The Stranger Things season 5 monsters: the whole bestiary of the last season

The season 5 monsters: what the last season lets loose on the town

In the fall of 1987, Hawkins lives under military quarantine. The population believes in a natural phenomenon, the army holds the barricades, and a small group goes down in secret into the Upside Down, sector by sector, to find the sorcerer missing since the rift of 1986. Those incursions have a name borrowed from the dungeons of the role-playing game, the crawls, and there were more than thirty of them without a single incident.

The first chapter breaks this routine in two places at once. A military convoy is attacked as it crosses a gate, and the soldiers are killed; a few hours later, a crack forms in the ceiling of Holly Wheeler's room, and something comes through it. The season therefore does not begin with a new creature, but with the return of a creature the audience has known since 1983.

That is the rule of the whole season. No new species is invented: the eight chapters replay the bestiary of the four previous seasons, gathered in the same place at the same time. What changes is not the shape of the beasts, it is their number, their use, and what you finally learn about what holds them.

From Holly's ceiling to the barn: the return of the Demogorgons

The Demogorgon is the workhorse of the season. Its silhouette has not changed since the first: a humanoid more than two meters tall, pale-skinned, whose head opens into five petals lined with teeth. It opens its own passages between the worlds, it is drawn by blood, and it carries its prey off rather than devouring them on the spot.

The prologue of the first chapter finally gives the show the scene it was missing. On November 12, 1983, the creature chases Will Byers in the Upside Down, catches him, and does not kill him: it carries him to the town library, where Henry Creel is waiting and infects him with a tentacle. Everything else in the season follows from that night.

Then the appearances come one after another. One creature attacks Hopper's convoy and wounds him. Another comes through Holly's ceiling, appears in front of Ted, who has come with his golf club, and throws him through a wall into Mike's closet, takes blows from a broken bottle wielded by Karen, then carries the child off behind the wall of the Upside Down. In the third chapter, a creature falls into the trap set at the Turnbows': Nancy hits it with a tracer dart before it slips away through a gate.

The fourth chapter turns it into a count. One creature is hit by Steve's car in front of the barn. Several go with Henry in the attack on the military base and massacre the guards. And three, sent at Mike, Lucas and Robin, are frozen in mid-flight and then killed by Will, by the force of his mind alone. In the next chapter, a Demogorgon corpse serves as a tool: the electricity of the radio tower revives it for a few moments, and Will uses it as a receiver.

The pack at the hospital

The demodog is the juvenile stage of the same species: a quadruped the size of a large dog, with the same petal head. The word is Dustin's, who had raised one at home in the fall of 1984 without knowing what he was feeding. The pack of that time hunted in tunnels and died at once on the day the gate closed.

In 1987, it comes back where no one expects it: in the Hawkins hospital, in the sixth chapter, while the army takes over the place. Robin, Vickie and Lucas end up cornered in the laundry room. Karen Wheeler is the one who saves them, by putting oxygen tanks in a dryer; the explosion takes the pack.

This return says something about the state of the world. In 1984, it took tunnels for the pack to move around; in 1987, it bursts into a service corridor because the rifts are everywhere. The creature has not evolved, the geography has given way.

The vines, the lair, and the melted walls of the lab

Not every threat of the season carries a species name. The Upside Down of 1987 has become organic, and it grabs without needing a maw. In the sixth chapter, Will wakes in the sorcerer's lair, bound by vines, and learns from his mouth that he had already served, without knowing it, to dig the tunnels under the town in 1984.

The Upside Down lab offers the most unpleasant image of the set. Nancy and Jonathan pass through rooms that melt into one another, with soldiers fused to the walls. These are not creatures; it is the same matter as the creatures, applied to human bodies, and the season does not linger on it, which makes the scene worse.

Above that building floats a sphere of exotic matter, and around the town rises an impassable wall that Brenner's notebooks describe as a containment field. Nancy fires on the sphere despite Dustin's warning, which comes too late: the shock wave cracks the wall, and whole stretches of the Upside Down are sucked into the void. Neither the sphere nor the wall is alive, but they belong to the same body as the rest.

