Stranger Things Season 5: Volume 1 Summary

Clock Strikes 5:00 // Cozying up, sophomore Natalia Arieli excitedly watches the 5th season of Stranger Things with her family. At exactly 5:00 pm PT on November 26th, thousands of people clicked on Netflix to watch the highly anticipated new season of Stranger Things; little did everyone know that this mass excitement and flood of people would crash Netflix servers. (Photo by Natalia Arieli)

*Warning: This article will be a complete summary of Volume 1, so make sure you watch it first before committing to reading this.

It’s finally out, folks! The long-awaited final season of Stranger Things had its first volume, consisting of four episodes released on November 26th, where it was ranked the #1 best TV show on Netflix, and for good reason. Season 5 has some of the best-rated episodes of the whole TV show, with the final episode generating insane shock and excitement for viewers everywhere. Countdowns are even beginning to commence for Volume 2, which comes out on Christmas Day, and the final episode, which comes out on New Year’s Eve. What happened in Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 1?

Episode 1: The Crawl

The first episode of Stranger Things 5 begins with a flashback to Will in the Upside Down, before he was rescued by Hopper and Joyce, where we can finally see how he was taken from his hiding place (Castle Byers) to the library, where he was found. From this scene, we can finally see that Vecna has had a plan since the very beginning, where he is the one who put a vine that contained a connection to the Upside Down into Will, so that Will was connected to Vecna and the Upside Down for the rest of the seasons.

After the flashback, we can see Hawkins approximately a year after season 4 ended, and it is under military lockdown after what happened the day all four portals were opened by Vecna in the ending of Season 4. Dustin, Lucas, Will and Mike continue to go to school, where Dustin is bullied for representing the Hellfire Club after Eddie died, and seems to be going through a tough time with the loss of his friend. Joyce and Hopper are seen with El, who is training intensely for fighting Vecna and evading the military, who have been on the search for her, suspecting she is the one who caused everything that Vecna did in season 4. In this episode, the group commences a plan called “the Crawl,” where they sneak into the Upside Down to look for Vecna during military supply transfers, which they have done several times before with no success. However, during this crawl, Hopper gets stuck in the Upside Down when the military trucks are ambushed by a demogorgon. Will experiences a vision where it seems that he is in the Demogorgon’s mind as it ambushes the military vehicles. He then tells the group that the Demogorgon is heading for the Wheelers’ house. The episode ends with Holly seeing a door to the Upside Down being opened on the ceiling of her bedroom. 

Episode 2: The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler

As El and Nancy hurry to get to the house, Holly is surprised by a demogorgon, whose motive seems to be to take her to the Upside Down. Karen Wheeler, the mom, fights the demogorgon, but, in the end, gets critically injured along with Ted Wheeler, the dad, and Holly is taken by the Demogorgon into the Upside Down. Nancy and El reach the scene, and El takes off into the Upside Down by the portal in the house to find Holly, while Nancy finds help for her parents. As the Wheeler parents gain help in the hospital, the group tries to figure out why Holly was taken by a Demogorgon. Does it have something to do with Holly’s “imaginary” friend, Mr. Whatsit?

While searching for Holly, El meets with Hopper, and they go together to try to find her. However, they end up reaching a gigantic wall in the Upside Down, where they think Vecna and Holly could be. As Nancy, Mike, and Lucas try to find out more about Mr. Whatsit, Will and Robin try to analyze why Holly could’ve been taken from a different perspective. Will shares a moment where he thinks he could’ve been seeing through Holly’s eyes at some point during a school day. The longer they think about it, Will believes that Holly could be one of Vecna’s targets because he’s able to see through the mind of Vecna through his visions, which means he can see which mind Vecna goes into. Both halves of the group’s answers seem to line up, as, at the end of the episode, we can see that Holly’s imaginary friend Mr. Whatsit is actually not imaginary, and he is actually Henry/01/Vecna, and he has taken Holly to a bright past version of the Creel House, which is the house that Henry lived in and killed his family.

