After nearly a full decade, five seasons, and more ‘80s references than you can shake a Gremlin at, Stranger Things wrapped up its run with 'The Rightside Up.' The final episode of Stranger Things season 5 is also the end of the Netflix series as a whole and, sure enough, the highly anticipated – and dreaded – finale featured plenty of New Year’s Eve fireworks before the final ball dropped and the credits rolled.
Leading into the episode, we had all the pieces in place… Vecna’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) plan to crash Dimension X, aka The Abyss, into Earth, using the power of 12 naive children… Okay, 10 naive children, plus Dipshit Derek (Jake Connelly) and Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher), who know better, but are possessed by Vecna/Henry anyway.
Meanwhile, on the side of good, we’ve got… Well, too many characters to mention here. But basically everyone else is headed into the Upside Down, which is actually a wormhole connecting the Earth and The Abyss. Their plan is to climb the WSQK radio tower in the Upside Down and attack Vecna both in his mind and physically when The Abyss gets close enough to Earth. There’s a lot more to it, but were they successful? Was Earth saved? Who lived? Who died? Do we even need to say massive spoiler warning for the end of Stranger Things past this point? Well, we said it, so let’s get into the epic ending of 'The Rightside Up' – and Stranger Things.
Stranger Things season 5 finale ending recap
Most of the episode is taken up with various groups heading to fight Vecna on various fronts. Hopper (David Harbour) and Murray (Brett Gelman) take Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and her psychic sister Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) to Hawkins lab in the Upside Down, so they can use the sensory deprivation tank there and invade Vecna’s mind, alongside Max (Sadie Sink), who knows her way around from her time living in Camazotz (aka, Vecna’s mind). They plan to rescue the minds of the children trapped by Vecna, while everyone else climbs the tower and enters The Abyss to save the kids’ bodies, and also kill the villain.
Naturally, they run into a few snags here and there. The villainous Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) finds out about the plan and captures Max, and Robin’s (Maya Hawke) girlfriend Vickie (Amybeth McNulty), around the same time Vecna tricks Hopper into breaking the sensory deprivation tank, yanking Eleven, Kali, and Max out of his mind – and leaving the children defenseless.
It’s cool, though, because Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) has finally accepted being Holly the Heroic. While Vecna, in his Henry Creel form, fights his fears of the cave the kids are hiding out in, she takes them to the abandoned mine where Henry was infected by the Mind Flayer many years ago, and got his psychic powers. At the same time (there’s a lot happening simultaneously here), now in The Abyss, Will (Noah Schnapp) tries to reason with Henry, having seen what happened in the mine… It’s not Henry’s fault; he’s as much of a puppet as Vecna made Will, and Will tries to pull a Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi on Henry.
It’s too late for Henry, though. He explains that he and the Mind Flayer are one and the same. Partners. And to illustrate the point, the weird dark castle he constructed in The Abyss turns out to be… A monster Kaiju version of The Mind Flayer.
Back in the Upside Down, Eleven and Kali are downed by the "kryptonite," aka the psychic dampeners used by Dr. Kay and company. Hopper is captured trying to rescue Kali, and Murray pulls an action hero move, blowing up a helicopter carrying one of the dampeners… But he’s too late: Lt. Robert Akers (Alex Breaux) has already shot Kali. Eleven kills Akers, and when they head to the roof, Eleven realizes she can use the various floating rocks to jump from the roof of Hawkins Lab in the Upside Down all the way up to The Abyss.
That’s gonna be a pretty sweet sequence, right? Well, have fun imagining it, because instead, Eleven just jumps into The Abyss, attacks Flayzilla, rips a hole in it, and starts fighting Vecna. Outside, the rest of the gang goes to the ol’ "hurt the hive-mind, hurt Vecna" plan, with Nancy (Natalia Dyer) acting as bait while everyone else does the ol' "same thing they did in Starcourt Mall" plan of throwing everything they’ve got at the Mind Flayer. Curiously, it works much better this time, despite The Mind Flayer being 1000x bigger and also not made out of goopy melted human beings and rats. Weird!
Regardless, they beat The Mind Flayer, which gives Eleven the opening she needs to impale Vecna on one of the inside teeth things growing in his cave. Everyone else enters and rescues the kids, who barf out Mind Flayer particles… But Vecna is not dead. Instead, he’s gasping and puking blood, so Joyce (Winona Ryder) takes an axe and chops off his head. But not in one chop. In so many chops, and it just keeps going and going...
