Stranger Things Season 5 finale: Was Vecna the most misunderstood villain after all? Details revealed

The last episode of Stranger Things Season 5 finally dropped on December 31, 2025.

The Episode is titled The Rightside Up, which is a cheeky nod after all these years freaking out about the Upside Down. It’s a two-hour rollercoaster that ties up almost ten years of Hawkins. The gang is up against their biggest threat yet: Vecna is back, the Mind Flayer is oozing menace everywhere, and the Upside Down is about to crash into the real world.

Maybe the most interesting twist is how the finale changes how we see Vecna. For years, he seemed like pure nightmare fuel, right up there with the Demogorgon and the Mind Flayer. But now, after that ending, you start to wonder if Vecna’s story is more tragic than terrifying.

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Stranger Things Season 5 finale: Was Vecna the most misunderstood villain after all?

Most of Stranger Things puts Vecna front and center as the terrifying, psychic monster who haunts Hawkins and picks off victims like it’s nothing. He is the type of villain you just love to hate, the one who seems way past saving. But then Noah Schnapp, who plays Will, throws everyone for a loop in an interview with TV Guide. He calls Vecna the most “misunderstood” character in the show and hints that there’s more going on than just evil for evil’s sake.

As viewers, we know that he is complicated. There’s pain there, maybe even regret, and turning into a monster wasn’t entirely something he chose. So, was Vecna twisted by trauma? Did someone even worse push him down this path? Or did he just snap and go full villain? The debate took off, with people digging for the real story behind the monster.

Now that the Stranger Things Season finale has dropped, things took a turn we didn’t see coming. During that last showdown, Will actually tries to reach Vecna and tries to talk to the guy’s scrap of humanity. He tells Vecna that he wasn’t always supposed to be the villain here. He wasn’t born the bad guy. And for a split second, Vecna looks like he might crack. There’s this flicker, almost like he wants to believe Will.

But, he digs his heels in. Vecna tells Will that the world was already broken, and the Mind Flayer opened my eyes to it. He wasn’t going back to pretending everything was sunshine and rainbows. So now he owns it. He is not just some poor soul who got twisted. He chooses to be the villain.

That’s what hits hardest. Vecna isn’t a tragic mistake. He is someone who took all his pain and weaponized it. In a world where everyone is carrying scars, he picks bitterness over hope. It makes you realize, sometimes, no amount of empathy can pull someone back from the edge.

He didn’t choose the beginning of this life

Vecna/ Henry Creel is one of those Stranger Things cases where it’s just complicated. On one hand, something nasty got its claws into him super early, rewiring his brain. But then, he still made his own choices. He signed the dotted line for evil.

Season 5 muddies the waters if you are trying to say Henry was born rotten. That “worst memory” plot (the one Max and Holly keep stumbling into) is actually about the first time Henry bumps into the Mind Flayer’s particles. It happens in a Nevada cave. The prequel play, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, reveals that this is the moment his life goes completely off the rails.

So, if you have connected the dots between the show and the play, Henry’s most painful memory isn’t anything about his powers or feeling victorious. It’s about him being changed fundamentally. Not by choice, it’s something that happens to him.

There’s a mysterious briefcase, too, as shown in Stranger Things. It shows up in the cave, robbed from some lab that’s exploring with Dimension X or the “Abyss”. Henry opens it, comes in contact with Mind Flayer particles, and he’s “flayed” for the first time. Not because he wanted to be, but because he was just... there.

The play actually digs even deeper. Those particles mess with his blood, turning him into something not-quite-human. That’s what makes him so appealing to Brenner later on, and why we end up with all those psychic kids running around Hawkins Lab.

The whole point is, Henry was just a curious kid in Stranger Things. He didn’t pick evil; evil kind of picked him. The First Shadow even goes out of its way to show that Henry had a shot at being good before getting hit by both supernatural nastiness and some truly awful adults.

What really jumps out from The First Shadow connections is that the Mind Flayer isn’t a big, spooky boss that Henry eventually takes orders from. It’s more like an insidious presence that has been whispering in his ear for years, poking and prodding him along. The play draws that line between Henry and the Mind Flayer way clearer than the show ever does. It’s not just one evil blob, it’s two messed-up forces doing their own thing.

That’s the strongest hint for anyone making the “misunderstood villain” case: His childhood was gone. His head was hijacked. His body was messed with. Any shot at a normal life was smashed before he even had a chance. And then, Brenner and all the lab just pile on even more trauma and control.

If you try to tell his story from the ‘cave moment,’ it reads like: here’s this kid who gets flayed, literally and metaphorically, before he even knows what a real choice is. But then that Stranger Things finale comes in with a rough question: Did he ever really try to fight back? Stranger Things refuses to just let Henry off with a sad backstory. After that first big corruption, it’s not all just tragic victimhood.

The finale twists the knife: Will stands there, explaining how he got tempted down the same road. But he fought it, and Henry didn’t. That’s where things turn. So, maybe the Mind Flayer kicked things off. Maybe all the abuse and lab stuff made it worse. But the ending doesn’t sugarcoat it: at a certain point, Henry stops being just a victim. He starts making choices. He becomes the villain in his own right.

In this ‘worst memory’ scene, Henry confesses he doesn’t regret it. No one forced him to keep going; he wanted to. So, you can argue he is ‘misunderstood.’ But Stranger Things is not letting him weasel out of villain status. He is both, and that’s the uncomfortable truth. The Mind Flayer gave him the push, the world gave him pain… but Henry gave consent.

The major point from Stranger Things Season 5 to be learned is that there is a possibility of harm coming to you. You may be played, your innocence may be taken away, and yet, you can still arrive at a situation where you need to choose if you will continue to cause pain to other people. Vecna’s character forces both characters and also the viewers to ponder: At what point is it okay for someone to justify evil? And how many reasons to choose kindness must one have before they walk away from vengeance?