'Stranger Things' full series recap, including Season 5 Vol. 1

For "Stranger Things," a nine-year journey filled with monsters, alternate dimensions and plenty of Eggo waffles is about to reach its end.

The Netflix phenomenon will be back on Christmas Day with another new batch of episodes from its final season. Season 5 is being released in three volumes, and this second drop will include episodes five, six and seven. The first four installments debuted in November, the day before Thanksgiving.

But if you binged through that first volume so quickly last month that it's a four-and-a-half hour blur, we've got you covered with a recap of all the biggest plot points from Season 5 Vol. 1. Now's also a good time for a refresher on earlier seasons, especially given that Vol. 1 features a character who hasn't been on the show in eight years.

Read on for a recap of the entire "Stranger Things" saga to date, including what's happened in Season 5 so far.

Season 1

The story begins with the disappearance of Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), who goes missing after biking home from his friend Mike Wheeler's (Finn Wolfhard) house in Hawkins, Indiana.

After a search, Will's body is found in a quarry, but his mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder), is convinced he's still alive and communicating to her from another realm. Jim Hopper (David Harbour), the police chief who is mourning his daughter Sara's death from cancer, realizes Joyce isn't crazy after he breaks into the morgue and discovers Will's body is a fake.

It soon becomes clear that Will has been taken into an alternate dimension known as the Upside Down, a gate to which is located inside a government laboratory in Hawkins run by Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine).

A girl with telekinetic powers (Millie Bobby Brown), who was a test subject at the lab, escapes and runs into Mike and his friends Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin). The trio helps protect the girl, known as Eleven because of her test subject number, from agents trying to find her, "E.T." style.

Along the way, Eleven and Mike develop feelings for each other, culminating in a kiss.

While investigating Will's disappearance, Joyce and Hopper visit Eleven's birth mother, Terry Ives (Aimee Mullins), but find she is in a catatonic state. Her sister explains that years earlier, Terry got involved in a CIA study, MKUltra, without realizing she was pregnant. Brenner kidnapped Terry's daughter, Jane (a.k.a. Eleven), when she was born, but covered it up by claiming Terry had a miscarriage; Brenner also told Eleven that her mother died in childbirth. Terry knows the truth about what happened to Eleven, but no one believes her.

It's also revealed that when Eleven was a test subject at the lab, she made psychic contact with a creature from the Upside Down dubbed the Demogorgon. In doing so, she unintentionally opened the gate to this other dimension.

Meanwhile, Mike's sister Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) is searching for Barb Holland (Shannon Purser), her friend who disappeared after attending a party at Nancy's boyfriend Steve Harrington's (Joe Keery) house. Barb, it turns out, was taken into the Upside Down and killed by the Demogorgon. During her search, Nancy teams up with Will's brother, Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton), causing animosity between Jonathan and Steve.

By the finale, Joyce and Hopper travel into the Upside Down and bring Will home, the Demogorgon appears to kill Dr. Brenner, and Eleven seemingly dies using her powers to defeat the creature.

Season 2

Eleven lives! Immediately after the events of Season 1, Eleven wakes up in the Upside Down and returns to the real world, where Hopper finds her in the woods. To keep her hidden, Hopper makes a home for Eleven in an isolated cabin, refusing to let her go out for her safety.

Mike, Dustin, Lucas and Will befriend Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink), who moved to Hawkins with her stepbrother Billy (Dacre Montgomery). But ever since returning home at the end of Season 1, Will has been having flashes of the Upside Down and of a large shadow monster, which the kids dub the Mind Flayer.

It's eventually discovered that Will is possessed by the Mind Flayer, which is using him to spy on the real world. An army of monsters from the Upside Down that are connected to the Mind Flayer via a hive mind soon begin attacking, and they kill Joyce's new boyfriend Bob (Sean Astin) near the end of the season.

