‘Stranger Things’ Series Finale Recap: “The Rightside Up”

Stranger Things Season 5, Episode 8
"The Rightside Up"
Writers/Directors: The Duffer Brothers
Cast: Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Mataraazo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Brett Gelman, Priah Ferguson, Linda Hamilton, Cara Buono, Jamie Campbell Bower

In sixth grade, my class was assigned Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game as part of our reading homework. The Westing Game is a murder mystery involving the potential heirs of a slain millionaire who must solve his murder to win the inheritance. It remains one of my favorite books, but its conclusion in particular sticks with me. After the culprit and the winner of the game is revealed, it features two different epilogues. The first is set in the immediate aftermath of the climax, showing how all the characters have changed as a result. Then it jumps ahead a number of years for the second epilogue, and in doing so, catches the reader up on the rest of the lives of the characters well after the events of the book. It's an eminently satisfying way to conclude time spent with memorable characters, and imprinted on me at a young age such that it's more or less the platonic ideal for conclusions as far as I'm concerned. 

Stranger Things, in the "18 Months Later" portion of "The Rightside Up," more or less nails that platonic ideal, if not telling us everything that happens to these characters in the future after the story ends, at least offering up enough of a glimpse to create a satisfying notion of what life after this story will be like for everyone. All of which is my long-winded way of saying that "The Rightside Up" is an episode which succeeds thanks in large part to its epilogue. While the final battle with Vecna and the Mind Flayer has its moments, the epilogue nails the emotional truth of the series in a way that overcomes some dodgy and by-the-numbers plotting in the first half of the episode.  

"Hello, Brother" 

As the party reaches the Upside Down Hawkins Lab, they split: Murray (Brett Gelman), Hopper (David Harbour), Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) head inside, while the rest proceed to the Upside Down Squawk to begin their climb. Unbeknownst to either group, they're being watched: Lt. Akers (Alex Breauz) and his crew, going rogue from Doctor Kay, are going to take out Eleven once and for all. Inside the lab, Murray fires up the generator and Eleven enters the sensory deprivation tank. Back at the Hawkins' Squawk, Max (Sadie Sink) suddenly gets up from her wheelchair and walks into the Void, her mind having been pulled in my Eleven. Together with Kali, the three slip into Vecna's (Jamie Campbell Bower) mind and land in 1959 Hawkins High. 

Outside, the rest of the party exhaustively climbs the Squawk tower, only to realize its not lining up exactly with one of the Vecna-created rifts in the drawing-ever-closer Abyss, which means they're about to get crumpled. 

Relaying the need to stop Vecna fast to Eleven by way of Hopper and some pre-planned tank knocks, Max leads Eleven and Kali through the high school auditorium and into the Creel House in Vecna's mind via a shortcut. Disrupting Vecna's power-enhancing ceremony by chucking him out the window, the Abyss stops its descent just as it bumps the tower and knocks Steve (Joe Keary) off (it's okay; his one-time rival Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) saves him). From there, the party is able to climb up through the rift, and into the Abyss. 

Inside Vecna's mind, with the help of Kali's illusion casting powers (keep those in mind), the Mind Trio are able to make the kids see the truth of Vecna's plans, turning them against him. After reuniting with Holly, Max leads the kids out of the house and into the caves, while Eleven and Kali attempt to kill their brother. But Vecna is able to hold his own, and gets inside Eleven's head, learning both the current plan and Kali and Eleven's concerns about letting the military get ahold of Eleven after the fact. With this useful information in hand, he disappears. 

Redemption Rejected

And promptly reappears in the Upside Down Hawkins lab, where he uses his powers and his peak inside Eleven's head to thoroughly mess with Hopper, playing on his lingering guilt and fear over Eleven's ultimate fate to seemingly make him shoot Eleven inside the sensory deprivation tank. It is, of course, an illusion, but it serves the purpose of prompting Hopper to pull Eleven out of the tank, disconnecting her from Vecna's mind and causing Eleven, Kali and Max to all pop away back to their physical bodies. 

This leaves Holly (Nell Fisher) to take charge of the kids, continuing the run to the caves inside Vecna's mind. With Eleven neutralized, Vecna returns and almost captures Holly, but Delightful Derek (Jake Connelly) manages to pull her back into the cave just in time. But with his plan hinging on the power boost from those kids, Vecna has no choice but to enter those hated caves, which he does, his face contorted in fear and rage. 

