Stranger Things summons the Queen for its final season trailer

With a little assist from Freddie Mercury (and a lot of angsting), Stranger Things prepares for its big climactic farewell.

By William Hughes | October 30, 2025 | 9:00am

David Harbour and Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things Season 5, Photo: Netflix

TV News Stranger Things

Stranger Things summons the Queen for its final season trailer

It has now been an absolutely baffling amount of time since Stranger Things last released new episodes—more than three years since the Netflix show’s bifurcated fourth season unleashed its big, flashy finale. Besides being enough time for the series to get a whole separate stage play to build up its backstory and for most of its young cast members to continue aging even further out of looking like plausible young high school students, that gap’s had a more concrete effect on the show. I.e., it’s been enough time for basically everybody to forget what was actually going on way back in 1986/2022. Since the series’ new season 5 trailer, released this morning ahead of its November 26 premiere, doesn’t really get into it, we’ll summarize the end of season 4 quickly: Everybody got their asses kicked and basically lost the big, important fight with would-be reality devourer Vecna. (Also: The cool heavy metal kid died.)

Most Popular

Instead of belaboring that point, the new trailer just dives into vibes, with Hawkins apparently transformed into a surveillance state, and various members of our young cast smarting from their inability to stop Vecna from tearing holes between the regular world and the endlessly goopy Upside Down. Set to a portentous cover of Queen’s “Who Wants To Live Forever?” the trailer shows Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven in training mode, Finn Wolfhard’s Mike trying to plan his way out of destruction, and Noah Schnapp’s Will once again stuck as the cosmic chew toy of interdimensional monsters. A lot of this is just standard “final season trailer” stuff, admittedly, with a lot of shots of characters crying, chyrons making a big deal out of “one last adventure,” and Eleven delivering a portentous “You don’t get to control who lives or dies on this one” speech. That being said, Natalie Dyer apparently also gets to top out the “Nancy keeps getting bigger guns” narrative by gunning down Demogorgons with a machine gun, so that’s fun. (See also: Like one second of Linda Hamilton running around with her crazy 1980s hair.)

Of course, that November 26 date is just for the arrival of the first batch of episodes of the fifth season: Stranger Things will air the first four episodes of its final season on the 26th, follow them up with three more on Christmas, and then air its finale on New Year’s Eve 2025.