SPOILER ALERT! This post contains major plot details from the first four episodes of Netflix‘s Stranger Things 5. Do not read unless you’ve finished the entirely of Season 5, Vol. 1.
The Duffer brothers have pulled off quite a few massive cliffhangers throughout the run of Stranger Things, so they set the bar even higher for themselves with Season 5. That’s why Vol. 1 doesn’t just end with one of the biggest set pieces they’ve ever done, it also includes one of the most jaw-dropping revelations in the show’s history: Will Byers has his own telekinetic super powers.
“It’s the most logistically challenging thing we’ve ever pulled off,” Matt Duffer tells Deadline of the battle at the Hawkins MAC-Z at the very end of Episode 4.
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Titled “Sorcerer,” the episode revolves around the Hawkins crew’s plan to steal the children that the military have rounded up and are holding hostage at the MAC-Z. Both parties are trying to protect the kids, but only our main characters know exactly what evil they’re facing, and they fear the military is severely unequipped to face Vecna — especially considering the only remaining gate to the Upside Down is in the MAC-Z.
After Joyce, Mike, Lucas, and Will are caught trying to steal the kids from the military complex, they desperately try to get the soldiers to understand the threat. But, it’s too late. Just as Will experiences another one of his hive-mind visions, Demogorgons begin to swarm the MAC-Z.
“One thing that made it particularly challenging is there were so many kids involved, and kids can’t shoot very late, so we had to shoot our ‘oner’ in pieces. So it’s four shots — four shots that were stitched together to look like one. It was exhausting. It felt like we were shooting it for a month,” Matt said.
To pull it off, Ross explains: “We would just shoot on the stage during half the day, and at night, we would move over to the MAC-Z [to] just chip off whatever we could do. So by the time it ended, I think the first couple days were like, ‘This is incredible. This backlot is amazing.’ It was so exciting. But by the end of it, we were all drained, everyone. But, hopefully the fans like it and it was worth it.”
As the scene unfolds, the camera weaves through the chaos. So, even though it is not truly filmed in one take, they still rehearsed it for weeks as though it were to make sure they could nail each of the four lengthy shots needed to stitch the scene together. Then, once they’d perfected it, they still had to shoot it.
“It was insane. We did rehearsals for weeks before, which we’d never done before. The VFX Department made a pre-vis video where they animated out the whole sequence to map it, and then the stunt department filmed a version on their iPhones to map it out. So we had all these guides to follow through the rehearsals,” Noah Schnapp explained. “Then on that day, we did a oner so we really had to have rehearsed it perfectly to get it done. Then, [for] another week, it was just me kind of having fun on the playground that was that set.”
The final sequence in “The Sorcerer” also marks the first time that the Hawkins crew has come face-to-face with Vecna since the Season 4 finale. They’ve been scouring the Upside Down hoping to track him down to no avail, until he comes waltzing out of the gate inside the MAC-Z as the Demogorgons wreak havoc.
And, in fact, it’s the first time that Will has seen Vecna since he was kidnapped in Season 1, which we saw in the first five minutes of the new season.
“It’s funny, Noah and I never spent any time really discussing the connection between the two of them. If you’re to go back and rewatch interviews that I did for Season 4, people would ask me, ‘Oh, what do you hope for Season 5?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I really hope that — it feels like there’s unfinished business between Will and Vecna — and I hope that that’s explored a bit more,’” Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays both Henry Creel and his supernatural monster counterpart, tells Deadline.
While he was already pretty menacing, as soon as he walks through the membrane, it’s pretty clear that he’s even more dangerous than the last time we saw him. He swiftly massacres nearly everyone on the military complex before summoning Will to his side.
Campbell Bower says that, despite all their preparation, they still came down to the wire to film the scene where Will and Vecna finally face each other for the first time in four years.
“We shot that at 5:30 in the morning. The sun was coming up at 6, so we had very little time. It was one of those moments on a film set, or in art in general, where I felt like I zoomed completely out of myself and could see everything that was going on around me and could see the brain trying to grab onto things,” he remembered. “We’re fortunate enough in art sometimes to have these moments where the world goes quiet and you can hear a pin drop. You can’t plan for them. They just come when they want to be there. That was one of those moments.”
Holding Will in a telekinetic vice grip, Vecna tells him that he specifically targeted him all those years ago because he was a weak child who could easily be manipulated. He says he’s now targeting other children for the same reason so that he can bring them to “his” world, which would presumably be the mind lair where he’s trapped both Max and Holly, where they will become “the perfect vessels” to reshape in his predatory image.
It would seem, however, that Vecna has vastly underestimated the youngest Byers. In what is likely to become a defining scene from the series, Will remembers his conversation with Robin from earlier in Season 5, where she says that she gained confidence when she stopped looking for answers about herself from others. As the words echo in Will’s mind, he recalls several childhood memories that are actually first referenced in Season 2, when Mike, Joyce and Jonathan were trying to save him from the Mind Flayer’s control.
