Vecna’s attack, Nancy and Jonathan

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Season 5, Part 1 of ‘Stranger Things.’

Ever-calculating, ever-scheduling, consistently confident Vecna ​​Crawl team leader Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) made a mistake in the fifth and final season premiere of “Stranger Things”: not telling her parents and sister that monsters were real.

Now that mistake could cost Nancy and Mike’s mother (Finn Wolfhard), Karen (Cara Buono), father Ted (Joe Chrest) and sister Holly (Nell Fisher) their lives, as Vecna ​​has unleashed the entire Wheeler family upside down to get his hands on Holly and use her in his overall plan for world domination.

What was the reasoning Nancy and Mike used for not informing the other Wheelers of Vecna’s threat in a place as twisted as Hawkins, where giant rifts opened in the ground in the Upside Down at the end of Season 4?

“This was actually a conversation with the Duffers,” Dyer said Variety. “When we discovered what has happened since then, what did we say to people? What did we explain? You have a military presence everywhere, and I think there is a sense – especially within Nancy – that you want to protect. I think in this scenario, especially like with her family, sometimes you feel like not telling means protection.”

It turned out not That turns out to be the case, and now Karen and Ted are in critical condition in hospital – and Holly has been taken by Vecna.

“With the whole situation now, there’s a lot of guilt,” Dyer said. “She’s obviously lost people in her life before in this, and I think for her it feels like a failure. It’s really, really hard. You try to do what you think is right at the time, and it still doesn’t work. But I think this is also a moment of connection for the Wheelers. I think it’s a galvanizing moment for what they have to do for them. It was a very impactful way for Nancy, I think, to start the season – to have that moment of something like that, you think you can done, and then that’s it not have it together. You have no control over the situation.”

Amid the war with Vecna ​​and the looming danger to her family, Nancy faces a much less serious dilemma, but one of great interest to ‘Stranger Things’ fans: her relationship with boyfriend Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) and whether she will ultimately end up with him, or old flame Steve Harrington (Joe Keery).

“This is a pressure cooker situation,” Dyer said of Nancy and Jonathan’s lack of intimacy and romance in the first few episodes of Season 5. “Obviously, they were apart for a long time last season, and when they got back together — I mean, there’s so much pressure and stress. It puts it into perspective, I think: what’s important, what you care about, what you can spend your energy on, what it’s asking of you. And I think in a situation where you’ve been confronted with death, with monsters, with these elements, grows there.

“She’s definitely in a place where she’s running at a survival level, but still figuring out herself and figuring out her life, and even what does a life look like and will there be a life?” Dyer said. “There’s definitely friction, but I think her focus right now is on fighting Vecna, doing these crawls, doing that planning work.”

Does Dyer ultimately care whether Nancy – if she makes it to the end of “Stranger Things” – ends up with Jonathan, Steve, someone else or no one? She does.

“Nancy’s future is important to me,” Dyer said. “After ten years, you can’t help but feel really invested in these characters and their story. You want them to end in a way that feels good. Not just the idealistic, most perfect, beautiful version – but when you’ve been through this, you want them to come out with something that feels like it’s earned or deserved, or that makes sense.”

“And I think that was always my focus,” she continued. “Everything has to feel good.”