There are very few hours left: 2 in the morning January 1, 2026 finally it will also be available in Italyfinal episode of Stranger Things. It is in fact the eighth episode of the fifth season, entitled The Rightside Up (in Italian: The real world), that is, the one that will put a final point to the adventures of the Hawkins kids and will probably give us definitive explanations on how the phenomena at the center of the series came to be created. The wait is long, the hypotheses even more numerous, but what is certain is that to fully enjoy these 2 hours and 5 minutes – this is the length of the epilogue – it is better to review a little to have a clear idea of what we will see unfold in front of our eyes. Something that, we are sure, will be epic and exciting at the same time.
The story so far
November 6, 1983 in Hawkins the younger Will Byers he is kidnapped into the Upside Down after Eleven breaches that dimension. The girl helps his friends – Mike, Dustin and Lucas – find him and bring him home, defeating the monstrous Demogorgone. During 1984, however, Will remains possessed by another creature from the Upside Down, the Mind Flayerwhich tries to invade our reality, unconsciously making the boy build a network of tunnels under the city. Although seemingly cast back into the Upside Down, a fragment of the Mind Flayer in the summer of 1985 assembles a monster made of corpses, also defeated by Eleven in the Hawkins Mallat the cost of losing their powers. In 1986 we see thearrival of Vecnawhich through the sacrifice of four people (including Max, a friend of the group who remains in a coma) breaks the boundary between reality and Upside Down; having recovered her powers, Eleven tries to drive the enemy back but the rift between the worlds is now complete.
The fifth season
The fifth season starts again in 1987 after the Upside Down’s invasion of Hawkins has been limited by theUS Armywho is among other things on the trail of Eleven, considered responsible for the disaster. As the group prepares to face Vecna, the latter begins kidnapping Hawkins’ childrenstarting from Holly WheelerMike and Nancy’s sister: you want to use them as vehicles to expand your powers and redesign the entire reality. However, a first attack by Vecna is repelled by Willwho discovers that he is so connected to the monster that he has it acquired some powerssimilar to those of Eleven. We also meet Max againimprisoned in the memories of Henry Creel/Vecna, who manages to return to reality thanks to Holly’s help. In subsequent episodes it is revealed that the Upside Down is not a parallel reality, but a wormhole or interdimensional bridge that connects our reality to the Abyssa dimension made only of chaos and destruction, and that Vecna’s true plan is to bring the two worlds together until they collide with each other.
The origins of Vecna
To get closer to the epilogue it is important to fully understand the story by Henry Creel/Vecnaalso based on the latest revelations mentioned in the fifth season. In fact, we know that the very young Henry, in the 1950s, came across one in the Nevada desert briefcase stolen from an experiment conducted by Doctor Brenner in which they tried to reach Dimension Having moved with his family to Hawkins, he begins to torment and manipulate her until he killed his mother and sistercrimes of which the father is accused. Dr. Brenner takes Henry with him to Hawkins Labs, turning him into the Patient 1 and using his blood to genetically modify the other children born there, including Eleven. It will be the little girl, again manipulated by Henry, who removes the device that inhibited the young man’s psychic powers, who begins to massacre everyone present in the laboratory. However, Eleven manages to face him and send him into the Abyssa fall that will definitively transform him into the monstrous Vecna.
The final plan
Obviously in the finale of Stranger Things our heroes will try to implement one last, daring plan. After various hypotheses (including one involving a helicopter), the group of protagonists arrive at the project they call Operation Beanstalk (from the beanstalk of the famous fairy tale): since it is impossible to reach the Abyss due to its height, the intuition is to let Vecna bring that dimension closer to the real one as much as possible; at that point Eleven will enter Vecna’s mind to stop him and in the meantime, thanks to the short distance, the others will reach the Abyss to save Holly and the other kidnapped children. There is another variable, however, that represented by exotic matter: this is the energy source that prevented the Upside Down from collapsing, but which was “disturbed” by Nancy’s rifle shots. For now the collapse of the various dimensions has been avoided, but how much will this influence the good intentions of our heroes?
