In the Stranger Things finale, everyone assembles for the largest and most complex battle sequence of the entire series.

At the start of Episode 8, titled “The Rightside Up,” the crew wastes no time launching its final stand against Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) and the Mind Flayer to save the world. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), and Max (Sadie Sink) team up to attack Henry (aka Vecna) in his mind, while Hopper (David Harbour) and Murray (Brett Gelman) prepare the trigger for the bomb that will destroy the Upside Down. The rest of the party braces to enter the Abyss to rescue the kidnapped kids.

“By the time we get to Episode 8, we don’t have to spend any time talking,” series co-creator Matt Duffer tells Netflix. “We’re able to jump right into it, and everybody was able to play their part in it.”

The only way to defeat Vecna and the Mind Flayer, Duffer notes, is if “everyone contributes in some meaningful way … In that sense, it also feels very much like the climax of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, where every character has a special skill, and they’re able to bring it to this final fight.”

With both monsters slain, the Stranger Things crew can move forward with their lives without worrying about interdimensional creatures wreaking havoc on their small Indiana town. So where do they go from there? Keep reading for a deep dive into the series’ final episode, including where your favorite nerds end up, those jaw-dropping reveals about Vecna and the Mind Flayer, and more.

How does Stranger Things end?

The series ends exactly how it began — with a Dungeons & Dragons game. Returning to the Wheelers’ basement for one more role-playing adventure, Will (Noah Schnapp), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Max, and Mike (Finn Wolfhard) finish their final campaign together before shelving their D&D books and leaving the basement one by one.

As the party walks up the basement steps, Mike’s younger sister, Holly (Nell Fisher), and her friends rush down to begin their own D&D campaign. That moment signals Mike and his friends “leaving their childhood behind,” Matt Duffer tells Tudum. “It’s their time to leave it behind and pass the torch to the next group of kids.”

“That was the first thing we ever shot, and it felt appropriate that this would be the last thing we ever shot,” co-creator Ross Duffer says, adding that he and his brother “even tried to mimic with the camera what we had done back in Season 1 all those years ago.” (Read our full series finale interview with the Duffer Brothers here.)

Who dies in the Stranger Things series finale?

Not everyone survives the final Stranger Things episode. Hopper kills several members of the military’s Wolf Pack unit while attempting to rescue Kali from an ambush at Hawkins Lab in the Upside Down.

Lieutenant Akers (Alex Breaux) then seemingly murders Kali when Hopper refuses to give up Eleven’s location. Distraught over her sister’s apparent death, Eleven uses her powers to take out the remaining Wolf Pack soldiers before forcing Akers to turn the gun on himself.

Does Vecna merge the two worlds?

Before their showdown with the Wolf Pack soldiers, Eleven and Kali stage an attack on their brother Henry in Camazotz, which stops him from merging the Abyss with Earth. That also gives the rest of the crew time to climb the Squawk radio tower, aka the beanstalk, and slip into the Abyss, where they plan to rescue the kidnapped children from the Pain Tree.

What happens in the Abyss with the Pain Tree and the Mind Flayer?

In the Abyss, the Hawkins crew — which includes Joyce (Winona Ryder), Will, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Steve (Joe Keery), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), Robin (Maya Hawke), and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) — find the entrance to the Pain Tree. But then the branches curve into spider-like legs, revealing that the Pain Tree is the Mind Flayer. While Eleven fights Henry inside the Mind Flayer’s body, the rest of the gang works together to defeat the enormous monster on the ground.

Acting as the bait, Nancy fires at the Mind Flayer and lures it toward a canyon, where Jonathan and Robin attack from above with a flamethrower and rocks. Elsewhere, Lucas launches several balloon accelerants with his wrist rocket and Mike sets the liquid ablaze with the flare gun Nancy gave him. At ground level, Dustin and Steve attack the Mind Flayer from underneath, stabbing its egg sacks with their spears.

