Review: Stranger Things, "The Vanishing Of..." | Season 5, Episode 2

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The title doesn’t lie: Stranger Things, as its run ends, is mirroring its own pilot. Just like its counterparts with Will Byers years before, a demogorgon has wrested little Holly Wheeler (now played by 14-year-old Nell Fisher after being a toddler three seasons ago. Try not to think too hard about it!) into the dandruffy hell that lurks beneath Hawkins. It’s a bit of a pat way to give a sense of closure to a show, sure, but it’s not necessarily a bad way to give this season’s cosmic battle human-level stakes and to restore a sense of mystery to the Upside Down. 

The issue here is that, even by the end of the pilot this episode is mirroring, we knew enough about Will Byers to make us care about him. And we know virtually nothing about Holly Wheeler.

In early seasons, Holly—at the time played by much smaller children—was little more than a way to round out the Wheeler family and illustrate its dysfunction. In the pilot, for instance, she gets upset at Nancy and Mike having a sibling tiff even as Karen uses her presence at the dinner table to try and shame her older kids into behaving. Now, she’s a big kid who rides her bike to school with her brother, reads A Wrinkle in Time over and over, and ostensibly has an imaginary friend who’s clearly actually Vecna (seriously, I called this the second we saw one of his hands last episode). Beyond that, she’s a blank slate waiting to be abducted, a body that can scream and struggle and motivate other characters to action but can’t do much else.

That stands in stark contrast to what we knew about Will Byers by a comparable point in season one. He got barely a single scene on-screen before being kidnapped, but his friends and mom and brother were constantly describing him to anyone who’d listen. We knew that Will was quiet, compassionate, artistic, shy, honest, sensitive, and badly bullied; Joyce tells Hopper in the pilot that her ex-husband called Will homophobic slurs. He’s absolutely an archetype—the artsy queer kid who caucuses with the straight nerds and then gets put in peril—but that doesn’t make him less of a character.