The Duffers told Deadline that, while they didn’t intentionally plant that seed of those memories three seasons ago to reference in this moment, it emerged as a perfect way to tie together Robin’s words to Will coming into his own.
“I do hope people pick up on it,” says Ross Duffer. “Those flashbacks, I remember they weren’t in the initial draft of the script that we wrote and we read it. We read it through. We had the Robin speech to him, and we had her voice coming over him, but it wasn’t having the impact, because it’s such an internal thing that he’s going through. And so as we were talking about how to express that, we decided to put in this idea of old home movies. And then, of course, we went back and looked at Season 2, and wanted to directly reference those.”
Once she looked inside herself, Robin says, she felt so free it was like she could fly. Cut to black, and the Demogorgons that were about to rip into all of Will’s loved ones are now at his mercy. With his eyes rolled back in his head and his hand splayed in front of him, Will stops them each mid-air and kills them instantly.
As he collapses and comes back to, he looks up and wipes a streak of blood dripping from his nose.
“I mean, I was, like, freaking out. I wanted to screenshot it and post it,” Schnapp said of reading that moment for the first time in the script. “That whole year, I was just looking forward to getting to do that and honor it as well as Millie [Bobby Brown] has done for so long.”
He’s obviously referencing the fact that, for the longest time, Brown’s Eleven has been the sole central character who possessed supernatural abilities.
But, no two characters have thus far had identical telekinetic abilities, and the same remains true now. Even though, in that moment, Will displays some similarities to Eleven, Brown says “they’re just two completely separate abilities.”
“As you read the scripts in Volume 2, it comes in a different way than hers,” Schnapp adding that the biggest task was “trying to have an arc with the powers of not having the full understanding of how it works until where it goes. So knowing how to let it evolve and change.”
He continued: “This season was difficult because we filmed it out of order. So that Episode 4 [scene] was the second time I did it. So then when I did it later in the season, it was the first time, and I was still not really sure how to do it. The Duffers weren’t on set, so I was like, ‘Oh I have to figure this out without them.’ So I was like, FaceTiming. Like, is this? Does this work?’”
The revelation about Will’s powers comes after years of fan speculation, and it also follows Mike repeatedly trying to convince his friend that Eleven isn’t the only person with super powers. As the gang is gearing up for this fight, Mike pesters Will to the point that all the latter can do is roll his eyes. Will has always been their party’s “wizard” in Dungeons and Dragons, he says, but that’s not real life.
Not everyone gets to see Will’s triumphant moment at the end of 504, since most of the crew is spread out across Hawkins and the Upside Down on their complicated quest to save their town. But, you know who does see it? Mike. Who is definitely thinking, “‘I f*cking told you so,’” says Finn Wolfhard.
“Even though it’s such an incredibly surreal thing, I think that it’s something that he kind of knew deep down, in a really odd kind of way, where I think that he knows that this connection between him and Vecna runs deeper,” Wolfhard explained. “If you look back also to Season 2, Season 3, he’s always been connected in some way. I think that Mike believes that Will has more to offer, and I think he’s gatekept a little bit by his mom, and I think that’s kind of how everyone feels. So I think it’s just a real, sort of triumph and big moment when it’s revealed at the end of [Episode] 4 that he has powers. It’s great.”
One of the reasons that this sequence feels so monumental, in addition to the obvious consequences for the back half of the season, is that, despite how mythologically complex the show has become, the Duffers have tried to keep Stranger Things looking and feeling relatively modest.
Every season has felt slightly bigger in scope and scale as the threats Hawkins faces have also grown, but those huge set pieces really only come around “if our character moment was also reaching an emotional climax,” Ross Duffer explains.
“We always look to do that. ‘Dear Billy’ would be one example where this horror climax, and you’ve got special effects and spectacle and in action, but at the same time you or have this character that’s been arcing to reach to this moment,” he continued. “If you can hit both at the same time, that’s always our goal, and sort of is our favorite moments from the show, whenever we can do that.”
Per the brothers, it was always the plan to divide the final season into three parts, even though Season 4’s split was entirely due to delays from the pandemic (“Netflix wanted to get this show out as soon as possible,” Matt says of that unplanned rollout).
And, they always knew that Vol. 1 would end with this full circle moment for Will.
“Immediately we knew the climax had to involve Will and him getting his powers back, and it was going to be this huge, huge battle,” Matt revealed. “I almost look at it as, like, two massive movies. Volume 1 and Volume 2 are two massive, almost standalone movies that each built to their own climaxes.”
As for where things go from here? Well, they could tell us, but what would be the fun in that?
“That’s a good question. I guess you’re gonna have to tune in to find out,” Matt jokes. “Can you say ‘tune in’ with Netflix? That’s actually not accurate. I don’t know. I don’t know what word you would use. You’ll have to click on it.”
Dessi Gomez contributed to this report.