Nine years since Stranger Things crept into our world, the retro, nerd-savvy, and heartfelt adventure series is drawing to an extended and much anticipated close: four episodes of the eight-episode final season are on Netflix in time for Thanksgiving. The rest of Season 5 is pegged to other end-of-year holidays—Christmas and New Year’s Eve—but rather than giving us any big victories or tragic deaths, Season 5, “Vol. 1” takes its time setting up the chess pieces (perhaps “filling out the D&D character sheets” is more appropriate) for the epic final battle against Vecna—and it will mean coming full circle back to Will Byers, Eleven, and a bunch of kids just like them.

Read more: Inside the Making of Stranger Things’ Epic Final Season

Where does Stranger Things Season 5 begin?

If it slipped your mind in the years since Season 4, Vecna is the evil puppetmaster behind all of our characters’ misfortune since Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) was first abducted into the Upside Down in Season 1. In his monster form, he looks like he belongs on a heavy metal album cover from the 1980s (as the late Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) taught us, nerds and metalheads share a love for D&D). Vecna is Henry Creel (Jamie Campbell Bower), a supernaturally gifted former Hawkins resident whose despair and anguish—not to mention an early battle against Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) when he was “One” during their stay in a research silo buried in the Nevada desert—transformed him into the monster we know today.

He was repelled at the end of Season 4, but at a significant cost: Eddie was mauled to death, Max (Sadie Sink) fell into a coma, and Hawkins is reeling in the aftermath of the Upside Down almost consuming the modest Indiana town. A year and change later, Hawkins is under military quarantine, Eleven is being hunted by a specialist team run by Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton), and the rest of our main cast (that’s ten characters) are searching for Vecna in the Upside Down on “crawls” using specialist radio equipment and clandestine codes.

Read more: What It’s Like to Grow Up on the Set of Stranger Things

What’s Vecna’s evil plan?

Much of Vol. 1 feels like one big extended mission, a four-and-a-half hour adventure movie extended due to the sheer amount of characters who need screen time and dramatic moments. (Don’t believe us? Just ask co-creator Matt Duffer.) In addition to the dozen main characters in this show, we also check in on helpful douchebag Murray (Brett Gelman) and Lucas’ sister Erica (Priah Ferguson), but the biggest new additions to our scrappy band of heroes are two kids who are the same age as Will, Mike, Lucas, and Dustin were when we first met them in 2016: Mike and Nancy’s kid sister Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher, played previously by twin sisters Anniston and Tinsley Price), and “Dipshit” Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly).

Simply put, these kids are Vecna’s new targets. Henry has been appearing to Holly and Derek as an imaginary friend that Holly dubs “Mr. Whatsit”, a reference to her favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time. She is kidnapped into Henry’s realm when Demogorgons attack the Wheeler family, where she lives with him in a picture-perfect, renovated version of the Creel home. But Holly is lured out to a cave by Max, who lives inside Henry’s memories (some of which were covered in the West End stage prequel, Stranger Things: The First Shadow) like a scavenger, safe in the one place she realizes he can’t step foot in.

Our heroes realize that Derek is Vecna’s next target before he can be abducted like Holly, as Will uses his mental connection with Vecna and the Demogorgons (remember the goosebumps he feels on the back of his neck?) as a two-way connection to see from the perspective of Vecna’s targets and the prowling Demogorgons. Derek is the opposite of Holly—annoying, combative, with none of the youngest Wheeler kid’s sunny disposition—but Vecna has chosen them both to open gates between his world and theirs, similar to Chrissy and Max in Season 4.

It occurs to our heroes that more kids have been visited by “Mr. Whatsit” around the same time that the military act on similar suspicions. Kay orders that some 73 pre-teen children be rounded up and held inside their MAC-Z facility—there is also a government base built inside the Upside Down, which Hopper (David Harbour) and Eleven try to infiltrate for much of Vol. 1. When they hear about Kay using Hawkins’ kids as bait, Mike, Will, Lucas, Joyce, Erica and Robin channel The Great Escape by smuggling the vulnerable kids out of the base into a tunnel below the bathroom cubicle.