Anyway, she chops off his head, they all escape The Abyss alive, and Murray puts on a Prince record timed to blow up the Upside Down and end this once and for all. Only, oops: Dr. Kay is waiting for them outside the portal to The Upside Down. And seeing this, Eleven sacrifices herself, staying inside the portal while the wormhole collapses, only giving one last psychic goodbye to Mike (Finn Wolfhard).
Wow, what an ending, right? Just kidding, there are still 40 minutes left in the episode.
Things pick up 18 months later, meaning it’s time for high school graduation. Everyone is back in town, and we get a montage showing how things are not just back to normal in Hawkins, they’re finally totally normal for the first time in six years. Steve (Joe Keery) is coaching the local baseball team, Robin is briefly guesting back on WSQK, and that’s just the beginning of the catch-up.
First up is Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Max, who are still together. Then we catch up with Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and his Mom, who take cute pics just like back at Halloween in Season 2. Will is at the cabin with Joyce, Hopper, and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), who is working the camera. And Mike? Mike is missing.
This leads to a heart-to-heart with Hopper, where the man who lost two daughters explains that Mike has two paths… He can go deeper into grief, or own his pain and move forward. Also sorta important, Mike explains that he shouldn’t have told Eleven he was going to take her to a place with three waterfalls, and that many waterfalls is too many waterfalls. One could mention that one should not go chasing that many waterfalls, or any really, but that doesn’t come up in the conversation.
Anyway, he goes to graduation, where Dustin is Valedictorian, and gives a speech about friendship that ends in him ripping off his graduation robe to reveal a "Hellfire Lives" T-shirt, to cheers from the crowd and a pissed off principal. Other things one might notice? Derek and Holly are friends now. Mrs. Wheeler (Cara Buono) has some sweet-ass scars after her Demogorgon attack. And after his speech, Dustin gets invited to a party by the cutest girl in school. Oh, also, Mike realizes something, which we’ll come back to later.
We then cut to the roof of WSQK, where Nancy, Jonathan, Robin, and Steve are hanging out. Steve is living his dream in Hawkins, close to buying his own house, thanks to his salary coaching baseball and teaching sex ed. Jonathan is at NYU for film and is making a horror movie about a consumer who is also a cannibal. Robin is at Smith. And Nancy… Has dropped out of Emerson to get a job as a trainee at the Herald. But after all that, they make a plan to see each other more, and even help Jonathan make his movie in Philadelphia… And The Philadelphia Experiment was one of the major influences on Stranger Things.
Then it’s over to Enzo’s, where Joyce and Hopper are having a celebratory meal. He suggests there’s nothing tying them to Hawkins, and they can go anywhere… And in fact, he’s been offered a chance to be the chief of police in Montauk. Guess what? The Montauk Project was another big influence on Stranger Things. But less of an Easter egg, more of a plot point, Hopper asks Joyce to marry him with what looks like the same ring Jonathan tossed away in the goop room in the Upside Down. Perhaps Hopper picked it up when he and Eleven were hiding in there in this finale?
There’s one last group to check in with, though: the D&D party, who have one final post-graduation game. And it is all fun and games until Mike ends the game with them getting contentment and happiness, which Max points out is a boring ending. So Mike tells stories, and it’s up to the viewer to decide whether they’re true or not. Lucas and Max just become more and more in love. Dustin excels at college, but still hangs out with Steve. Will moves to a bigger town where they accept him for being gay, and he even gets a boyfriend. And as for Mike, he becomes a writer and writes his friends’ adventures (if you thought the final shot would be a book Mike wrote called "Stranger Things," well, you’re not alone).
Mike has another story to tell, though, the thing he figured out at graduation: Eleven might not be dead. He recalls that Eleven was standing in the range of the psychic dampeners when she contacted him with her mind to say goodbye. But that’s impossible, right? Instead, he posits that what happened is Kali didn’t die, but used her illusion powers to fake her death. She then used them to make Eleven invisible so she could sneak away to safety and say goodbye to Mike to sell the lie, while Kali again used her powers to make it look like Eleven was on the other side of the portal, ultimately consumed by the destruction of the Upside Down. Mike also throws out that she traveled the world and found a small village with two waterfalls, which is a reasonable amount of waterfalls, unlike three waterfalls.