Off in her own storyline, Eleven leaves the cabin to visit her mother, Terry, who remains catatonic. Flashbacks reveal that after Brenner kidnapped Eleven as a baby, a gun-wielding Terry went to Hawkins Lab to rescue her. She found Eleven in a room with a rainbow outside the door, but was quickly subdued, and Brenner subjected her to electric shocks that damaged her brain.

Eleven subsequently tracks down Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), a former test subject at Hawkins Lab.

Kali, a.k.a. Eight, leads a group of criminals hunting down anyone who was involved in the lab experiments. She gives Eleven a punk makeover and recruits her to her gang, but after they track down a former employee of Dr. Brenner, Eleven can't bring herself to kill him. While pleading for his life, the man reveals Brenner is still alive.

Eleven ultimately comes home and reunites with her friends after realizing they're in danger. Kali is unhappy with this decision, as she wants Eleven to come with her, but the two part ways as Kali's group heads on the run. Hopper and Eleven reconcile, the group saves Will by using heat to make his body uninhabitable to the Mind Flayer, and Eleven seals the gate to the Upside Down. After the dust settles, Hopper obtains a birth certificate for Eleven, which gives her the legal name of Jane Hopper.

Other miscellaneous Season 2 developments include Nancy bonding with Jonathan after she and Steve break up; Steve becoming unlikely friends with Dustin and discovering he's surprisingly good with kids; and Lucas and Max beginning to fall in love. Nancy also gets some justice for Barb by, with help from conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman), forcing government officials to admit involvement in her death.

Season 3

As Season 3 begins, Eleven and Mike are officially a couple and can't keep their hands off each other, upsetting an overprotective Hopper, who tries to break them up. Mike starts creating distance with Eleven after Hopper threatens him, leading Eleven, who bonds with Max over the drama, to end their relationship.

Over in Starcourt Mall, the hot new spot in Hawkins, Steve has started working at an ice cream parlor. Dustin, Steve and Steve's coworker Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke) investigate a Russian transmission that Dustin intercepted while trying to reach his girlfriend Suzie (Gabriella Pizzolo), whom he met at camp.

This leads them to discover a hidden base under the mall, where Russians have been building a machine to open a gate to the Upside Down.

Meanwhile, Nancy is working at a newspaper and is dating Jonathan, with whom she begins looking into reports of infected rats. This turns out to be connected to a much larger problem: Max's stepbrother, Billy, is possessed by the Mind Flayer and serving as its new host, much like Will was in Season 2. While under the Mind Flayer's control, Billy begins kidnapping people and bringing them to the creature, which has taken the form of a giant, spider-like blob made of rat flesh.

With Billy's assistance, the Mind Flayer assembles an army of people whose minds it has taken over, which the kids nickname the Flayed. Under the Mind Flayer's control, the Flayed start melting into goop and merging with the creature's body to make it even larger. The Mind Flayer attacks Eleven and leaves a piece of itself inside her leg, which she is forced to remove. After getting back on her feet, Eleven helps Billy fight the Mind Flayer's control, and he saves her life. The creature kills Billy in front of a distraught Max.

While this is happening, Joyce, Hopper and Murray sneak into the Russian base and destroy the machine. They close the gate to the Upside Down, which in turn kills the Mind Flayer's fleshy body (though this doesn't solve the problem that it remains alive in the Upside Down). But Hopper seemingly dies, as he's standing next to the machine when it explodes.

Three months later, with Hopper presumed dead, Joyce, Will and Jonathan move to California. Eleven, who lost her powers during the battle with the Mind Flayer, goes with the Byers family, but not before telling Mike she loves him.

Also on the romance side of things, Robin comes out of the closet to Steve this season after he reveals he has feelings for her, while Joyce finally agrees to go on a date with Hopper, at least before his supposed death gets in the way of their dinner plans at Enzo's.

Season 4 Vol. 1

Season 4 is the most plot-dense season of them all and was the first to be released in two volumes.

