(Credit: Netflix)

The second volume of Stranger Things season five on Netflix came with a fair warning: everything we thought we knew so far about the Upside Down was “dead wrong.”

Now, after nearly a decade of traversing through the unknown, the Stranger Things fandom has finally found its answers about the Upside Down and its mysteries. The second volume sheds light on many secrets Ross and Matt Duffer have been keeping close to their chest, including the concept that the Upside Down has been a “wormhole to another dimension” all this time.

In a conversation with Deadline, Ross Duffer confessed, “We’ve known it was a wormhole since season one, but it’s one thing to say it, and it’s another to try to figure out how to visualise such an abstract concept.”

In the first two episodes of Stranger Things season five, volume two, Nancy, Jonathan, Steve, and Dustin are seen tracking down clues and answers surrounding the massive, flesh-like wall they’d run into in the Upside Down version of Hawkins. While they do find their answers inside the Hawkins lab, they’re not what the gang had been expecting the entire time.

In the conclusive moments of the fifth episode, ‘Shock Jock,’ Dustin comes across a journal belonging to Dr Martin Brenner while Nancy and Jonathan reach the roof of the lab to find an enigmatic presence floating right above it. It dawns upon Dustin that neither Vecna, nor Holly, nor anyone, for that matter, are actually behind the wall. Instead, it’s the wall holding the entire place together.

Before Dustin can inform and warn Nancy and Jonathan about his findings, the Wheeler sibling fires a shot at the mass floating above the roof, causing a thunderous shockwave throughout the dimension and ripping “a gash” in the wall against the wormhole. This is the first time the audience really gets a glimpse of what the mass actually looks like. “I think, ultimately, we really wanted it to have that hourglass shape, because we thought that was the simplest way to communicate such a big idea to the audience,” Ross Duffer added.

“But to do that, we had to zoom out. I can’t remember how many miles away visual effects figured out that we were by the end in order to see the full shape, but we had to go way out.” They explained that although they try to show things through the characters’ perspectives, this was the moment they had to break away from that “just to show the enormity of this whole thing.”

After the discovery, Dustin and the crew make it out of the Upside Down, and the nerdiest of nerds draws a diagram on the booth at WSQK to explain to the gang what they’re locking horns with. It turns out that the mass at which Nancy fired her shotgun was “exotic matter,” which holds the wormhole as it is. “[The Duffers] literally drew that diagram at the season pitch out two years ago, because they understood, even then, that we would need visual aids,” Shawn Levy said.

The Duffers also gave credit to one of their writers, Paul Dictor, for the explanation and illustrations of the sci-fi aspects, including the alternate dimension Dustin calls “The Abyss.” As for the exotic matter, when Nancy and Jonathan reach the roof, they realise that the entire lab is seemingly melting.

Speaking of that aspect, Matt Duffer explained, “All we knew was that we wanted the lab to be melting, and weirdly, actually, that idea came less because we thought it was cool, and more from it kind of all revolved around, or started with, that scene between Nancy and Jonathan. We knew we wanted to put them in a life-or-death situation.”

Lastly, coming to The Abyss, this is the dimension which is believed to have produced all the monsters, including the Demogorgons, the Mind Flayer, and Vecna. This is the reason why the Hawkins gang haven’t been able to track Vecna in the Upside Down because he’s actually “thousands of yards above them, recovering in this alternate dimension, and that is where he’s keeping all those kids, including Holly.” While we get a glimpse of The Abyss, thanks to Holly, there are still a few loose ends Stranger Things is yet to tie up, and now, it all boils down to the gripping finale.