Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS ARE AHEAD for the first volume of Stranger Things Season 5, available streaming now with a Netflix subscription.
The long wait of Stranger Things fans to see how Hawkins could recover from the catastrophic Season 4 finale has ended, and there were plenty of new disasters for the fifth season. The fourth episode of Volume 1, released ahead of Thanksgiving in the 2025 TV schedule, included a large-scale assault of Demogorgons on the MAC-Z , with soldiers dying en masse while Will, Mike, Joyce, and a band of kids were just trying to survive. By the end, I was reminded of what the Duffer Brothers said about the show’s “most violent death,” and I think I know who it was.
Ahead of the Season 5 premiere, the Duffers spoke with The Times about the increased amount of violence as the series continued over the past decade. They said:
- Ross Duffer: “The goal was always to scale up each series with the age of the characters and our audience. But then we keep getting new audiences. Hopefully parents don’t get too mad at us.”
- Matt Duffer: “I would say season five is not as violent as season four, but it has the most violent death of any season.”
When I first read those quotes from Ross and Matt Duffer, I had a hard time imagining how a death could get any more violent than what we saw happen to Vecna’s victims in Season 4. Even the sounds of those bone-breaking deaths were scary! But after the fourth installment of Season 5’s first volume, called “Sorcerer,” there was one demise that I think was gruesome enough to qualify, and it happened to this unlucky man around the 1:13:45 mark of the episode:
The soldier had the dubious honor of being killed by Vecna himself rather than shredded by a Demogorgon, which was what happened to most of the soldiers at the MAC-Z. The claws of one of the villain’s hands went right into and then out of the soldier’s head, going straight through his eye sockets and leaving him a very bloody mess from the shoulders up.
While the guys who Vecna lit on fire with their own flamethrowers and soldiers who were blown up by their own grenades after Vecna pulled the pins might have suffered more than the man who was speared through the face (and probably died immediately), I would say that Vecna’s hands-on kill of the soldier who was trying to crawl away is the one that was gruesome enough to possibly qualify as “most violent death of any season.”
Sure, there are still four episodes left of Season 5, with the finale boasting a run time of a little over two hours, so there is time for some deaths that will be more violent than the unfortunate fellow at the MAC-Z. Still, I’m going to name him the #1 candidate after Volume 1, and I’m at least happy that none of the major characters were killed off to become candidates themselves. (Karen would have been a contender if she hadn’t survived her encounter with a Demogorgon.)
There’s still Volume 2 and the series finale that everybody needs to survive, however, and there are surely going to be many more casualties before the final credits roll. The release schedule for the remaining episodes is a bit odd, as fans will have to wait a month after Volume 1 for Volume 2 on Christmas Day, and then under a week for the finale on New Year’s Eve, with just hours to spare before the start of the 2026 TV schedule. For now, you can always watch and rewatch every episode of Stranger Things so far on Netflix.