Eight months after Season 3, Joyce, Will, Jonathan and Eleven are still living in California. In Hawkins, Mike, Dustin and Lucas have joined a Dungeons & Dragons group led by Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) called Hellfire Club, while Max has broken up with Lucas and is still grieving Billy's death. During spring break, Mike goes to California to visit Eleven, who still doesn't have her powers. 

During this time, Dr. Sam Owens (Paul Reiser), who became the director of Hawkins Lab after Dr. Brenner, tracks down Eleven. He tells her Hawkins is in danger, and the only hope of saving the town is to restore her abilities. Eleven goes with him willingly, while Mike, Will and Jonathan flee after soldiers come after them over knowledge about Eleven's whereabouts. Dr. Owens brings Eleven to a silo in Nevada, and she reunites with the very much alive Dr. Brenner.

In Hawkins, cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham (Grace Van Dien) begins having disturbing visions and starts seeing and hearing a grandfather clock. To find relief, Chrissy seeks out Eddie to buy drugs off him and when she goes to his trailer, she falls into a trance and is killed by a monster, later dubbed Vecna. After Eddie flees the scene and goes into hiding, Chrissy's boyfriend, Jason Carver (Mason Dye), and his friends blame him for killing her.

Vecna soon kills student newspaper reporter Fred Benson (Logan Riley Bruner), also Nancy's friend, after which Max starts having visions and realizes she's the next target. While searching for a way to defeat Vecna, Nancy and Robin investigate the case of Victor Creel, a man accused of killing his family in the 1950s. Victor maintains his innocence and claims Vecna murdered his wife and kids. 

It's eventually discovered that a person can break free of Vecna's trance by listening to their favorite song, so the gang plays Max the Kate Bush song "Running Up That Hill," allowing her to run from him to safety. Lucas apologizes to Max for not realizing how much emotional pain she was in, and they reconnect. Vecna subsequently claims another life: Patrick (Myles Truitt), one of Jason's friends.

As Eddie is named a suspect in the murders, Jason riles up the town to hunt him down, claiming the Hellfire Club is a cult. 

Dustin speculates that Vecna is killing people to open new gates to the real world from the Upside Down, meaning there are gates located in all the spots where Vecna's victims have died.

Steve, Nancy, Robin and Eddie wind up in the Upside Down after traveling through a gate at the bottom of the lake where Vecna killed Patrick. While inside, they discover the Upside Down is stuck in the past ‒ specifically, Nov. 6, 1983, the day Will went missing in Season 1 and the day Eleven contacted the Demogorgon, opening a gate to the Upside Down.

Back in the silo, Brenner places Eleven in an isolation chamber, forcing her to relive repressed memories from when she was a test subject at Hawkins Lab. She recalls becoming friends with an orderly (Jamie Campbell Bower), who turned out to have telekinetic powers like hers.

The orderly is revealed to be Brenner's first test subject, a.k.a. One.

That's not all: One is also Henry Creel, Victor Creel's son. When he was a child, Henry went into a coma after using his powers to kill his mother and sister ‒ murders that were blamed on his father ‒ and was awakened in the care of Dr. Brenner. As Henry tells it, Brenner wanted to control him, but when he realized he couldn't, he tried to recreate him through the original lab program that Eleven was a part of.

As an adult, before the events of Season 1, Henry manipulated a young Eleven into removing a chip in his neck that was suppressing his abilities before he went on a killing spree in the lab. He planned to flee the lab and asked Eleven to come with him so they could reshape the world together, but she refused.

Instead, Eleven used her powers to banish Henry into the Upside Down, turning him into Vecna. Dustin theorizes that Vecna is working for the Mind Flayer as its "five-star general," though a flashback later shows Vecna seemingly forming the Mind Flayer out of black particles in the sky.

Season 4 Vol. 2

While traveling back to the real world from the Upside Down, Nancy falls under Vecna's trance and sees visions of Hawkins destroyed by four gates. The group concludes that when Vecna kills again and opens another gate, Hawkins will fall. So they formulate a plan to have Max, still cursed by Vecna, serve as bait while everyone else sneaks into his lair and kills him while he's distracted.  