Episode 3: The Turnbow Trap

At the start of the episode, Will gets another vision of Vecna going into another child’s mind, Derek Turnbow. Will, Mike, Nancy, Robin, Lucas, Erica, Steve, Dustin and Jonathan try to conduct a plan to kidnap this kid so that they can potentially save him from a demogorgon coming and taking him next. As all of this is happening, El and Hopper encounter the military in the Upside Down, who seem to have a sort of kryptonite for El’s powers. They try to attack El and Hopper, but Hopper stops the kryptonite, and El stops the rest of the military crew. They find out from one of the soldiers that the military is hiding something really powerful at their Upside Down base, which they think could be Vecna, and so they go to try to find the base and find Vecna.

Back in Hawkins, the group devised a plan to save Derek, and Erica knocks out the whole Turnbow family with a drugged pie, and they take them to an abandoned farm. They booby-trap the Turnbow’s house so that, when the Demogorgon comes, they trap it and put a tracker in it, to see where it’s going and if it is going to the same place Holly is. Derek then wakes up, and the demogorgon realizes where Derek actually is and goes to the farm. As they try to stop the demogorgon, Will has another vision into Vecna’s mind and sees a plan of Vecna’s to get 12 kids and do the same thing he did with Will in the Upside Down in season 1. The demogorgon runs back to the Upside Down, and Steve, Dustin, Nancy and Jonathan drive through the newly-created door and into the Upside Down. Meanwhile, Holly enjoys her time, unaware that Mr. Whasit is a bad man,  in the old Creel house, when she gets a message to go through the woods to meet him. However, when she ventures out there, she doesn’t find Henry, but instead finds Max, who is awake in Vecna’s mind, but in a coma in Hawkins.

Episode 4: Sorcerer

In Holly and Max’s world, Max explains how, when she almost died in season 4, she actually was sent into a world of Henry’s memories. She tried to escape through them by hearing Kate Bush’s voice again, just like in season 4. Max was able to see a door back into Hawkins with Lucas and started running towards it, but then the music stopped, and the door was suddenly gone, with Henry starting to chase her. Max ran through the memories again and encountered a huge cliff cave, where she realized Henry was afraid of. Max explained to Holly how she stayed there, where she was safe, and waited for something to happen. She tells Holly that, with Holly in there with her too now, she thinks she has a plan to finally escape.

El and Hopper find the military base in the Upside Down and break into it, looking for Vecna. However, sirens suddenly go off, and the kryptonite sound goes off as well. El struggles in pain as they try to hide from the soldiers. The leader, Dr. Kay, finds El and Hopper, and Hopper fights with a soldier and Dr. Kay, and finally knocks them both out. Hopper then finds who is the powerful source that El thought was in the base, and El is reunited with Eight from season 2. Steve, Nancy, Jonathan and Dustin encounter the big wall that El and Hopper did in the Upside Down, and figure out that the wall is a circle, with the middle being Hawkins Lab, the same place where everything started.

In Hawkins, kids around the same age as Derek and Holly are taken to the military base, or “Mac-Z,” to be protected by the military. However, the group knows that the kids are not safe with the military, and devises a plan to get all of the kids who knew about “Mr. Whatsit” out. Derek gathers all of those children, and the group finds a tunnel under Hawkins that leads to the bathroom of the room that all the kids were staying in, slowly getting each kid out into the tunnels. However, they’re caught and are taken for questioning when chaos strikes, and doors to the Upside Down are ripped open, with demogorgons attacking. The group tries to get the kids to a safe spot, but Will is taken into the visions of the demogorgons and cannot move. Suddenly, Vecna comes into the base and defeats the remaining soldiers. The demogorgons take the children to the Upside Down, and Vecna brings Will to him. He explains to Will that he was the first of all these children and then leaves. Meanwhile, three demogorgons prepare for a fatal attack on Mike, Robin and Lucas. Will suddenly realizes he can channel Vecna’s powers, and stops all three demogorgons from different places, killing them and leaving his friends safe and speechless.

The season ends with that crazy and dramatic scene, probably one of the most intense scenes throughout the entire series. Through all this, we can tell that Season 5 of Stranger Things is going to be the peak of all of the seasons, which now makes sense because the season took so long to make, but so worth it in the end. Fans everywhere are now impatiently rewatching these last four episodes and are just counting down the days until Volume 2, me included. There is no doubt the conclusion of Season 5 will be absolutely incredible, and hopefully, we all won’t be crying too much on New Year's Eve.