The battle at the MAC-Z

The cliffhanger climax of episode 4, “Sorcerer” is where things go badly. The rescue mission is thwarted (shout-out to Jake Connelly for the iconic delivery of, “Ashley Klein is a snitch!”) with only five kids smuggled out into tunnels and Murray’s van. The rest of our heroes are apprehended by the base’s gate, but fail to convince the soldiers of the danger they’re putting the kids into before a slew of Demogorgons tear into their reality and start causing carnage. The storm of bullets do little to repel the demonic infantry, and while a flamethrower briefly stops one of the Demogorgons, temporarily knocking out all the others who are psychically connected to it, it also incapacitates Will, who writhes on the ground in agony, making his link between the demonic entities unmistakable.

This proves to be Will’s secret weapon, and the exciting final twist in an otherwise pessimistic finale—he can telepathically command the Demogorgons after years of Vecna nurturing a connection between his demonic self and his teenage vessel. Vecna arrives in MAC-Z to dispatch the enemy combatents, revitalizes his Demogorgon minions, and kidnap the kids into the Upside Down to get started on his twelve gates. He taunts Will, explaining that weak, troubled, defenseless young kids make for the best demonic vessels, and leaves his monsters to kill all of Will’s friends. While Mike, Lucas, and Robin are all saved by Will realizing his magic-like abilities, only Mike sees what his best friend is capable of.

Will and Eleven realize the truth in “Sorcerer”

Mike gives him a pep talk before the tunnel mission begins saying that he may be more powerful than Joyce lets him believe—calling his powers “innate” like a sorcerer—but in the moment Will recalls a chat he had with Robin where she discussed what happened after her first crush Tammy unwittingly broke her heart by hooking up with Steve “The Hair” Harrington (who at this point has driven a convoy into the Upside Down; more on that in Vol. 2 when they venture to Hawkins Lab, the center of the Upside Down).

Trying to help Will come to terms with his queerness, Robin says she realized, “I was looking for answers in someone else, but I had all the answers.” We see a montage of Will Byers’ home movies to underline, in Stranger Things’ bluntly sentimental but still effective fashion, the emotional surge triggering his transformation. In the heat of battle, these “answers” are literalized into telepathic strength, but it’s also a way for Will to stop feeling like a victim in a fight that has made him feel small and sidelined. Maybe his unique experience doesn’t make him a liability, but a hero.

Eleven makes a similarly seismic discovery; her and Hopper have broken into the Upside Down military base because, well, a military base set up in the Upside Down cannot be up to much good. They make headway before Eleven is incapacitated by a device that is like her “kryptonite”, while Kay attacks Hop with a slithery Upside Down creature they’re testing in a lab. Eventually Hop makes it to a chamber that Eleven believes contains Vecna, fully committed to explode them both with dynamite strapped to his chest. But it’s not Vecna—it’s Eight, or Kali (Linnea Berthelson) from Eleven’s all but ignored sidequest to Chicago back in Season 2. She’s strapped into a machine that is reminiscent of the horrid, organic tendrils that Vecna uses to feed off his vessels, like we see in Will’s flashback to his first encounter with Vecna when he first went missing in 1983. This isn’t a coincidence—clearly Kay is happy to violate and maim young, helpless people with the same cruelty that consumes Vecna.

It’s not the only parallel that resonates throughout “Sorcerer”; it’s impossible to think of Holly, Derek, Debbie Miller (Eden Stephens), and Mr Whatsit’s other targets without thinking of the babyfaced Season 1 versions of the grown-up Mike, Will, Eleven, Dustin, and Lucas. The Duffer Brothers remind us of the intensity of danger and vulnerability that “the Party” felt when they were just starting their quest against the forces of darkness, calling back to the show’s earliest days now that the final season is concerned with lore, narrative payoffs, and a dozen different characters (who stay miraculously alive, for now). “Sorcerer” tells us that our heroes will not let what Vecna did to them happen to another generation of kids.

How Vol. 1 sets up the finale

All we want to do is speculate on the final showdown with Vecna in Vol. 2 and the series finale, especially as Season 5 has so far been notably devoid of any character deaths. Vecna has kidnapped a new crop of children and Dr. Kay has emerged as one of the show’s nastiest human adversaries, so the odds are stacked against our heroes, but whatever happens, it’s fitting that Will and Eleven will play a key part in the ending—not just because they both have a handy superpowered connection to their nemesis, but because their childhood trauma from coming into contact with Henry Creel has been gradually revealed as the impetus for this entire saga.