Escape From Camazotz
Season 5
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
While Dustin’s discovery about the Upside Down has existential implications for Hawkins (and the world), the team has more pressing matters at hand.
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix © 2025
When “Escape From Camazotz” kicks off, we see the aftermath of Nancy firing that bullet into the big energy ball in the sky. It is, uh, not great. It turns into a swirling, fiery mess of matter that restarts all the building melting going on and, even worse, sends out a giant energy wave across the Upside Down. The wave eventually slams into the flesh wall as Hopper, El, and Kali watch in confusion. That blast loosens up the wall, and suddenly Steve’s stuck Beemer is sucked through to the other side. The hole creates a vacuum that sucks everything nearby through the wall, and “everything” almost includes Hop, El, and Kali until they see a gate ripped open and make a run for it into Real Hawkins. Back at the now-melting lab, Dustin is still trying and failing to reach Nancy and Jonathan, and when Steve catches up with him, he fills the rest of us in on what shook him to his core in Brenner’s journals: Everything we thought we knew about the Upside Down is wrong.
According to the journals, that swirling mess is exotic matter, and it’s a single source of energy holding the wall together. Steve asks the right question: Don’t they want the wall destroyed so they can reach Vecna and Holly? Nope. Wrong again. Vecna didn’t make the wall, so neither he nor Holly is behind it waiting to be found. The wall is the edge of the wormhole that the Upside Down is sitting in. Or, perhaps more accurately, the Upside Down is a wormhole. A wormhole is like a tunnel (hence the wall surrounding it) that connects two points in space and time or like a bridge — a bridge between the Real Hawkins and some other world. When the bridge collapses, those two worlds will collapse on each other. When the bridge collapses, which it’s now starting to, thanks to that bullet, it will take everything and everyone with it. What’s on the other side of that wall? Steve asks. “Death,” Dustin says with his signature flair for the dramatic. You following, class? Perhaps the biggest reveal this season has to offer is that it turns out you need to be a theoretical physicist to understand what the hell is happening on Stranger Things.
Okay, so Dustin’s discovery is both kind of confusing and quite alarming, but the rest of the episode mostly focuses on less heady developments and more emotional ones. Thank Einstein and Rosen that wormholes take at least a few hours to collapse on themselves, am I right?
Back at Hawkins Lab (Wormhole’s Version), the walls are melting. The stairs, too. As we’ve established, I’m no theoretical scientist, but wouldn’t, like, people be melting too? Just all matter in this exotic matter’s path? I know Stranger Things already did melting people back in season three, but still! Anyway, the situation is dire and only makes Steve want to track down Nancy and Jonathan more, even as their path upstairs gets more dangerous (and liquidy) by the second. At one point, Steve sets a ladder over a hole in the stairs, even though it’s sure to fall through and into the bowels of the melty lab, but Dustin rips him away before he can do it. He is beside himself, begging Steve not to try. “You can’t die, please,” Dustin cries out. And between Dustin’s sobs of “Not you” and “I can’t deal with it again,” Steve can finally shake off the tension between them. He sees how deeply Eddie’s death has scarred Dustin and just how much Dustin loves Steve. Steve backs away from the ladder (a good thing, because it instantly falls through the stairs) and holds his friend tight. My sweet boys have healed themselves!
While this development is sweet and much needed, it does little to help Jonathan and Nancy, who are in an even worse situation than melted stairs. Since they’re closer to the exotic matter, everything around them is melting quickly. They find that they’ve fallen from the roof into a room below that is quickly filling up with building goo. If they don’t get out soon, they’ll be swallowed up. It doesn’t take long for them to realize there’s no way out. If they cut through the door, more of the liquid walls start gushing in, the ceiling is collapsing, and with it, you guessed it, more goo. They sit on the one remaining table, waiting to die by goo. There’s nothing like realizing you’re about to die to get you to finally be honest. And so, Nancy and Jonathan have the big breakup we’ve been waiting for.
Their conversation is honest and full of love, and maybe just a little too long given all the very urgent end-of-the-world stuff we should be dealing with at the moment. But they come clean about a lot of things, but most important, that the whole staying together because of their trauma bond probably isn’t a great idea. It’s made them both feel safe, yes, but also suffocated. It’s time to let go. It’s a pretty mature and well-earned ending to this couple’s arc. But don’t worry, they aren’t dying today. After Jonathan presents the engagement ring and gives Nancy an “un-proposal,” they tell each other how much they love one another — they’ll always love one another — and Nancy tosses that ring goo-side. And wouldn’t you know it? The ring lands with a clatter. The goo has solidified. The building has stopped melting. Why? We don’t know, but a win is a win, and everyone is getting out of that lab alive today.
Over in the Real Hawkins, we get some other major happenings. No, Will is still unconscious, and Joyce is really kicking herself for pushing her son to link up with the Hive Mind, but Robin finally realizes that Will, Max, and Holly must all be trapped in Vecna’s mind and if what Will said about Max is true, Max and Holly are attempting an escape — once they’re free, they’ll have intel on Vecna. To facilitate that mind jailbreak, Robin and Lucas head to the hospital to blast some more Kate Bush into Max’s head.
Mike stays with Joyce and Will and is soon joined by Hopper, Eleven, and Kali, who have made it through the gate. El immediately wants to jump into the Void to try and find Will. The group eventually makes its way to the cabin so El can use the tank there — and it works. She finds Will strung up in the library, where Vecna held him when he originally took him back in 1983. When El frees him, Will has bad news. Vecna used him one last time as his spy. He entered his mind and got Will to show him exactly where Max’s body is. If Vecna can kill her, he can stop her from getting Holly back to her body. Remember, he needs 12 vessels for his plan. They need to get to the hospital fast — Vecna’s already sent his demodogs.