Back in (one of) the physical worlds, Akers makes his move, storming the lab while deploying a helicopter-mounted Hedgehog to disable Eleven and Kali's powers. While Eleven manages to evade the initial onslaught, Hopper is captured and Kali is shot. While it sure looks like Hopper is prepared to let Kali die rather than give up Eleven to Akers (something which, in his defense, Kali seems to be urging him to do), he ultimately doesn't have to make that choice, as Murray takes a portion of the explosives they brought along to blow up the Upside Down and chucks 'em at the helicopter, disabling the Hedgehog and allowing Eleven to telekinetically make short work of the annoying Akers and his men once and for all. But it's too late for Kali, who dies as a result of the bullet wound (OR DOES SHE?!? — hold on to that thought). Hopper and Eleven head to the roof, where Eleven realizes she can make like Super Mario and jump across a series of floating rocks to get into the Abyss. She and Hopper say goodbye, with Eleven thanking him for being her dad, but also asking him to give her the space to make her own decisions and be her own person, giving him back his daughter's hair tie that she's worn on her wrist since season 2. 

In Vecna's mind, the kids are racing through Vecna's Traumatic Memory Mine Shaft tunnels, hoping to reach the escape hatch Max and Holly used in "Escape from Camazotz." Holly, spotting the fireplace poker she dropped in her last visit, completes her character arc by overcoming her fear and facing down Vecna this time, bashing him with the poker. It doesn't do much, of course, but Holly is saved when Will (Noah Schnapp) taps into Vecna's mind once more. Watching the memory of young Vecna bludgeoning a man to death and becoming forever-connected to the Abyss and the Mind Flayer, Will realizes that Vecna is, in his way, just like Will and all the other kids he's targeted: a victim-turned-tool of the Mind Flayer. He reaches out a hand to Vecna, telling him it's not too late, that he can help them stop the Mind Flayer, but Vecna bats it aside, insisting he made his own choices, that the world is flawed and he wants to reshape it alongside his partner the Mind Flayer. Just then, in the Abyss, the party reaches Vecna's Pain Tree, where Vecna's physical form and the bodies of the kids are currently residing, just as it shudders to life, and flips over, revealing itself to be the slumbering form of the massive Mind Flayer. 

Hit Points

As the Mind Flayer zeroes in on the well-armed but diminutive party, Eleven enters the scene, heralded by a flurry of boulders telekinetically chucked at the Mind Flayer. Doing a pretty sick tuck and roll after ripping an opening in its flesh with her mind, she attacks Vecna directly. Dungeon Master Mike (Finn Wolfhard) declares that since Vecna and the Mind Flayer are linked, any damage they do to it will also impact Vecna. So Nancy (Natalia Dyer) lures it into a narrower space where Jonathan can hit it with his flame thrower and Robin (Maya Hawke) can launch Molotov Cocktails at it as Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) launches water balloons filled with kerosene which Mike ignites with a flare gun, while Steve and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) go all stabby-stabby with their knife spears on its soft underside. Will once more slips inside Vecna's mind and harnesses his power. Telling Vecna none of them are afraid of him anymore, he snaps his arm, creating an opening to allow Eleven telekinetically throw him onto a spikey rock outcropping, piercing his heart and causing the Mind Flayer to shudder and collapse. 

Everyone proceeds inside, freeing all the kids, who promptly vomit up the Mind Flayer particles (Derek gives Steve a giant hug and it's adorable). Joyce (Winona Ryder) approaches the gurgling, still alive, Vecna, and proceeds to take her axe to his neck eleven (Eleven! Get it?) times, telling him he fucked with the wrong family. With each strike, a member of the party flashes to the deaths, pain and misery caused by Vecna — Will's kidnapping and possession, Eleven and Max's traumas, the deaths of Nancy's Season 1 friend Barb, Joyce's season 2 boyfriend Bob, and Eddie — until his head flies off. 

Reuniting with Hopper and Murray in the Upside Down, the party — the whole party — races back to the library gate, having set the bomb — timed to Prince's Purple Rain album, to the delight of of Minnesotans everywhere —  to detonate the exotic matter emanating from Hawkins Lab and destroy the Upside Down. But to the surprise of no one except everyone in the party, as they burst back into the Rightside Up, Doctor Kay and the military are waiting, and swiftly overpower everyone — except Eleven, whom Mike spots standing on the other side of the gate, back in the Upside Down. Despite the phalanx of hedgehogs keeping her power at bat, Eleven pulls Mike into the Void, telling him the government will never stop looking for her, making her a constant danger to him and their friends. She asks him to thank the others for teaching her what being a friend meant, and insists that one day, he'll understand her choice, because he's always known her better than anyone. They embrace, and Eleven says she'll always love him as he slips back to reality. Just then, "Purple Rain" ends, the bomb detonates, and the Upside Down disappears, taking Eleven with it. 