According to Ross Duffer, the elaborate battle sequence, which ends with the crew slaying the Mind Flayer, presented “a lot of logistical challenges” because it was filmed on the heels of the MAC-Z battle in Episode 4.

“I do think once that was done, it was almost like an adrenaline rush and no one was really thinking about this being the end,” he explains. It wasn’t until they began filming the post-battle scenes that the cast and crew started to “actually mourn the show because things slowed down, and we’d focus on the characters in their final moments together.”

What’s inside the scientist’s briefcase? And why is Henry so afraid to enter the cave?

Bower tells Tudum, “There is a reason why Henry is so deathly afraid of that particular memory” near the cave in Camazotz. The cave contains a traumatic memory that he doesn’t want to confront because of what happened to him as a boy in the Nevada desert.

Episode 8 reveals that after young Henry bludgeons the unnamed scientist, he opens the man’s briefcase and finds a rock containing Mind Flayer particles, which then possess him. “Come find me,” the Mind Flayer beckons. And the dying scientist warns, “It will consume you.”

Bower points out that the mysterious rock is “the reason he lost his youth, his childhood, his love, his heart.”

Who ultimately kills Vecna?

The Mind Flayer is dead, and Eleven is close to killing her brother, Henry, which would end the Vecna nightmare for everyone. Just when it looks like Henry gains the upper hand, Will overpowers him. This distracts the monster long enough for Eleven to drive his body through a spire.

But Joyce is the person who actually kills Vecna, beheading him with her axe. The Duffer Brothers had deep discussions about who among the ensemble should deliver the death blow to Vecna before landing on the Byers family matriarch.

“At the end of the day, it felt like it had to be Joyce because Joyce was the first one [in Season 1] to really take action, to believe that something strange was going on,” Ross Duffer explains.

Joyce executes her deadly strike with these final words for the impaled villain: “You fucked with the wrong family.” Although it’s not the first f-bomb in the series — Billy (Dacre Montgomery) uses the expletive in the Season 4 episode “The Sauna Test” — this was the first time the Duffer Brothers intentionally included the word in the show’s dialogue.

“We were looking for a real moment that would deserve stronger language, and we’ve been saving [it],” Matt Duffer notes. “We felt if we were going to go there, this was the moment for it. Let’s give it to Winona.”

Was Vecna controlling the Mind Flayer, or was the Mind Flayer controlling Vecna?

Before Henry dies, Will tries to convince him that the Mind Flayer is merely using him. “Will realizes he was led down the same path as young Vecna, but the only difference was that Will fought it and Vecna gave into that evil,” Schnapp explains. “He’s telling him, ‘Fight it. Help us fight it.’ ”

But Henry insists that it was his choice to become one with the Mind Flayer. “Henry says, ‘No, it showed me that this world is broken, that man is broken,’ ” Bower explains. “It was the first moment in Season 5 [where] I truly felt human again and understood him. I felt like I’ve been wanting to protect him all this time, because I felt like all the people just hate him. And it was at that moment that I was like, ‘Now you see why I am [the way I am].’ ”

The Duffer Brothers discussed in the writers room whether Henry was capable of a redemptive moment, like Billy had in Season 3, before deciding that he would remain loyal to the Mind Flayer. “Even though he is shaken by seeing this memory, he’s too far gone at this point to turn against the Mind Flayer,” Ross Duffer says.

“We wanted to leave it up to the audience in terms of whether young Henry did choose this or whether it was simply the Mind Flayer controlling him from beginning to end,” he adds. “But ultimately, in terms of where Henry goes, it doesn’t matter because he chooses the side of the Mind Flayer at the end of the day.”

What happens to the Upside Down?

Once Vecna and the Mind Flayer are defeated, and the children are rescued from the Pain Tree, the whole party make their way back to Hawkins. In the Upside Down, Hopper and Murray set the timer on the bomb — using Prince’s 1984 album, Purple Rain, as the trigger — before they leave. “Purple Rain,” the last song on the record, plays as the wormhole collapses.

