‘Stranger Things’ Has Ended. What Happened in the Series Finale?

There was a lot to tie up after five seasons and nearly 10 years, and the show gave itself another two hours to do it. Here are the major events.

Worlds collide. Heroes die. The day is saved … but not without a little heartbreak. So ends “Stranger Things.”

After five seasons — spread across nearly 10 years — the “Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer concluded their enormously popular Netflix show on Wednesday much the way they began it. Although the brothers’ budgets have gotten bigger, their aims have remained mostly the same: to tap into their core influences (Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, teen comedies and “Dungeons & Dragons”) and tell the story of a handful of brave young people in the 1980s, protecting their small town of Hawkins, Ind., from monsters.

In the two-hour series finale, titled “The Rightside Up,” the heroes are helped as always by their secret weapon: Jane (Millie Bobby Brown), a.k.a. Eleven, a teenager whose innate psychic abilities became supercharged when she was imprisoned in a secret government lab as a child. Thanks to Eleven, a group of Hawkins middle schoolers and high schoolers discovered the Upside Down, a shadow version of their town in another dimension, populated by dangerous beasts.

Season 5 really built up Eleven’s arch enemy, the original Hawkins Lab test subject, Henry Creel (Jamie Campbell Bower), who in a demonic form named Vecna has been orchestrating attacks on the town since Season 1. As viewers learned in the most recent batch of episodes, released on Christmas, Vecna dwells on a planet that the heroes’ resident science genius Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo) has called the Abyss, connected to the Upside Down with a wormhole.

As the finale begins, Vecna has enlisted the aid of some kidnapped Hawkins grade schoolers to help boost his powers and complete his master plan: to draw the Abyss through the wormhole and crash it into Earth, remaking our planet in his dark image. Our young heroes, aided by Police Chief Hopper (David Harbour) and the eccentric former journalist Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman), enter the Upside Down and embark on their own plan, called Operation Beanstalk, in hopes of rescuing the kidnapped children and stopping Vecna.

How does it all end? Let’s answer some key questions.

Did Operation Beanstalk work?

Eventually, yes.

In Episode 7, the last one before the finale, Dustin’s best pal, the feather-haired jock Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), came up with a plan to reach the Abyss before it reached Hawkins. Steve hoped that once the Abyss drew near enough, he and his friends could climb the Upside Down’s version of the Hawkins radio tower — like Jack climbing the beanstalk — and hop onto this other planet, where they could rescue the kidnapped children.

Eleven was supposed to neutralize the Vecna problem during this rescue — and freeze the Abyss’s approach — by entering his memories and destroying him from within his own mind. Once the job was complete, Hopper and Bauman planned to set off a bomb in the Upside Down and close the bridge to Hawkins forever.

Much of the first hour of “The Rightside Up” covers this mission, which ultimately goes off as intended. Eleven, along with a fellow Hawkins Lab alum, Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), and their friend Max (Sadie Sink), is able to enter Vecna’s mind long enough to sever his connection with the children. This freezes the Abyss in place, close enough for Steve and company make their jump.

Eleven is expelled from Vecna’s mind through some trickery on his part; but then she uses her supernatural abilities to leap to the Abyss herself, where she intends to fight Vecna in person.

Things get a little more complicated when Vecna’s treelike home, where the kidnapped children are being held, is revealed to the Mind Flayer, a giant spider-like creature familiar from earlier seasons, which has a kind of symbiotic relationship with Vecna. The Mind Flayer comes alive and attacks. While Eleven’s friends fight back using an arsenal of makeshift and standard-issue weapons, Eleven ventures inside the Mind Flayer’s body to tussle with Vecna.

The surprise M.V.P. of this scrap is Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), whose abduction by Vecna in Season 1 left him with a deep psychic link to the villain. Will uses this connection to slow Vecna down enough that Eleven — with a later assist from Will’s ax-wielding mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) — can kill him.

Was Hawkins saved?

Yes, but not without one last twist. The Hawkins defenders haven’t been facing off against only Vecna this season; they’ve also been dealing with the U.S. military, which has a Cold War interest in the research at Hawkins Lab. When the heroes emerge from the Upside Down, they are met by the malevolent Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) and her troops, who’ve been relentlessly pursuing Eleven.

When our heroes’ bomb goes off, it destroys the Upside Down and the wormhole connecting Earth to the Abyss, along with everything the government was hoping to exploit. Hawkins can, at last, rebuild.

Unfortunately, the destruction appears to take a couple of our heroes with it.

Who died?

Vecna/Henry, for one, but only after we learn that Henry was made evil as a child when the Mind Flayer infected his blood — a significant twist on their connection as it was previously understood.

Then, somewhat surprisingly … Eleven dies, too. Maybe.

Before commencing Operation Beanstalk, Kali pulls Eleven aside and insists that they need to let themselves be destroyed along with the Upside Down in order to make completely sure that the government will never capture them and use them in future experiments on other kids. (It involves using Eleven and Kali’s blood — it’s complicated, and it’s explained in earlier episodes.) Hopper, Eleven’s longtime guardian and father figure, pleads passionately against this plan.

Kali gets her wish when she is shot dead in the Upside Down while protecting Eleven. Then, just before the Upside Down is exploded, Eleven seems to follow suit, stepping back through the portal to be swept away in the destruction.

But is she really gone? In the series’s rousing final scene, Dustin, Will, Max and their friends Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin) and Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) are back in the Wheeler basement playing Dungeons & Dragons when Mike, who was in love with Eleven, suggests an alternative ending. He proposes that Kali stayed alive long enough to use her powers to project an illusion of Eleven’s death. In reality, he hopes, Eleven slipped away and is somewhere far away, having adventures incognito.

Who’s still together?

The on-again/off-again relationship between Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) didn’t survive Episode 7. Mike’s romance with Eleven obviously ended in the finale. The other major relationships held.

After the Upside Down explosion, the episode jumps ahead 18 months to the spring of 1989, where we see that Max and Lucas are still together. Hopper, meanwhile, finally proposes to Joyce at a fancy restaurant (she accepts) and then asks her to move with him to Montauk, N.Y. He has an offer there from the local police department. And he wants to trade the sound of crickets for that of sea gulls.

What does the future hold?

The finale really drove home how much the real-world passage of time has been an unexpected boon for the show. The series began in 2016 when most of its younger cast members were in their pre- and early teens. Flashbacks to those earlier years emphasized how much the cast and the viewers have been through since then.

There’s even a high school graduation scene in which Dustin gives a rebellious valedictorian speech, talking about how his Hawkins generation had its childhood stolen. It’s hard not to think about the young people who started watching this show three years before the Covid-19 pandemic, who might relate very strongly. To say nothing of the actors themselves.

As for what’s next, the finale includes a nice scene with the older teens Jonathan, Nancy, Steve and their hip friend Robin (Maya Hawke), in which they talk about how their lives after high school are going. Jonathan goes to N.Y.U. film school; Steve becomes a local schoolteacher; Robin goes to Smith; and Nancy drops out of Emerson to work at the Boston Herald.

We also get glimpses at how the next few years might go for the younger teens. The most telling detail here is that Mike becomes a professional writer — just as so many Stephen King characters do.

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