The creature from the Abyss: the last, and the first

The only beast the show had never shown arrives in the last chapter. In the Abyss, the dimension beyond the Upside Down that some translations call the Abysses, the lair where Henry Creel holds the children turns out to be the very body of the entity he has carried since childhood: a colossal spider, which rises and attacks the group that arrived by the radio tower.

Its origin sits in a memory that Max and Holly had cracked open in the sixth chapter, and that the finale finishes. As a child, Henry meets a wounded man in a mine who is carrying a case. He kills him, he opens the case, and he finds in it a fragment of this entity. It is that fragment that corrupted him, long before the lab and long before the town.

Will begs him to destroy the fragment. Henry refuses, and claims that the entity and he can no longer be told apart. In other words, the creature of the last chapter is not a novelty: it is the oldest in the bestiary, the one whose shadow of 1984 and whose body of flesh of 1985 were only passing forms. The fight that follows is a group fight: Nancy draws it into position, fire and explosives weaken it, and Eleven goes inside the monster to face the man who inhabits it.

The hierarchy: who commands what

Three names circulate in the show, and they do not name the same thing. The Demogorgon is a predator; Vecna is not a Demogorgon, he is a man, Henry Creel, the lab's first numbered subject; and the Mind Flayer is neither one nor the other, it is the name the children had given, from their role-playing manual, to the entity that rules the other world.

The rule that ties them together has been in place since 1984: a single organism, a hive mind, creatures that work like limbs. Wounding the master weakens everything else, and cutting the link with the Upside Down kills at once whatever is on this side. The last season does not drop this operating manual, it applies it on a much larger scale.

It adds a new branch: a human who takes hold of the hive. According to the creators, Will has no powers of his own like Eleven; he draws on the hive because Henry is closer than ever, and he can manipulate everything that belongs to it, meaning the creatures, but he could not open a gate. That is the distinction that makes the barn scene possible without breaking the mythology.

As for the master, he no longer settles for sending beasts. He kidnaps eight children, whom he describes as perfect vessels he can reshape in his image, and he holds them in a space made of his own memories, which Holly names Camazotz. His final aim is not a hunt: it is the merging of the two worlds.

What changes compared with the four previous seasons

The first difference is a writing choice: no new species. The previous seasons each introduced their creature, and the pleasure was in understanding it. Here, everything is already known, and the story spends its time elsewhere, on the side of the kidnapped children and the mechanics of the worlds.

The second difference is what is done with the beasts. They drop a rung: they are no longer the mystery, they are the obstacle. They are fought with a shard of a wine bottle, a car, a dryer and a tracer dart. One of the most discussed scenes is not a revelation about the creature, it is a mother hitting it in her bathroom.

The third difference is the most important: for the first time, the hive works both ways. For four seasons, the link ran from the entity to Will, who saw and spoke for it. In 1987, Will uses it, freezes three creatures in mid-flight, then enters the master's mind. A creature's corpse even becomes a device, wired to a radio tower.

One last distinction, for readers looking for the 1986 swarm: the demobats remain the creature of a single season: none of the eight chapters names them. The real novelty of the season is not a beast, for that matter, it is a place: the Abyss, and what is found there.

The fate of the bestiary, at the end

The master dies in three beats, and by three hands. Will tears off his arm, Eleven impales him, and Joyce cuts off his head with the axe. This split is deliberate: it is the mother who was looking for her son in 1983 who brings down the one who had taken him.

The entity, risen as a colossal spider even before Henry falls, is brought down with fire and explosives. Then Hopper and Murray blow a bomb set on the exotic matter that held the dimension. The Upside Down collapses, the rifts close under Hawkins, and everything that depended on it falls with it. The rule of the previous seasons holds through the last shot: it is what had killed the pack in 1984 and the body of flesh in 1985.

The price is not zero. Kali, Eleven's lab sister, dies from a stray bullet during the assault on the lab, and Eleven stays willingly on the other side at the moment of the explosion; the show shows neither her death nor her way out, and lets each person decide. The kidnapped children, Holly included, are freed.

In the epilogue, the town rebuilds and the army has pulled out. Nothing comes out of the walls anymore, nothing digs under the streets. The last image of the show is a door Mike closes on a new game of Dungeons & Dragons, and it is the only creature left: the one on a game board.

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