Is that what happened? Again, it’s up to the viewer to decide. But the D&D group all believes that’s what happened. They put their binders away and head upstairs as Holly, Derek, and friends begin their own game of D&D. Mike smiles, and shuts the door.
And if you can believe it, there are still forty minutes left. Just kidding. After extended credits that feature the cast like they’re in a D&D manual or character sheet, we see the cover of a Stranger Things D&D manual. And that’s the strangest thing of all.
Who dies in the Stranger Things finale?
Does Eleven die in the Stranger Things finale? That's left somewhat ambiguous. Everything we see suggests Eleven sacrifices herself during the destruction of the Upside Down, by getting sucked out into space, though Mike has a somewhat complicated theory which may explain how El survived. Other than that, Kali definitely dies, whether by getting shot or by the destruction of the Upside Down. Akers shoots himself, and several other random soldiers die as well. Vecna is defeated and also dies to the point that you might be shouting, "stop, stop, he’s already dead." And the Mindflayer is destroyed.
Will there be a Stranger Things spin-off?
One of the big questions about Stranger Things is the future, and while creators The Duffer Brothers have promised that the finale wraps things up for Hawkins and these characters, it’s hard not to wonder what the spin-offs are, and how they potentially connect to the way things are left in the final episode.
We know for sure an animated series called Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 will likely premiere in 2026, though that’s more of an alt-history thing that includes more monsters and mysteries, versus a direct continuation.
On the other hand, it’s also hard not to speculate about where these folks could go next. Certainly, you’ve got Hopper and Joyce in Montauk to think about. Nancy, Jonathan, Robin, and Steve making a monster movie in Philadelphia as twenty-somethings also seems ripe for more drama and adventures. And then there’s Eleven’s trip to… Ireland? Or something? To think about, as well. Or not. Maybe actually don’t think about that too much.
But if we are really putting things to the side here, the biggest question leading into any spin-off is when it will take place, given The Abyss has been separated from Earth after the destruction of the Upside Down. And the answer there is: who says they need the Upside Down to get there? In the lore, and specifically in the Broadway show Stranger Things: The First Shadow, experiments to access The Abyss, also called Dimension X, have been going on since at least the 1940s. So even with all of Henry Creel’s psychic babies off the board, there’s every chance the US government will still be going after Dimension X in whatever spinoff is coming down the pike.
What did Dr. Kay want?
Related topic: what was Dr. Kay’s deal? There was plenty of speculation that she was Dr. Brenner’s (Matthew Modine) sister – they do have similar haircuts after all. And she clearly had a bone to pick with Eleven, and the whole Upside Down thing. But ultimately, she was just a bad guy who gave up and left town as soon as Eleven died? That seems… Crazy. Not every villain needs a motivation, but her motivation seemed to be… Well, she loved dissecting things, we know that. And good on her.
What happened to Sam Owens?
Probably the biggest character to get zero resolution was Sam Owens (Paul Reiser). Last we saw, he had survived an attack on the desert facility that left Dr. Brenner dead. Maybe he died too, but the lack of finality there is bizarre, given he was so important to Eleven, and the plot of the show for at least three seasons.
What happened to Murray? And Erica? And…
We get a glimpse of Murray in the crowd with Mr. Clarke (Randy Havens), and Erica is seen blowing up confetti cannons once Dustin does his "screw school" speech at graduation. But both characters are majorly featured in the season, and we don’t find out what happens to them. Similarly, whither Robin’s girlfriend Vickie? Did they break up? Are they at Smith together? What’s the deal?
Does Eleven die, or not?
The biggest question out of this season and the show is whether Eleven is dead or not at the end. Like we said earlier, it’s entirely up to interpretation, so if you think what we saw – she sacrificed herself to be sucked into space when the Upside Down collapsed – is what really happened, then that is, indeed, what really happened. After all, she was standing behind the psychic dampeners, so perhaps they weren’t impacting her. On the other hand, if you think Mike is right, well, they did that plotline in Season 2, when Eleven pretended to be dead to keep her friends safe, and it didn’t work out and made everyone sad. So doing that again would be pretty annoying. But hey, in that scenario, at least she got to see a reasonable, and not at all unreasonable number of waterfalls. So that’s a plus.
How many waterfalls is too many waterfalls?
We can answer this one: three. Three waterfalls is too many waterfalls.
Stranger Things season 5 volume 3 is streaming now. For more, check out our Stranger Things season 5 finale review, and if you're looking for something to watch next, check out our list of the 25 best shows on Netflix right now.
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