Your Stranger Things 5 Survival Guide

Time and time again, the kids-now-teens of Stranger Things have used their knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons to make sense of the horror show that their hometown of Hawkins, Indiana, has become since a supercharged telekinetic kid named Eleven accidentally opened a gate to a monster-filled realm called the Upside Down. The kids turn to their handy, and lengthy, Dungeons & Dragons handbook full of terminology and descriptions that turn out to be useful not only for their game, but for the unexplainable things happening right in front of their faces. You know what else has a ton of terminology, a bunch of locations to explore, and a whole host of monsters to keep straight? Stranger Things.

Heading into its fifth and final season, there’s already a lot to keep track of. The plan that our big bad, Vecna, revealed to Nancy Wheeler at the end of season four foretold the death and destruction for Hawkins (and her family, specifically). Eleven not only has to power up to battle Vecna one last time, but the U.S. military is on her ass. And who knows if Max will ever come out of her Vecna-induced coma. All of this is to say we have enough on our plates already without having to remember what the hell a hive mind is or who was in the Hellfire Club. So to help you recall all the people, places, and vocab you’ll need to know as the final chapter of Stranger Things gets underway, we’ve created our own handbook for what’s been happening in Hawkins over the past four seasons. Study up, nerds, we’ve got alternate-realm villains to defeat, and you’ll need to know the difference between your Mind Flayers and your Demogorgons.

The Party The Party is everything. The Party is life. The Party is also the name for the group of people with whom you play Dungeons & Dragons. And to our original troupe of foul-mouthed dorks (compliment) — Mike Wheeler, Lucas Sinclair, Will Byers, and Dustin Henderson — the Party comes before all else. This makes things a little sticky in season one when Mike wants to bring Stranger Things’s resident superhero Eleven into the Party (she’d be the Mage, obviously), and the others aren’t quite sure. It all works out in the end, though, as Eleven learns the first rule of the Party, “Friends don’t lie,” and then saves everyone’s lives, and the world, and continues to do so over and over again. It’s certainly one way to get people to like you.

Will the WiseA.k.a. Zombie Boy, a.k.a. Will Byers. The Party’s sweet, sensitive wizard, Will (who is definitely crushing on Mike) is taken into the Upside Down at the start of Stranger Things. And although his mom, Joyce, and police chief Hopper enter the Upside Down and bring Will back, the Upside Down never really leaves him. Even when they flush the Mind Flayer from Will’s system in season two, he’s still attached somehow. Since then, Will’s become a sort of alarm system, alerting the good guys whenever something Upside Down–ish is close. It’s quite useful, but it does force Noah Schnapp into a lot of hand-to-neck acting.

Mad MaxLike Eleven, Max Mayfield — or Mad Max, as per her arcade-game username — has to earn her spot in the Party when she and her piece-of-shit stepbrother, Billy Hargrove, move to Hawkins in season two. Since she and Lucas quickly wind up crushing on each other, it’s not an impossible feat. Things take a turn for Max in season three when she watches Billy die right in front of her at the melted-flesh hands of the Mind Flayer, which leads to the intense levels of guilt and grief she is dealing with (poorly) in season four. This, unfortunately, makes her the perfect prey for Vecna and his trauma kink — he invades her mind and uses her to open his fourth gate (see below). Max is dead for a little over a minute before Eleven arrives in the void and attempts to bring her friend back to life. Last we saw her, Max was alive but in a coma.

JopperIt remains amazing to me that Hopper and Joyce have made very little effort to find other adults to help them fight the monsters of the Upside Down and instead rely on all the tweens and teens around them. Alas, they only have eyes for each other (and Murray Bauman, at times) when it comes to both falling in love and saving the world.

Scoops TroopA group bonded by ice cream, hair products, and bringing down commie bastards, the Scoops Troop is invented in season three when pseudo-brothers Steve and Dustin, Steve’s Scoops Ahoy co-worker Robin, and Lucas’s little sister Erica intercept a secret Russian message and infiltrate a bunker underneath Starcourt Mall where Russians are attempting to open the gate to the Upside Down.

Hellfire ClubOnce led by the late, great Eddie Munson, Hellfire is a DnD club at Hawkins High where Mike, Dustin, and Lucas find their people in season four. (Well, until Lucas ditches DnD for basketball.) Things go bad for this group once cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham is murdered by Vecna while buying drugs from Eddie. The gruesome murder mixed with the growing Satanic Panic of the time has the entire town turning on Eddie and Hellfire, branding them a cult that’s to blame for all of the horrible, mysterious happenings in Hawkins. Dustin takes Eddie’s death and the villainizing of Hellfire especially hard.

Campaign Villains and Other Bad Guys

The big baddies, their minions, and one evil dude.