Passing The Torch

Eighteen months later, things are back to relative normal in Hawkins. The quarantine is lifted, the military is gone, and Robin is delivering all this exposition just like in the first episode of the season thanks to a returning guest stint at the Squawk. She's back in town because it's graduation day for the class of 1989 (Steve isn't on hand to help her, as he's busy coaching Derek's little league team). Mike isn't in a festive mood though; following a concerned call from Karen, Hopper finds him sulking on a bench looking at the library, the last place he saw Eleven. Hopper tells him he has a choice to make between two paths, and that Hopper, referencing the death of his daughter Sara, has been down one of those paths before. Instead, he suggests he accept Eleven's choice, and rebuild his life like she wanted.

Mike proceeds to join his friends at graduation, where valedictorian Dustin gives a moving speech about the power of friendship and the way all the "good chaos" Hawkins and its people have been through in the last four years helped break down barriers between people who otherwise wouldn't have been friends. Then he rips off his gown to reveal a "Hellfire Lives" t-shirt and delivers a screed against conformity before flipping the principal the bird and grabbing his diploma, just as Eddie always said he'd do if he ever graduated. At one point, feedback from the speakers seems to spark an idea in Mike. 

That night, Steve, Nancy, Jonathan and Robin reminisce on the roof of the Squawk. Jonathan is a film student at NYU, Robin is at Smith college, Nancy just dropped out of Emerson to write for the New York Herald, and Steve is a coach and high school sex ed teacher. More than anything, they miss hanging out together, and resolve to meetup at Robin's weird uncle's house in Philadelphia once a month. At the same time, Hopper and Joyce finally get their date at Enzo's, where Hopper congratulates Joyce on raising two beautiful boys into incredible men, then reveals he's been offered a sheriff's job in Montauk, before proposing. 

At the Wheeler house, Mike is leading his party through one last Dungeons & Dragons campaign. In the process, he reveals the fates of their characters, and we see glimpses of everyone's future. The Knight and the Zoomer — Lucas and Max — stay together, their love growing stronger. The Bard — Dustin — goes to college but still finds time for adventuring alongside Steve (who gets the RV he always wanted). Will the Wise similarly goes to college, finding acceptance both within and without. And Mike, the storyteller, becomes a writer, inspired by him and his friends' adventures. One story he can't ever tell anyone else, however, is the story of the Mage — and Mike explains how Eleven may have survived, that she couldn't have pulled him into the Void with the hedgehogs active, that instead she may have gotten clear of the devices using the underground tunnels and that the image of her staying behind in the Upside Down was preplanned, cast by the dying Kali. 

Mike can't be sure he's right, but one by one, the others tearfully declare they believe he is, as we see Eleven alone, backpacking to a remote village near two waterfalls. Just then, Karen calls down for dinner, and one by one, the party places their D&D books on the shelf before heading upstairs. Mike is the last to go as Holly and her friends thunder into the basement and begin to play the game on their own. Smiling wistfully, he closes the basement door. 

