the Upside Down can be destroyed.

Meanwhile, Joyce, Will, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Steve, Jonathan, Robin, and Nancy climb the radio tower and wait for the Abyss to get close enough that they can climb in through one of the rifts. This requires pretty precise timing, since the Abyss needs to get close enough for them to reach it, but Eleven needs to prevent Henry and the kidnapped children from completing the merger. There are only a few seconds in it, but Eleven, Kali, and Max reach Henry just in time to stop the Abyss from toppling the radio tower.

Then the real fun begins.

The Mind Flayer Is the Real Villain

With help from Kali to convince the kids of Henry’s ill intentions, the gang spirit them off to the caves that Henry is too scared to enter. To try and prevent this, he tricks Hopper into releasing Eleven from the tank, which expels Eleven, Kali, and Max from Henry’s mind. However, Holly has been on this journey before, so she takes charge and tries to lead the kids through the cave to the same exit that she and Max took in Episode 6.

This time, though, Henry pursues them into the cave, coming face to face with his own most traumatic memory. We had already seen young Henry bludgeon a man to death in those caves, but the finale reveals what was in his briefcase – Mind Flayer particles. As soon as Henry touched them, the Mind Flayer reached out to him and possessed him, commanding him to come and find it.

This explains why Henry was so terrified of the caves. This was the moment he lost his youth and innocence and became a puppet of the Mind Flayer. While this is going on, Will has projected himself into Henry’s consciousness and implores him to turn against his puppet master. He recognises that Henry has been used, just like he was, and he only needs to undergo the same realisation to break free.

But Henry isn’t Will. He gave himself over to the Mind Flayer as a kid and claims to have joined with him willingly, on account of understanding that the world, and that man, are broken. It’s deliberately unclear whether this is just a case of Henry being too far gone or whether he was always evil and just found an excuse to embrace it, but either way, come crunch time, Henry sides with the Mind Flayer.

The Final Battle

While this is going on, the above-ground group approaches what they believe to be the Pain Tree, where the kidnapped children are all being held, but it’s promptly revealed to be the Mind Flayer, which turns right-side-up and immediately starts stomping after them. Eleven arrives on the scene, having leapt into the Abyss across a few errant bits of debris in the Upside Down, and charges at the Mind Flayer, using her powers to enter its body so she can confront Vecna one-on-one.

Meanwhile, Nancy, now looking exactly like John Rambo, acts as bait to the creature, opening fire on it with a variety of guns while leading it down a narrow canyon. The rest of the gang attack it from above with fire and spears while Eleven fights Vecna, since what hurts one hurts the other. Will also joins in by entering Vecna’s mind again, helping Eleven to overpower him and impale him on a spike.

Fittingly, it’s Joyce who finishes the job, hacking Vecna’s head off with an axe. Winona Ryder has been sadly sidelined in Season 5, so this moment felt right.

Eleven’s Sacrifice and the Destruction of the Upside Down

Kali’s sudden reappearance in this season had introduced the possibility of Eleven sacrificing herself in order to prevent people like Dr. Kay and Brenner from using her to create more “monsters”. Even in Episode 8, the topic comes up again. However, Hopper is, as predicted, dead against it, and Kali ends up getting killed by Lieutenant Akers. After Vecna’s defeat, it seems like Eleven won’t need to do anything drastic to save the day.

All that remains is for the kids and the adults to exit the Abyss, rig the Upside Down to blow – with Prince’s classic 1984 album Purple Rain providing both the detonator and the soundtrack – and return to Hawkins. However, on their way out, they’re ambushed by Dr. Kay and the military, halting their escape.

While everyone is being held at gunpoint, Mike notices Eleven is missing. He sees her standing at the gate leading to the Upside Down, and she projects into his mind to say her farewells. She’s remaining in the Upside Down to be destroyed along with it, as that’s the only way that she’ll ever be free. As the C4 detonates and sends a giant shockwave from the exotic matter core, the Upside Down is demolished, and Eleven disappears along with it.

18 Months Later

In an epilogue, we catch up with how everyone in Hawkins is doing 18 months later. The kids are all graduating, with Dustin having been named Valedictorian. He uses his speech as an opportunity to stage an Eddie-style anti-establishment rallying cry, which makes him a minor celebrity among his peers.

The adults have all gone their separate ways, and everyone other than Steve has moved out of Hawkins. He’s coaching Little League baseball and teaching sex ed. Robin is at Smith College in Massachusetts, Nancy has taken a minor position at the Boston Herald, and Jonathan is at New York University working on an anti-capitalist cannibal movie called The Consumer (it’s a working title). They all agree to meet once a month at Robin’s weird uncle’s house in Philadelphia and reminisce about old times.

Hopper and Joyce are still happy together. The former has been offered a job as the police chief in Montauk, New York, which will come with a bit of a salary uptick and position them both closer to the kids. He also proposes. Unsurprisingly, Joyce says yes.

A still of Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Vecna in the finale of Stranger Things Season 5 | Image via Netflix

What Really Happened to Eleven?

The ending of Stranger Things Season 5 fittingly takes the form of a final game of Dungeons & Dragons. Mike is the dungeon master, running a campaign for Will, Mike, Lucas, and Max, which he has written, in a way, as the story of his own friends and their adventures. And it’s here that he suggests a hopeful new theory about Eleven’s potential survival.

Given that the military was using their power-dampening speakers, Eleven wouldn’t have been able to use her powers to project into his mind. She must have been doing that from elsewhere, even though everyone could clearly see her standing in the gate to the Upside Down. Mike’s theory is that this Eleven was an illusion. He figures that Kali didn’t die immediately from the gunshot wound and instead used her powers to turn Eleven invisible, allowing her to slip away from the ambush. She then projected an illusion of Eleven at the gate so that everyone believed she had died, and the military left Hawkins alone.

Mike thinks Eleven survived and went somewhere else where she could finally be happy and free. Perhaps, if only in his mind, a place like the one they talked about, with three waterfalls. It’s deliberately unclear whether any of this is true or just wishful thinking, but it doesn’t matter, since all of the kids agree to believe in this rosier version of events.

Passing the Torch

Mike also uses the D&D campaign to provide little capsule summaries of where each of the gang ends up. Max and Lucas stay together and enjoy their movie date. Dustin goes to university, but still maintains a relationship with Steve. Will leaves for the big city and finds acceptance there, not to mention a boyfriend. And Mike becomes a writer, even though the most personal stories he has are ones he’ll never be able to tell.

After having their fates laid out for them, the gang tearfully replace their D&D books on the shelf, and one by one, exit the basement. As Mike is leaving, Holly and her friends burst downstairs to start their own D&D campaign, and the torch is nicely passed from one generation to the next.

Smiling, Mike closes the basement door and leaves his childhood behind.