Stranger Things Series Finale Recap: How Did It All End For The Hawkins Gang?

As we head into a new calendar year, there's one thing we'll sadly be leaving behind in this one: "Stranger Things."

After five seasons and 42 episodes — and a lot of patience from its fans, as it took nearly a decade to get to this point — the Netflix phenom wrapped up for good on Wednesday night with a series finale that brought both satisfying closure and heartbreaking, permanent (or so we think?) goodbyes.

The swan song — appropriately titled "The Rightside Up" — also brought quite the runtime, clocking in at two hours and eight minutes, the show's longest episode ever. So let's dive into the specifics of the "Stranger Things" series finale... but we'll keep it to the highlights.

Keep scrolling for a breakdown of the "Stranger Things" series finale, then drop a comment with your full reviews of the episode!

The plan to destroy Vecna and the Upside Down once and for all is simple at first — well, as simple as something on this show can get. Eleven, Kali, and Max will use their combined skills to enter Henry's mind and kill him there; Dustin, Steve & Co. will venture to The Abyss to disentangle Holly and the other kids from the hive mind; and when everyone is out of there safely, Hopper will make the entire Upside Down go ka-boom with a lot of C-4.

Well, only some of that happens the way it's supposed to. The C-4 part, pretty much. In the interim, there's a lot of mind-hopping among Eleven, Max, Henry/Vecna, and even Will — and when Henry eventually finds the courage to go into the cave that had long terrified him in his own mind, it briefly seems that he might never be truly vanquished. Plus, one of the gang's greatest assets — the ever-powerful Kali — sadly dies when Lt. Akers shoots her in the stomach after the military briefly gets her, Eleven, and Hopper in their grasp.

And oh, it gets worse. We've all been so concerned about Vecna, his hive mind, and the imminent collision of The Abyss and Hawkins that we sorta forgot about the Mind Flayer — and it turns out Vecna and his hive mind are inside the Mind Flayer. That freaky-looking tree that's been in Will's vision? Yep. Dormant Mind Flayer. And it isn't dormant anymore.

Fortunately, Will, Eleven, and all of their friends don't have any fear left to spare in these life-or-death scenarios, so they fight as hard as they can in The Abyss to destroy the Mind Flayer for good. Nancy, Steve, Robin, and the rest of 'em go to work on the Mind Flayer's exterior, shooting it with bullets and fire and everything else in their arsenal. Meanwhile, inside the creature, Eleven uses her well-honed powers to face Vecna at last and rip him apart, impaling him on something spiky in the Mind Flayer's insides. (Will helps out here, too, taking remote control of Vecna so the Big Bad and his tendril-like arms can't do any damage to Eleven.) 

After a massive battle scene worthy of the movie screens where this finale is showing across the United States, the Mind Flayer is toast, the kids are saved from the hive mind, and Vecna is within an inch of his life — and Joyce, in a well-deserved moment of heroism, finishes the job by taking an ax to Vecna until his head falls from his body. Go, Joyce!

But hey, we've still got 58 minutes left in this finale, so something devastating's gotta happen — and it does, just after the entire group has successfully driven across the threshold that exits the Upside Down and enters regular Hawkins. At that threshold, Hopper & Co. have their vehicles cut off by the military, and the vehicles are raided in search of Eleven, whom Dr. Kay still wants to seize. At first, it seems El might have made a successful escape... but then Mike spots her standing on the exact point where Hawkins meets the Upside Down. Before Mike can stop her, Eleven has entered his mind, and she confirms that she's made the choice to end her life here; if she doesn't, none of this will ever truly stop. They have a heartbreaking final conversation in Mike's head, where they both express their love for each other and kiss one last time. And if you're a sucker for flashbacks to earlier seasons, this finale must have gotten you good: Mike and El's final chat is littered with scenes from their friendship and romance, including reminiscences of the first day they met. 

After they've said their goodbyes, Mike returns to the scene in Hawkins, and he and the others are crushed to see El still standing at the portal to the Upside Down. The C-4 that Hopper previously set up in the Upside Down goes off at last, and the entire world is wiped away — and Eleven goes with it.

A time jump then takes us to a year and a half later, and it's Graduation Day for Will, Dustin, and the others. Mike almost doesn't attend his own graduation ceremony, still forlorn over El's death, but Hopper encourages him to live the life that El would have wanted for him, and Mike does don that cap and gown in the end. 

And hey, Dustin is valedictorian! (I should think so, after he figured out the Upside Down was a wormhole to another dimension.) Curiously, at the end of Dustin's speech — which serves as a great middle finger to authority figures and The System in general — Mike hears some feedback on the speakers at the ceremony, and it makes him think about the night El died. Hmm...

There's more closure and more heartstring-tugging nostalgia as the episode winds down. Robin, Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve meet up to swap stories about life in the adult world — Nancy dropped out of Emerson to take a trainee position at a newspaper; Jonathan's at NYU and pursuing a filmmaking career; and Steve's teaching sex ed and coaching baseball at a school in the suburbs — and they agree to meet up once a month so they don't have to miss each other so much. Later, Joyce and Hopper go out to a nice dinner, where Hopper not only proposes the idea of moving to the beach for a fresh start (Montauk needs a new chief of police, after all), but actually proposes to Joyce — and she says yes!

And, naturally, Will, Dustin, Mike, Lucas, and Max get in one last Dungeons & Dragons campaign in the basement of the Wheeler house, with all the events of their game paralleling nicely with the actual life-or-death scenarios they've lived for the past several years. Once the campaign wraps up, Mike shares with his friends a theory about the night Eleven died. You know how that microphone feedback at graduation made Mike remember El's death? Well, it's because he remembered that when Eleven perished in the big Upside Down explosion, the military had been using three of those massive machines that emitted an awful, power-stifling shriek that usually rendered Eleven useless. So, if those machines were on at the time, how could Eleven have been standing so upright when the Upside Down blew up?

Mike likes to believe that Eleven didn't die, after all — that before Kali perished, she was able to conjure the illusion of Eleven standing on that threshold to the Upside Down, while the real Eleven escaped somewhere. We see a shot of Eleven hiking somewhere in the present day, and she reaches a clearing to face those three beautiful waterfalls she'd once dreamed about. But when Max and the others ask how Mike knows if this is real or not, he reaffirms that he doesn't know El's true fate; he just chooses to believe this version of the story, and the others tearfully agree that they'll believe it, too.

With that, Karen Wheeler calls everyone upstairs to have dinner... and as he makes his way out of the basement, Mike watches his sister, Holly, and her friends race down there to embark on their very first Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

OK, "Stranger Things" fans: How'd you like it? Grade the series finale in our poll below, then hit the comments to back up your choice.