Other Thoughts

• Max casually rattling off what all the first generation characters were doing in the high school memory was pretty funny. 
• If you're confused why, when Max, Eleven and Kali entered the theater in Vecna's mind it was some weird play and not Oklahoma!, it's because in the Stranger Things stage show, Joyce isn't really mounting a production of Oklahoma!, but using that as cover for a real staging of a play called Dark of the Moon, about a witch boy whose story parallels Will and Eleven.  
• Note to Kali: don't pause before killing Vecna to deliver the dry cool action hero line. Strike, then quip. 
• When Mike pesters Nancy for a gun and she gives him a flair gun, it's got big "Melvin pestering Michael Gross for a gun, only to get an unloaded one in Tremors" energy. 
• I appreciate both that Will found the grace to offer Vecna a shot at redemption (because that's what heroes do), and also that Vecna ultimately passed up the opportunity to pull a Darth Vader and asserted his willing villain-ness. 
• If you're curious to learn about the weird rock that dissolved into lil' Vecna's hand, establishing a link to the Mind Flayer and giving him psychokinetic powers, stay tuned: a Stranger Things prequel spinoff exploring the government's earlier explorations of the Abyss and what led that guy to be in that cave with that rock is in the works. 
• It was pretty clear when the show had the chance to kill Ted and/or Karen early in this season and then passed that we weren't heading for much in the way of a finale character bloodbath. Still, I don't love that the only heroic character to die in this episode was the little brown girl.  
• No one expected the show to end with the characters in military prison and the fact that with the Upside Down and Eleven gone, the military would lose interest in Hawkins is clear enough, but a line of dialogue or something suggesting how everyone got away scott free would have been nice — having Paul Reiser's Owens play a role in that would have been a nice callback. 
• Dustin's mom and Lucas' parents turn up at the end, but we still don't see Max's mom, and it sure seems like she's just living with Lucas now. 
• It's a brief moment, but I love that when we see Karen at the graduation, her scars from the demogorgon attack are visible, almost like a badge of honor. 
• The girl who comes up to Dustin after his speech is Stacey, the same girl who rejected him at the Snowball dance in Season 2, when Nancy later told him someday, girls would be into what he has to offer. 
• There's absolutely no way the four older kids are going to meet up every month, but that's not the point; the point is they want to, and that anyone on the older side of their characters' ages recognize the bittersweet reality of that not being enough. 
• Hopper getting a job offer in Montauk seems like a nod to the series' origins, which originally was going to be set there instead of Hawkins, the Duffers having been inspired by the Montauk Project.  
• Just as the epilogue circles back to the beginning of this season with Robin's expositional DJing, the final scene calls back to the first scene of the series, which opening with the boys playing D&D in Mike's basement. 
• When we see Mike's future dorm room, Will's picture from last season is hanging on the wall and he has Eleven's photo framed on his desk. 
• The final scene of the series, with Mike the last one out of the basement and closing the door literally and figuratively, was always planned to be the last shot of the series. The addition of the "next generation" of kids in the form of Holly and her friends grew out of this season. 
• Eleven's fate remains (intentionally) vague. For what it's worth, like the characters, I believe she survived. All else aside, if we're meant to take the flashes of the character's fates during Mike's story as glimpses of an objective truth, then we should do the same when we see Eleven, as it's presented the same way — Mike says something he couldn't possibly know at the time, and then the objective eye of the camera tells us he's right. 

Nitpick Corner

• Maybe Erica and Mr. Clarke shouldn't have used the Squawk van for their secret recon mission? 
• There really shouldn't be any water in that Upside Down sensory deprivation tank.  
• I know these characters are running on days with no sleep, but no one considered that maybe there wouldn't be a rift which perfectly lined up with the Squawk tower once the Abyss drew closer? 
• I guess there being 12 kids and Vecna attempting the merging of worlds on the anniversary of Will disappearing/when the Upside Down was created wasn't important and was just Vecna being dramatic? 
• Where are the Demogorgons, demoddogs, demobats, etc.? Lucas calls this out while in the Abyss, and Dustin reasons they all died with Vecna; except, at that point, Vecna wasn't dead. 
• The party's plan for Nancy to lure the Mind Flayer back towards the cliffs so they can hit it from above requires Jonathan, Robin, Mike and Lucas to climb some really tall cliffs really fast.  

• See above re: sleep, but no one had a contingency plan or any expectation that the military would be waiting for them on the other side of the gate they previously stormed through after killing some soldiers?  
• Max is somehow graduating with the rest of her class despite having been in a coma/trance for eighteen months. 
• So…are the rest of the Turnbows still in that barn? 
• Remember, nitpicks are born of love. 

Best New Character of the Season?

It's Derek, and it's not even close. 

Who Won the Episode?  

In the first half, Jamie Campbell Bower really made the most of his two big scenes, entering the cavern and then facing down his past before ultimately rejecting Will. 

Despite Dustin's touching and fun graduation speech, the back half of the episode belongs to Mike, who experiences a little mini-arc and proves the perfect lens through which to view the end of the series.  

Who Won the Season?

Friends — excuse me, best friends — Will and Mike share this honor. From discovering the untapped power within to his powerful coming out scene to playing a key role in the defeat of the man/tree monster who tormented him for so long, this is easily the season in which Will had the most to do and also had his own agency in the doing of it. 

But this is also the season where Mike reversed his late-series skid into an intolerable, self-centered character, reminding us of the value he brings to the party as both a leader and storyteller, organizing the missions against Vecna, helping Will find his power (and standing by his friend without missing a beat), becoming to the younger kids what Eddie and Steve were to Mike and his friends (the older, cooler kid who takes a shine to you), and choosing not to let his grief over the lack of a happy ending with Eleven derail his life.    

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