After reliving her memories of Vecna's origin, Eleven gets her powers back. Brenner urges her to stay at the silo longer, but she calls him a monster. Military men, who have been chasing Eleven all season because they believe she's responsible for Vecna's killings, raid the silo, and as Brenner carries Eleven out, he is shot and seemingly killed.

Jonathan, Mike and Will arrive, reuniting with Eleven before they all flee. 

Amid all this, Joyce has been on a mission to rescue Hopper, who survived the machine explosion from Season 3 and is being held in a Russian prison camp.

Joyce and Murray sneak into the prison, where the Russians have captured various Upside Down monsters. After fleeing the prison, Joyce and Hopper reinstate their plans for a dinner date at Enzo's and share a kiss.  

Steve, Robin, Nancy, Eddie and Dustin head to the Upside Down, while Max, in the real world, baits Vecna by going to the Creel house with Lucas. Once Max enters Vecna's trance, Dustin and Eddie loudly play music to draw bats away from Vecna's lair, and Eddie is killed. In California, Eleven enters a makeship sensory deprivation tank and telepathically projects herself into Max's mind. Once inside, Eleven battles Vecna.

In Russia, Hopper, Joyce and Murray break back into the prison to kill the Upside Down monsters and injure Vecna, who is connected to them via a hive mind.

While Eleven is restrained, Vecna starts breaking Max's limbs. Nancy, Steve and Robin enter Vecna's lair, setting him on fire and shooting him repeatedly. He falls out of a window, but when the trio goes outside, his body is gone. As Max dies, rifts begin to form in the fabric of reality, causing widespread destruction and killing Jason, who had barged into the Creel house during the final battle. Eleven uses her powers to bring Max back to life, but she remains unconscious and seriously injured.

Two days later, Mike, Will, Eleven and Jonathan return to Hawkins, where 22 people have been killed. The official story is that the rift in reality was a deadly earthquake. Eddie, who is missing and presumed dead, is still the prime suspect in Vecna's murders, and Max remains in a coma in the hospital. Hopper returns home and reunites with Eleven, and Will says he can feel that Vecna is hurt, but alive.

On the personal relationships side this season, Will is heavily implied to be gay, and has feelings for Mike, while Robin crushes on a girl named Vickie (Amybeth McNulty) and starts bonding with her in the finale. Before she went into her coma, Max was back on good terms with Lucas, and they made plans to see a movie.

There are also suggestions that Nancy and Steve could rekindle their relationship. Steve admits to Nancy that he has dreamed of starting a family with her, and we learn that Jonathan secretly doesn't intend to go to Emerson College with Nancy, as the two had planned. By the end of the season, though, Jonathan still hasn't had the guts to tell her.

In the closing scene of Season 4, ominous pillars of smoke appear on the horizon, indicating the Upside Down is spreading into the real world and setting the stage for an epic final battle with Vecna.

Season 5 Vol. 1

More than a year after the events of Season 4, all of the major characters are living in Hawkins and aren't allowed to leave, as the town is under quarantine and military occupation. The rifts in reality from the end of Season 4 have been sealed using what Robin, now a radio DJ, describes as a "giant metal Band-Aid," and a gate to the Upside Down is located in an off-limits military control zone known as the MAC-Z.

Since we last saw them, the gang has been working together to conduct what they refer to as crawls: Excursions into the Upside Down, where Hopper methodically searches for Vecna zone by zone. This involves breaking into the military control zone and sneaking through the gate undetected. Eleven has been training for battle and wants to join Hopper on his missions. But he insists she stay home, because within the Upside Down is a military base where Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) commands a search for Eleven.

