The opening minutes of the newly released fifth season of Stranger Things transport viewers back to the very beginning of the Netflix smash series. A young, terrified Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) is hiding out in his makeshift fort in the Upside Down, having been kidnapped by evil forces. It’s been almost a decade since we’ve seen Will at this age with that signature bowl cut, but his bulging eyes instantly take us back to the terror he felt during his Season 1 abduction. (The sequence was filmed using a body double, with a digital version of Schnapp’s face superimposed via visual effects.) As he is forced to flee a Demogorgon, he runs through a dark forest, climbing a tree as red lightning flashes around him. Then, when he must leap to a different tree as the monster continues its chase, he crashes to the ground and is knocked unconscious before being dragged away.
It’s a fitting start to what will be the final chapter of the show. (The second batch of Season 5 episodes will be released on Christmas, and the series finale on New Year’s Eve.) Will is the “heart and soul” of this final season, according to creators Matt and Ross Duffer, also known as the Duffer Brothers, and most of the four episodes released so far (and indeed, much of the entire series) has been about Will trying to outrun demons that he can’t really escape from. Some are literal, to be sure, but others are more nebulous things within him that he has tried to bury. Stranger Things has always been a gripping horror sci-fi series about otherworldly creatures, but as it inches toward its conclusion, it has also become something I didn’t quite expect: a surprisingly tender show about adolescence, queerness, and the long journey to self-acceptance—things that can often feel just as scary or alien as monsters, but in their own unique ways. In a season of the 1980s period drama that has so far drawn mixed reactions, this element feels timeless.
Across its entire run, Stranger Things has made it clear that Will is not like the other boys. In the first season, he’s the one quite literally set apart from his friends when he’s kidnapped into the Upside Down. But after he’s rescued, his differences become manifest. He’s been infected by the poison from this other dimension, and it’s left a darkness within him that separates him from the others. In Season 2, he’s even bullied for what happened to him and comes to see himself as a freak. By the third season, as his friends start to show more interest in girls than in playing Dungeons & Dragons, Will feels left behind. “It’s not my fault you don’t like girls,” Mike (Finn Wolfhard) spits at him during one argument. In that moment, Will looks stung, but both kids seem to be grappling with the ramifications of what Mike’s words might ultimately mean.
By 2022’s Season 4, though, Will’s queerness was becoming much more overt. For a school project, he chooses to study gay mathematician Alan Turing, and he’s even shown recoiling when a female classmate tries to flirt with him. He complains to Mike that he feels like a third wheel during their time with Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), and hints that he’s worried about being honest with his friends about what he’s feeling inside. “What if they don’t like the truth?” he says. When he and Mike eventually share a tender moment during a car ride, Will’s words about Mike making Eleven feel cherished also transparently apply to himself. “When you’re different, sometimes you feel like a mistake, but you make her feel like she’s not a mistake at all, like she’s better for being different,” Will says, before sobbing quietly.
Watching Will’s journey throughout these seasons, I can vividly recall my own feelings as a budding gay kid. I too resented when friends began having adult conversations about girls, wondering why we couldn’t just be kids a while longer. I remember feeling left behind before coming to understand I was on a different track entirely. But this wasn’t an overnight realization. Before you can be closeted, you have to first realize there’s something different about you to begin with, and, as Will has learned, this can be a messy, confusing, and frightening process. It’s for this reason that I have a lot of grace for the slow pace at which Stranger Things has built out Will’s sexuality. In addition to being realistic, it has also allowed the denouement of his character in the fifth season to feel much more impactful.
When Will spies on Robin (Maya Hawke) kissing her girlfriend Vickie (Amybeth McNulty) in the fifth season’s first episode, he’s shocked not at their queerness, but at their happiness. There’s a longing on his face as he sees the tenderness with which they embrace. That comfort isn’t something he was even aware he might one day be able to have. It’s important, then, that Robin acts as a mentor to him as the episodes progress. She’s only out to Steve (Joe Keery), but she can sense a kindred spirit in Will—someone else who doesn’t quite fit in. “I’m not like your other friends,” she told Steve back in Season 3.
When she and Will eventually discuss her kiss in the third episode of Season 5, there’s an instant affinity between the pair because of this shared language they both speak. He wants to know what signs Robin saw that Vickie wanted to be more than just friends. “There were signals,” she tells him. “A brush of the knee, a bump of the elbow, a shared look. It all just kind of accrued, like a snowball rolling down a hill, until it was obvious.” It’s only when she sees him playfully pushing Mike in the next episode that Robin realizes who Will is looking for those signs from.
In the fourth episode, Robin purposefully hangs back so that she and Will can speak as the gang navigates the tunnels under Hawkins. She tells him how she once felt that developing a crush on another girl in her class for the first time made her finally feel confident that she could be her full, authentic self and accept a dark part of her that scared her. But it was only later, when she was watching old home movies of herself as a carefree and fearless child, that she realized that she had always had the power to accept herself. “I was looking for answers in somebody else, but I had all the answers,” Robin says. “I just needed to stop being so goddamn scared of who I really was. Once I did that, I felt so free. It’s like I could fly.”
Her words are ringing in Will’s head at the episode’s climactic ending as Demogorgons seem set to kill his friends. In his head, Will imagines his memories as his own old home movies. Young Mike is there, of course, but so are his mother and brother. Will realizes he’s been surrounded by love his entire life, and this empowers him to finally accept himself—all parts of himself. Suddenly, like Robin, he has unlocked a superpower, although in his case it’s a more literal one. Will is able to channel his association with Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) and control the monsters. The dark thing inside of him that he has long been afraid of is actually something to be cherished.
Schnapp has previously spoken about how he used to dread doing press tours for the show when he was younger because he would be peppered with questions about his character’s sexuality—and his own—that he didn’t yet have answers for. But Schnapp has also said that it was only when he did accept that Will was gay that he felt free to embrace his own queerness, too. Will’s journey out of the darkness, navigating the demons within him, is the most powerful aspect of Stranger Things, and one that might arrive just in time for some young viewers traveling a similar road. His queerness—like theirs, like mine—isn’t a curse. It’s a strength—a superpower, even. After all, Will isn’t a wizard, Mike tells him; he’s a sorcerer. His magic comes from within.