‘Stranger Things’ Season 5’s First Episode Now Has An Official Title

On November 6, 1983 , Will Byers went missing in Hawkins, Indiana. The boy simply vanished. His friends were mystified. His mother in a panic. Nobody knew where Will had gone, and many suspected the worse. What nobody expected was that the boy had been taken by a monstrous Demogorgon into a mysterious and terrifying alternative plane called the Upside Down.

That date has since become Stranger Things Day, and on Stranger Things Day you can usually expect a tidbit of new information about the show, or some other fan service.

I completely forgot that yesterday was Stranger Things Day, so I’m a bit late to this news, but even if it’s just a tiny tidbit of new info about the next season, it’s still fun.

The first episode of Stranger Things 5 finally has an episode title, and it raises some interesting questions and inevitably will lead to plenty of fan theories and speculation.

The official Stranger Things Twitter account shared a picture of the first page of the screenplay for the very first episode of the show:

Chapter One: The Crawl, written by the Duffer Brothers, is the somewhat ominous sounding title for the Season 5 premiere.

Fans are speculating that the ‘crawl’ refers to dungeon-crawling, which you often do in Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games. In D&D, a dungeon crawl is where a band of adventurers heads down into some kind of cave or maze or dungeon and fights monsters and solves puzzles and springs traps and eventually fights some kind of boss before escaping with whatever loot and treasure they found along the way.

Of course, all the best titles for TV shows have a double (or triple!) meaning, and this could be the case with Stranger Things as well. Granted, many of the show’s past episode titles have been pretty straightforward (not much to glean from The Hellfire Club other than it’s the name of the D&D club Eddie ran—RIP—and the name of Stranger Things 4’s opening episode).

If this is about a dungeon crawl, we could see our heroes return to The Upside Down in the very first episode of the show, which the show’s creators say “is more really like Part 2 of Season 4.” That makes sense. There can’t really be a time-jump as some speculated, because the demonic world is spilling over into the real world in the Season 4 finale.

Filming of Stranger Things 5 begins in 2023, so you can add it to the list of shows—from House of the Dragon to Rings Of Power—not returning until at least 2024.