Stranger Things Season 5 Reveals Max's Fate (And Raises Even Bigger Questions)

The following post contains spoilers for "Stranger Things" Season 5, Volume 1.

We're going to need a whole lot of Kate Bush to get Max out of this one.

"Stranger Things" is back at last for its final season on Netflix, and in the last of the Volume 1 episodes that dropped Wednesday, viewers got a long-awaited — though not entirely cheery — update on what's really happening to a comatose Max (Sadie Sink).

If you need your memory jogged, Season 4 ended with Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) taking control of Max's body and using it to open a gate to the Upside Down. Vecna broke Max's bones and left her for dead; she was then revived when Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) took a trip inside Max's mind, but the havoc that Vecna wreaked on Max's body couldn't be completely reversed, and she's been in a coma ever since.

Though Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Max's romance was on uncertain ground for much of Season 4, we come to learn during Season 5 that Lucas is constantly by Max's side in the hospital — and he regularly plays Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" for her, in hopes it can bring her back to consciousness like it's managed before.

Nancy and Mike's younger sister, Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher), is the one to encounter Max toward the end of Season 5A — and they're both currently trapped in the mind of Henry Creel aka Vecna. Not a great place to be. Earlier in the season, Holly was abducted by a Demogorgon and has since been clinging to life somewhere in the Upside Down, but she's not aware of her true captive state. As far as she knows, Henry — who started out as an imaginary friend only Holly could see, sent to warn her about the monsters lurking in Hawkins — is keeping her safe at the Creel House, and she's having a nice time.

Holly later discovers that Max is also residing in this colorful faux-paradise, which Max explains is actually a prison. When Max first woke up in Henry's mind, she found herself walking through dozens and dozens of Henry's memories, which circled back on themselves endlessly and confused Max too much to find a way out of her new jail.

One day, though, she did hear the Kate Bush song that Lucas was playing at her hospital bedside, and she followed the music until she was almost out of Henry's mind entirely. A portal in the sky presented an image of herself, comatose in Hawkins, and she could feel Lucas' hand on hers when he touched her in the real world. But just as Max ran toward that portal, the Kate Bush cassette tape stopped playing in real life and had to be rewound; the portal closed, Henry found Max, and he chased her until she reached a cave that, for some reason, Henry won't dare enter. A painful memory, perhaps?

Max has been hiding in that cave ever since, and had accepted her fate of indefinite captivity. Now that Holly has shown up in Henry's mind, though, Max is reinvigorated: She wants them both to escape, and she's got a plan. We'll just need to wait until Part 2 to see how it goes.