Stranger Things Season 5 Gives Will Byers A Transformation That Changes Everything

Contains spoilers for "Stranger Things" Season 5 Episode 4 –"Sorcerer"

Will Byers, the character made famous by Noah Schnapp in "Stranger Things," has always been a major key to the show's overall lore. After all, it's Will's disappearance into the Upside Down in Season 1 — and his mother Joyce Byers' (Winona Ryder) frantic attempts to find him alongside his best friends Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin), and Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo) — that kicks off the entire adventure of "Stranger Things." Now, in the show's fifth and final season, we just learned something huge about Will: like Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Will has special powers that can help defeat the show's ultimate villain Vecna (a character also known as "One" and Henry Creel played by Jamie Campbell Bower).

Just as a refresher, Season 5 of "Stranger Things" focuses on Will, Eleven, Dustin, Lucas, and various other friends and family members — including, of course, Eleven's adoptive father Jim Hopper (David Harbour), Mike's sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Will's brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), and everybody's best buddy Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) — trying to save the fictional and apparently cursed town of Hawkins, Indiana from Vecna's clutches. See, at the end of Season 4, Hawkins experiences what most people think is an "earthquake" but is actually the town being split in two by Vecna's powers as he attempts to overtake it by force and meld the Upside Down and the normal Midwestern town into one. Again, it feels absolutely right that Will has powers, because throughout the entire series, he's had the clearest connection to Vecna and the Upside Down beyond Eleven, a character who's had powers from the jump.

In the beginning of the premiere of "Stranger Things" Season 5 — titled "The Crawl" — we flash back to November 12, 1982, which fans of the series might recall is when Will was in the Upside Down back in Season 1 — and watch as a younger Will is chased through the dark and sinister realm by Vecna himself. After Vecna finally gets ahold of Will, he binds the boy with his freaky tentacles and starts doing something that certainly seems like some sort of merging between the two beings (it involves a lot of black goo and Will's mouth, and it's honestly very gross). "You and I, we are going to do such beautiful things together, William!" Vecna exclaims before we return to November 3, 1987, which is when "Stranger Things" Season 5 properly begins.

This scene is obviously important because it's something that ostensibly happened during Will's initial time in the Upside Down that we've never seen before, but it's also a pretty significant clue that Will is the key to bringing Vecna down once and for all. Eleven is obviously very strong — and seems quite a bit stronger throughout the first four episodes of Season 5, based on the fact that she can now fly, hover, and even snap necks — but she's the only one with powers, and humans like Dustin, Lucas, Mike, Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve can't possibly hope to defeat Vecna without more supernatural firepower on their side. 

Will began "Stranger Things" with a connection to Vecna, and at this point, it seems like he might be the one to defeat this Big Bad. The show itself confirms this during the final episode of the first drop of "Stranger Things" season 5. By the end of that episode, "Sorcerer" — named for an idea that Mike has about Will potentially being able to overpower or even control monsters sent by Vecna — we definitively learn that Will can see through the eyes of the creatures known as Demogorgons and even stop them in their tracks.

How? Well, as Demogorgons invade Hawkins and try to attack Will's friends after they escape from a military access control zone, something unbelievably shocking happens, even by "Stranger Things" standards. Vecna appears to Will after Demogorgons drag a group of captive kids into the Upside Down and speaks to him once again, telling him that when he, Vecna, originally took Will into this realm, it helped him realize the full extent of his powers. Apparently, this awakens something big within Will as well. Inspired by his love for his friends, Will accesses his inner strength and finds himself able to control all of the Demogorgons trying to kill his friends, and even though they're scattered throughout Hawkins, he kills those same Demogorgons. Then, just to confirm everything, Will gets a nosebleed, the physical symptom that always accompanies Eleven's powers.

We'll have to wait until Christmas and New Year's Eve to watch the next two drops of "Stranger Things" Season 5 and see how the show concludes; the first four episodes of the final season are on Netflix now.