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Happy Stranger Things Day!
Fans of the Netflix series have turned November 6 into an annual global holiday, as this is the date Will Byers went missing from his home in Hawkins, Indiana in 1983 — and kickstarted an otherworldly adventure beyond belief. As the show heads into its final season fans are eager to know what the fifth chapter will hold, and now we have some long-awaited confirmed details about Stranger Things 5.
In celebration of Stranger Things Day and Stranger Things Season, Netflix confirmed that Stranger Things season 5 will officially premiere in 2025 and also revealed all 8 episode titles from the fifth and final season of the show on Wednesday morning in a teaser video.
The season will begin with the “The Crawl,” a title that was previously revealed on Stranger Things Day 2022. Episode 2 is titled “The Vanishing Of _____," which is a direct callback to the very first episode of the series, “The Vanishing of Will Byers.” Exactly who has vanished is blurred out in the clip, teasing another character's netherworldly disappearance.
Episode 3 is titled “The Turnbow Trap,” which some fans believe references a company previously advertised in a billboard seen in the Upside Down. Episodes 4 and 5 are titled “Sorcerer" and “Shock Jock," respectively. While sorcerer fits neatly into the Stranger Things lexicon, as it is a playable character class in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, a shock jock was a popular '80s term for a provocative radio broadcaster or DJ, like the infamous Howard Stern. (The cast was spotted filming at an abandoned radio station in January of this year.)
Episode 6 is titled “Escape from Camazotz.” If you're wondering, a quick Google search reveals that Camazotz is a feared figure in ancient Mayan religion and mythology and is a giant bat-like god of night and sacrifice, whose name in the Ki'che' language literally translates to “death bat." Camazotz is also the name of the dark planet in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which is ruled by the mind-controlling evil entity IT. Sound familiar? (And do you remember what killed Eddie Munson? Demobats. Hm.)
The penultimate episode is titled “The Bridge" — which could tease a more open path between the real world and the worlds Vecna and the monsters inhabit — and the series finale is aptly titled “The Rightside Up,” a clear homage to The Upside Down and a full-circle moment for the series. (The season 1 finale was also titled “The Upside Down.”)
According to the teaser, the fifth season will be set in November 1987, so there's a bit of a time jump from the events of season four, which was set in March 1986. Production on the fifth season of Stranger Things was delayed due to the Hollywood strikes, which led fans to wonder how the show planned to de-age the main characters who started the show in 2016 as kids but are now well into their twenties.
“We've already watched the cast of our show grow up in the public eye, and between 12 and 22, every human being changes profoundly,” producer Shawn Levy told Variety last year, saying the crew planned to use the magic of traditional hair and makeup versus CGI. “The ’80s are also our friends in returning these young adult actors to their iconic Hawkins characters.”
We know that the final episode “The Rightside Up” will be a powerful one, as star David Harbour teased that it is “the best episode they've ever done” and that the cast couldn't handle their emotions during the read-through. (Get your tissues ready.)
“The end of this episode when we were reading it — just us reading it — about halfway through, people started crying,” he explained. “Then about the last 20 minutes, it was just uncontrollably crying, waves of different people.” Harbour also shared that the last chapter of the Stranger Things story will feature the largest time jump yet. “It's 10 years later, and we examine that idea, and it's so well done and so beautiful,” he shared. “It's such a great episode, and it's such a great season. You guys will love it."