The idea of exploding the interdimensional bridge stems from the Duffer Brothers’ love of David Lean’s 1957 war film, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

“The idea in that film is they need to blow up this bridge. It’s a major military goal,” Matt Duffer says. “We thought the idea of a supernatural version of that where our characters ultimately need to blow up this bridge, which connects Hawkins to an evil dimension … was something we’d been working toward for a couple of years.”

What happens to Eleven?

In Episode 7, Eleven’s sister, Kali, proposes the idea that they remain in the Upside Down when it collapses. She explains that it’s the only way to ensure that Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) or any military scientist who replaces her cannot use their blood to create more supernatural children and open more gates to other worlds.

In Episode 8, when the gang triggers the bomb that will destroy the Upside Down, returning to MAC-Z before it collapses, they notice that Eleven is missing. She then appears at the gate, still in the Upside Down, waiting to be wiped from existence along with the wormhole. Eleven pulls Mike into the void to say goodbye, and he can only watch as she disappears along with the Upside Down.

McLaughlin lauds Wolfhard’s performance in that scene, noting that his co-star takes it “to another level” while yelling for Eleven. “Hearing his scream, it was very piercing, and I was really proud of him,” McLaughlin says.

During that last D&D game with friends, Mike spins a hopeful tale of Kali casting one last illusion so that Eleven can escape the Upside Down undetected. He and the rest of the party choose to believe that she survives and moves far away to a small village where no one can know she’s alive.

The Duffer Brothers have left it up to viewers to decide what they think happens to Eleven. But for the Hawkins crew, “she lives on in their hearts, whether that’s real or not,” Ross Duffer says.

Where do Will, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Max end up?

Mike, in his last D&D game with friends, also shares the story of where the nerds wind up at the series’ end.

Max and Lucas have their long-awaited movie date and eventually settle down together. Meanwhile, Dustin continues his studies at a university but still finds time for adventures with his best bud, Steve. Will, who’s seen chatting with a guy at a bar, finds acceptance in a bigger city. And Mike follows his passion for storytelling by becoming a writer.

“We wanted each of the characters to find happiness but in their own specific ways,” Matt Duffer says.

What about Nancy, Jonathan, Steve, and Robin?

After defeating Vecna, the teens have gone their separate ways but remain bonded as friends.

Steve stays in Hawkins, where he coaches little-league baseball — with Derek (Jake Connelly) as his catcher — and teaches the next generation. Working with kids is “something we’ve discovered he’s very good at,” Matt Duffer notes.

Robin attends Smith College in Massachusetts, Nancy drops out of Emerson College to take a job at the Boston Herald, and Jonathan is a filmmaker at New York University working on an anti-capitalist cannibal movie.

They all vow to meet once a month at Robin’s “weird” uncle’s house in Philadelphia.

Do Hopper and Joyce stay together?

They sure do! The pair finally have their date at Enzo’s, and Hopper caps their romantic evening on a special note by proposing to Joyce. We end with the happy couple planning a move to Montauk, New York (a nod to where Stranger Things was originally going to be set), where Hopper has a job waiting for him as chief of police.

Is Ted Wheeler still alive?

Yep! Papa Wheeler (Joe Chrest) lives to relax in his trusted La-Z-Boy recliner for another day. Along with his wife, Karen (Cara Buono), Ted was severely injured during the Demogorgon attack in Episode 2. He reappears in Episode 8 attending his son Mike’s graduation from Hawkins High School.

Why did the Duffer Brothers use David Bowie’s “Heroes” for the finale credits?

Peter Gabriel’s cover of the song was featured at the end of Episode 3 in Season 1, when police pull what everyone believes is Will’s body from the water.

That song is brought back for the finale credits, and Keery suggested they use David Bowie’s original version (the title track from his 1977 album). “Once Joe said that, we immediately knew that was the right song to end the show on because it is, in some ways, an anthem for Stranger Things,” Ross Duffer says. “To use the original Bowie version just felt right and fitting for the conclusion.”

Stream all five seasons of Stranger Things now, only on Netflix.