Max remains in a coma, but Lucas continues to visit her in the hospital and play "Running Up That Hill" in hopes she'll wake up. At school, Dustin draws the ire of bully Andy (Clayton Royal Johnson) by continuing to defend Eddie, putting him at odds with Mike, Will and Lucas, who urge him to keep his head down. Andy and his fellow bullies eventually assault Dustin, forcing him to miss the latest crawl. 

Meanwhile, Steve and Jonathan compete for Nancy's affection, and Jonathan is revealed to have acquired an engagement ring for her. Robin has been secretly dating Vickie, and Will accidentally catches a glimpse of them kissing, thereby discovering Robin is gay. Will asks Robin how she knew Vickie was interested in her, and Robin later observes Will having a conversation with Mike. It's seemingly implied Robin realizes in this moment that Will has feelings for Mike but Mike doesn't feel the same way. Mike is still dating Eleven and discusses a future with her after Vecna is defeated. They suggest they'll leave Hawkins and go somewhere peaceful when it's all over.

Hopper's latest crawl goes south after a Demogorgon attacks and kills numerous soldiers in the Upside Down. The Demogorgon then goes to the Wheeler house, enters the real world, and attacks Mike and Nancy's mom and dad, who wind up in the hospital. The Demogorgon also kidnaps Holly Wheeler, Mike and Nancy's sister, so Eleven heads to the Upside Down to find her.

Before she was taken, Holly had been talking to a mysterious man no one else could see, who she referred to as Mr. Whatsit. This man turns out to be Vecna. He took Holly to a version of his childhood home inside a mysterious realm that appears to be made up of his memories. There, Holly encounters Max, who has been living in a cave while her physical body is still back in the hospital. She describes this realm as Vecna's prison, but notes the cave is a safe space because he is terrified of it and won't go inside. Holly nicknames the realm Camazotz after "A Wrinkle in Time," and Max reveals she has a plan to escape it, which involves Holly going back to Vecna.

Back in the real world, Lucas points out Holly was taken just three days before the anniversary of Will's kidnapping from Season 1, which he suggests can't be a coincidence. Speaking of Will, he begins having visions after tapping back into Vecna's hive mind. He and Robin learn Vecna is planning to kidnap more kids — it's later discovered that he needs 12 specifically — and one of his next targets is a boy named Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly).

So the gang head to the Turnbow house, where they drug the family and set up a trap for the Demogorgon, firing a tracker into the monster so it will lead them to Vecna. They also kidnap Derek and take him to an abandoned farm to keep Vecna away from him.

Soldiers soon begin taking children out of their homes and bringing them to barracks inside the military control zone, as Dr. Kay believes Eleven is the one who has been kidnapping kids. With Derek's help, Joyce, Will, Mike and Robin sneak kids who are targets of Vecna out of the barracks, but Vecna arrives with an army of Demogorgons to attack. As the creatures take the children away, Will discovers that when he taps into the hive mind, he can take control of it. He uses this new ability to kill the Demogorgons and save his friends.

Inside the Upside Down, Steve, Jonathan, Nancy and Dustin follow the Demogorgon they're tracking and crash their car into a mysterious wall made of some sort of fleshy material. Eleven believes Holly is on the other side of this wall. Though no one is clear on what the wall is, Dustin posits it's a circle that surrounds the Upside Down, and at its center is Hawkins Lab.

Eleven and Hopper break into the military base inside the Upside Down after learning a prisoner, who they believe to be Vecna, is being held there. But they discover the prisoner is actually Kali, a.k.a. Eight, the former Hawkins Lab test subject who Eleven hasn't seen since Season 2.

Heading into Vol. 2, major unanswered questions include: What has Kali been up to since we last saw her? Why does Vecna need 12 kids specifically? What is Max's plan to escape Camazotz? And what the heck is that wall?

When does 'Stranger Things' Season 5 Vol. 2 premiere?

Volume 2 of Season 5 will hit Netflix at 8:00 p.m. ET on Christmas Day. The volume will consist of three episodes, which will be followed by the series finale, set to drop on New Year's Eve.