Hey, good thing we already have some of the gang at the hospital! Lucas heads straight to Max’s room and cues up Kate Bush, but Robin gets stopped by Vickie, who is livid. Apparently, they’ve figured out that Robin stole those benzos and now the military police are trying to track her down. Vickie thinks Robin must be a drug addict. And when Robin finally comes clean about the Upside Down of it all, she really thinks her girlfriend is a drug addict. But as the military officers start to escort Robin out of the building, the demodogs arrive. They suck face with the officers, Vickie realizes Robin was telling the truth, and she helps her hop on the intercom to warn Lucas that they’re coming for Max. It gives him enough time to grab Max and the boom box and make his way to the elevator to meet Robin and Vickie in the basement.
Unfortunately, once they make it to the basement, they’re trapped. There’s nowhere for them to go except to hide in the laundry room. Jurassic Park won’t be released for several more years, but this whole scene is very velociraptors in the kitchen; if you know you know. (And Robin and Lucas will know in 1993!) It looks like it’s the end of the line for Robin, Lucas, Vickie, and a still-unconscious Max.
Those four should be thankful that the demodogs seem to be moving awfully slow today and that Karen mother-fucking Wheeler heard Robin’s message over the intercom and sprang — well, “sprang” as much as a woman who just had her throat ripped open by a demogorgon can spring — into action. Just as the demodogs are about to reach our foursome, a dryer kicks on and there’s a whole lot of clanking around going on. The demodogs move over to the noise, and we see a highly flammable can of oxygen shoved into that dryer. The whole thing explodes, killing all the demos. The foursome watches as Karen steps out of the smoke. Ted Wheeler deserves none of this woman!
So is all the running around with unconscious Max worth it? Or is she still as trapped in Vecna’s mind as she’s ever been? It seems very much worth it. After the run-in with Vecna in Holly’s memory, Max and Holly make it back to the caves. Henry tries to tell Holly that if she doesn’t come out, he’ll kill Max (since he now has Will as a spy, he doesn’t need to go into the caves). Neither of them buys his threats, but realizes they need to get out of this mind prison. Well, Max is feeling defeated and thinks they should wait for El, who she assumes is the one who possessed Vecna to issue that warning (wait till she finds out it was Will!), but Holly can’t sit and do nothing.
Since Max has a theory that these caves must be some traumatic memory that Henry refuses to revisit, Holly wonders if, like their traumatic memories, there is an exit out of Vecna’s mind here, too. Sure, Max and Holly’s memories with exit doors are the ones in which Vecna finally took them, but it’s worth a shot to see if this memory works the same way.
It does! Holly realizes the strange cut out on the cap for the spyglass she took from Henry’s Boy Scout uniform is in the same shape as the opening to the cave they’ve been hiding in. It must be a map. And lo and behold, when she matches the shape on the cap to the caves, they stumble upon (and almost into) a mine shaft that contains another memory. It’s a weird one! There’s an injured man in a lab coat, clutching a briefcase, at the end of one corridor. He is terrified. And when a young Henry Creel approaches, seemingly to help this man, the guy in the lab coat shoots Henry’s hand. Henry tussles with the guy to get rid of the gun and ends up bashing the guy’s head in with a rock. “Is this what made Henry bad?” Holly asks Max. He goes to open the briefcase, but we never see what’s in it because Max has found the exit.
Once in the red, unformed section of Vecna’s mind, Max sees Lucas holding her in the distance, but she also realizes Holly can’t come with her. Holly needs to find her own connection to the real world so that she can find her body. The whole back-and-forth about not needing a Kate Bush to get out of here is wild. But the pep talk Max gives Holly about Holly the Heroic is nice and also effective. As Max reminds Holly how brave she’s been, she sees herself in the real world, too. Unfortunately for Holly, her body is hooked up to the vines, so it’s not as comforting as waking up in your boyfriend’s arms, but it’s still progress. Max tells Holly that once she wakes up to find her house in the Upside Down and hide. They’ll come and get her as soon as they can. With a hug, the two friends part and make their way — kind of slowly for how urgent this is, if I’m being honest — to their respective connections out of this mind prison. We don’t yet know whether either of them will finally be free of Camazotz.
• Hopper and Kali really do not like each other! Hopper heard everything she told El and isn’t exactly enthused about her implication that this doesn’t end with just killing Henry. When Mike hears about this, he asks El for clarification. She tells him about the pregnant women and how the program can always be restarted as long as her blood is available. Mike isn’t super into where this line of thinking leads, either.
• Mike is still holding on to hope for a happy ending. He is adamant that he, El, Lucas, Will, and Dustin get to write the end of this story because it’s always been theirs, and I am crossing all my fingers that this means the original kids will have at least one big moment together by the end of this. I will be weeping.
• Is finding out that Will was actually building the tunnels from season two in his mind that big of a deal? What important or useful information does this give us?
• Lucas refusing to turn off “Running Up That Hill” even though it will attract the demodogs is both so dumb and so romantic.
• During their big breakup, Nancy assures Jonathan that this was never about Steve. Steve is a good guy and her friend, but they are very different people. She isn’t choosing him over Jonathan; she is choosing to figure out who she is and what she wants. I cannot wait for a few years when Nancy is watching Kelly Taylor on Beverly Hills 90210 choose herself and be like “girl, I get it.”
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