Stranger Things Season 5 brought the Duffer Brothers’ generational sci-fi/horror saga to a close as 2026 began, and fans are still sifting through their feelings about it all. Since New Year’s Day, the interwebs have been steadily flooding with more and more reactions from fans who are either sitting down to view the last episode or catching up with the entire series to be part of the larger conversation about it all.
But along with feelings about how Stranger Things ended, savvy fans and industry analysts are beginning to compile the errors, plot holes, and major retcons that all snuck into the final season. Today, we’re talking about the latter: retcons that were made to Stranger Things‘ lore, just in time to jibe with the final season’s storyline.
To be clear: a “retcon” is defined as a piece of established series lore that revised or changed in some way, later on in the storyline. The term springs from the comic book world, where changes and revisions to superhero lore and backstories, and crossover connections are commonplace. As franchise universe IPs have taken over entertainment, new and bigger demographics of fans have adopted the term.
With that understanding, here are the biggest retcons that happened in Stranger Things 5.
Water In Hell
Netflix
This may teeter the line between retcon and outright plothole, but hey, people are talking about it: When did the Upside Down get water?
The entire ticking clock hanging over Stranger Things Season 1 was finding Will Byers and rescuing him from the Upside Down before he was mauled by Demogorgons or ran out of food and water. The terrain stayed barren throughout the following seasons – and yet, the final battle against Vecna sees Eleven jumps into a sensory deprivation tank to battle Henry Creel on the psychic plane. That tank is located in the Upside Down version of Hawkins Lab, so the fact that there is still water inside it is a changing of the rules, at best, and a logistical error, at worst.
Will Met Vecna (& Got Superpowers)
netflix
The opening of Stranger Things Season 5 revealed a major retcon, right off the bat: Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) met Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) during his time being stranded in the Upside Down (Season 1).
This marked a significant shift in the first three seasons of Stranger Things, with its thematic core centered on Will and his friends (and others) overcoming the dark influence of the Mind Flayer. That Lovecraftian villain served as a powerful metaphor for kids growing up and having to face the increasing darkness of an adult world and adult obligations – and Will was the one who had to fight those demons, literally and figuratively. A lot of fans felt like this retcon reduced Will’s storyline to a basic plot point rather than a deep subtextual metaphor. But there’s no debating that watching young Will inhale all that black smoke from the Mind Flayer was way freakier than listening to Vecna monologue.
There’s a second retcon connected to this one: Will having the ability to Uno-reverse Vecna this entire time, through their psychic link. Fans thought this retcon was revealed for a much bigger purpose – at least bigger than the one heroic moment Will “The Sorcerer” got at the end of Season 5 Volume 1.
That’s Holly?
Netflix
One of the biggest “retcons” to Stranger Things 5 was infusing Holly Wheeler with all that main character energy! Holly went from being a bit character from the Wheeler household that we barely remembered to being the keystone in Vecna’s master plan. Sure. It got even wilder when the twin actresses who played Holly in seasons 1 – 4 (Anniston and Tinsley Price) were replaced by a new actress (Nell Fisher) in Season 5, who was clearly much older. To say that the changes to Holly’s age and importance in the story were jarring would be an understatement.
The Upside Down (Wormhole)
From Season 1, Stranger Things defined its nightmare parallel dimension in Dungeons and Dragons terms: The Upside Down. The show became a worldwide hit in large part because of how it used the dark world as a horror element. It was a blessedly simple counterpoint to the sci-fi elements like Eleven’s psychic powers and the interdimensional experiments at Hawkins Lab.
Stranger Things Season 5 tilted the balance away from horror into full-on sci-fi by revealing the “wall” between the Upside Down and the true dark realm beyond it, the Abyss. The entire realm of the Upside Down was explained as being a wormhole bridge between the Abyss and Earth, preventing the former from completely consuming the latter. It was a cool twist to explain Vecna having a secret (movie-sized) lair; however, it was also a clear retcon that didn’t jibe at all with everything Stranger Things had established. The whole show (and especially the Season 4 finale) was all about preventing Hell from overtaking the Earth. With this retcon, it’s hard to reconcile everything we saw in the previous 4 seasons with the “plan” Vecna tried to execute in Season 5.
Symbiotic Evil (Vecna & The Mind Flayer)
Netflix
Here’s the one that seems to be getting the most traction and causing the most aggravation – and rightfully so. For anyone unaware (and many viewers were), a Stranger Things Broadway stage show called The First Shadow is currently in production. That show (which is part of the official franchise canon) tells the backstory of how Henry Creel first discovered his psychic powers in a horrific boyhood moment (seen in Season 5). It also details how Henry actually broke through to the Upside Down decades before his battle with Eleven; he was corrupted by the Mind Flayer (or “shadow entity” to Henry), which coerced him into slaughtering family, friends, and even pets. The vastly smaller group of fans who watched (or read about) the events of The First Shadow had some big questions about what we saw in Stranger Things 4, not to mention what obligations Stranger Things 5 had to address those questions.
The Duffer Brothers tried to walk a fine line between honoring the mass viewership of the TV series and treating the lore of the show and the play as one canon. And they didn’t quite land the plane without some damage to it. To be clear: the retcon here isn’t Stranger Things 5 showing scenes of young Henry’s first visit ot the Upside Down (that was already established by the stage play: the retcon is the monologue Vecna gives about how he and the Mind Flayer joined together precisely because they are “symbiotic.” That wasn’t some big twist reveal of lore: it was a character mouthing back the words the showrunners really wanted to reply with on the chat threads and reddits. In the end, Stranger Things went from having some of the best villain lore in modern TV to having some of the most convoluted.
Who Knew Henry?
Stranger Things: The First Shadow not only revealed Henry Creel’s backstory, it also revealed that the troubled young boy grew up in Hawkins alongside none other than Joyce Byers (or “Joyce Maldonado” back then) and James Hopper Jr. Joyce, Hop, and their crew of other local students (like Lonnie Byers and Ted Wheeler) all crossed paths with Henry Creel during his downard spiral, and it was actually Joyce and Hopper’s investigations into Creel’s first kills that ultimately got him sent to Hawkins Lab as Dr. Brenner’s test subject.
With that retconned story now established, Stranger Things 5 looked pretty crazy for not ever having Joyce or Hopper acknowledge the full-circle nature of events. According to the Duffer Brothers, “We had a walk a fine line with the play — we don’t want to frustrate, because so much of our audience is unable to see it. To have them start talking about it would have been confusing in the context of someone who hasn’t seen the play. But I’m sure they did have that conversation [offscreen].”
Fine explanation, but doesn’t fix how weird this all looks now.
Stranger Things is streaming on Netflix. Talk about the finale with us on the ComicBook Forum!