Demogorgons Remember when we met the Demogorgon in season one and thought he was the worst and only monster the citizens of Hawkins would have to battle? Eventually, we’d come to learn that the Demogorgons are just henchmen for the true villain of the series. Still, that no-face-all-teeth vibe they have going on and the fact that they can’t seem to get enough of the taste of human flesh makes them pretty terrifying all on their own.

DemodogsThe same faceless horror show, now in compact but lethal dog form. These are the guys that get Bob Newby in Hawkins Lab during season two. Turns out it wasn’t so easy-peasy; RIP, sweet angel.

DemobatsYou guessed it: These are Demogorgon creatures in bat form. You’d think that would make them less scary, but when hundreds of them are whipping around you, you might be wishing for the mama Demogorgon. These creatures are the ones that kill Eddie Munson after he distracts them with the most metal concert on top of a trailer in an alternate realm ever, in order to lure them away from the Creel house and give Steve, Robin, and Nancy a fighting chance to defeat Vecna. The man everyone — especially those letterman jacket a-holes on the basketball team — blames for all the recent Vecna murders actually dies saving the town of Hawkins.

Mind Flayer (Smokey’s Version)He’s a giant spiderlike monster made out of smoke who infiltrates your mind. In season two, they beat him back to the Upside Down after flushing him out of Will’s system with heat (“He likes it cold,” as they say) and having Eleven close the gate at Hawkins Lab.

Mind Flayer (Melted Flesh Variety)The Mind Flayer returns in season three with a makeover: Now he’s made out of the flesh and bones of melted rats and also humans. Cute, right? This time around, he’s hell-bent on coming after Eleven and is using Billy as his sort of possessed consigliere. El has two major showdowns with the Mind Flayer, which leave her completely drained of all her powers at the end of the season. It’s Billy, internally battling the Mind Flayer, who protects El from her fleshy rival long enough for Joyce and Hopper to destroy the key that the Russians were using to reopen the gate in Hawkins in their secret mall bunker.

Dr. BrennerSome may argue Dr. Martin Brenner is actually the deadliest monster of all. They’d be wrong, though, because did you read the thing about the melted human-flesh monster?? Still, Brenner is a terrible human being. His obsession with harnessing power from and control over these superpowered kids, and his obsession with using Eleven to find Henry/One/Vecna in the Upside Down, are really at the root of everything else that happens in Stranger Things. Plus, he makes all these kids call him Papa, and that’s creepy as hell. He meets his demise in the Nevada desert in season four after catching a bullet aimed at El and asking her to understand and forgive his actions. One bullet does not make up for a lifetime of torture, so El does not give him what he wants.

Henry Creel/OneSurprise! Season four reveals that every monster we’ve met so far has actually been working at the long, scaly hands of the Stranger Things’s big bad, Vecna. But there is a twist within the twist: Vecna is actually Henry Creel, a man who came to Hawkins as a young boy in the ’50s, where he discovered his deadly telekinetic powers and a deep hatred for other humans and the “cruel, oppressive world” they created. He uses those powers to violently murder his mother and sister, and after his father, Victor, is arrested for those murders, Henry finds himself under the care of Dr. Brenner. Henry becomes the first child in Brenner’s experiments — he even has the 001 tattoo to prove it.

VecnaIn 1979, Henry/One goes psycho and murders all the other children at Hawkins Lab, and it’s Eleven who summons all the power in her tiny body to stop him, but she winds up sending him to an unformed version of the Upside Down. After a grisly makeover, Henry-now-Vecna realizes the power he has in this realm, begins to shape it to his liking, takes control of its monsters, and then waits for a gate to open so he can exert that power on his old realm. This, of course, eventually happens thanks to his old nemesis Eleven. Those two seem to keep meeting up, huh? This is especially true when El uses Max’s mind as a way to piggyback into a face-to-face with Vecna at the end of season four. The El-Vecna mind fight — while she’s in a pizza-dough freezer and he’s trying to kill Max — is a doozy, and thanks to an assist from Nancy, Steve, and Robin attacking Vecna’s body in a trance at the Creel House, and the Russia contingent roasting Demogorgons at Kamchatka Prison, she’s able to fend him off for now. But as he reminds her before he hides somewhere in the Upside Down to nurse his injuries, “This is only the beginning — the beginning of the end.” Vecna is nothing if not a drama queen.

A closer look at the map.

The Upside DownAh, the infamous Upside Down. This is another realm of existence that looks exactly like Hawkins, except everything is dead or dying and it’s full of monsters. Home, of course, to the biggest monster, Vecna. Two fun facts: (1) Vecna is the one who shaped the Upside Down into what it looks like now after he was forced to spend eternity there during a battle with a tiny Eleven in 1979; (2) Nancy discovers that the Upside Down is frozen in time, stuck on the date November 6, 1983 — the day Eleven opened the gate and Will Byers was taken.

The Wheeler HouseThis is arguably the home base for the series. It’s where the Party plays all of their DnD campaigns. It’s where Mike hides Eleven when they first find her in the woods (and where they find her iconic pink dress and blonde wig). It’s where our resident badass Nancy Wheeler stores her guns and angsts over her ongoing love triangle with Jonathan Byers and Steve Harrington. (She contains multitudes.) You’d think Wheeler parents Karen and Ted would have more questions about what’s going on in their home (well, at least Karen), but alas, they remain very much in the dark. However, one has to believe that Mike and Nancy’s little sister, Holly, has caught on to some of the shenanigans — she is tiny but she is perceptive.

Castle ByersA pretty sweet — excuse me, bitchin’— fort that Jonathan helped Will build that Will used to hide away from the world when needed. He also hides there from Demogorgons and other monsters while trapped in the Upside Down in season one. Now, he does destroy it in a fit of teenage angst in season three, but its spirit lives on.

Hawkins LabThis place purports to belong to the U.S. Department of Energy, but it’s really the secret lab where Dr. Martin Brenner is performing all of his experiments and training on the superpowered kids he collects. Hawkins Lab is also the site of the first gate that Eleven opens, accidentally allowing a connection between our world and the Upside Down.

Starcourt MallIn the summer of 1985, Starcourt Mall is the place to be in Hawkins. It’s got everything: a movie theater showing Back to the Future, nautical-themed ice-cream shop Scoops Ahoy, a secret Russian bunker where they’re trying to reopen the gate to the Upside Down and harness its power for Cold War stuff, Zales, and enough space for a giant melted-flesh monster from another realm to battle a teen with telekinetic powers.

The Creel HouseThe Creel family moved into their gorgeous Victorian home with the stained-glass flower on the door in the 1950s in hopes of getting their son Henry out of his funk. This did not work. After Henry murders his sister and mother and makes his father the fall guy, this place becomes known as the Murder House in Hawkins. The Upside Down version of the Creel house also happens to be where Vecna plugs into the hive mind and enters his trance state so he can access the minds of depressed teens and murder them by showing them their worst fears and breaking all the bones in their body. That’s not going to help with the resale value, but it should be disclosed nonetheless.

Spellcasting and Other Magic Items

Freaky happenings, powers, and other weird things to know.

The VoidThe “void” is a term used to describe the state Eleven enters when she uses her telepathic powers to locate someone. Physically, she’s in some sort of sensory deprivation — the white noise of a radio, a kiddie swimming pool full of salt water, a pizza-dough freezer — surrounded by dark and nothingness until she finds the person she’s looking for, and, if needed, she can enter their mind. It’s how she talks to her catatonic mother. It’s how she locates her sister Eight. It’s how she mind-fights Vecna and brings Max back to life (albeit in a coma).

The Gate(s)A “gate” is an opening between our world and the Upside Down. All of these strange shenanigans started when Eleven had a surge of power (terrified after meeting a Demogorgon in the void) and ripped one open at the Hawkins Lab. Honestly, a lot of Stranger Things is just about opening and closing various gates. The gates become a bigger problem in season four when Vecna enacts his master plan: He kills four teens in Hawkins, knowing each kill opens up a small, snack-size gate. And, like a dam with cracks in it, once all four of those small gates are created, there’s enough pressure to rip open some giant fissures across Hawkins, making more than enough room for monsters to infiltrate the town and, if Vecna gets his way, the world.

Hive MindHey, so, it turns out that everything in the Upside Down — every monster, every vine, Vecna himself — are all connected by a shared intelligence. That’s pretty terrible news if you want to sneak around in the Upside Down without being noticed, but great news when you’re trying to hurt the monsters in the hive. For instance, when Hopper, Joyce, and Murray torch a bunch of Demogorgons in Kamchatka Prison, it injures the hive enough that Nancy, Steve, and Robin are saved from strangulation by the vines in the Upside Down. Robin calls it a miracle, but that’s just hive mind, baby.

Now MemoriesIn season two, we come to learn that because of his time trapped in the Upside Down and his run-ins with the Mind Flayer (Smokey Version), Will is connected to the hive mind, too. When he starts to have visions of what the hive is up to — at first, he sees vines spreading — the only way he can describe them is that they’re like memories, but happening in the present, or “now-memories.” He was being possessed by a monster from another realm at the time, so we’ll forgive him for not taking the time to workshop that a little more. Now, if you’re thinking about how we just learned that if one member of the hive mind gets injured, every member gets injured, which means Will would be hurt too, uh, yeah, that’s been a problem in the past.

Kate BushThe Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Grammy-nominated, best-selling artist was magic before “Running Up That Hill” was featured in Stranger Things, but the magic really leveled up when that song kept Max, in the clutches of Vecna, tethered to reality in season four. When Max’s friends put her favorite song on her Walkman, it emboldens her to fight her way out of Vecna’s mind-prison situation and provides us with the perfect needle drop for an intense, emotional sequence.

Farrah Fawcett hairsprayThe most magical item of all. How else do you think Steve “The Hair” Harrington keeps things perfectly coiffed?