I Really Need Stranger Things Season 5 To Reveal What’s Happened To One Missing Character

Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 1 are ahead!

The first four episodes of Stranger Things Season 5 premiered on the 2025 TV schedule last week, and there was a lot for fans with a Netflix subscription to take in. Among the highlights were Will Byers’ unique powers fully awakening and the return of Kali Prasad, better known as Eight. While these moments and many others made the first half of Season 5 enjoyable to watch, I really need the show to clear up what’s happened to one missing character before all is said and done: Paul Reiser’s Dr. Sam Owens.

Where We Last Saw Dr. Owens

After being introduced in Stranger Things Season 2 and making a cameo in the Season 3 finale, Dr. Owens returned in a prominent capacity during Season 4. He joined forces with Dr. Martin Brenner for the program NINA, which was supposed to bring Eleven’s powers back. That objective was accomplished, but then Lt. Colonel Jack Sullivan arrived at the scene to screw everything up.

Believing Eleven to be responsible for the murders happening in Hawkins, Indiana during this period of the show, Sullivan and his soldiers stormed the NINA facility to find and kill Eleven. Owens pleas to spare Millie Bobby Brown’s character went unheeded, and after one of Sullivan’s snipers shot Brenner, he gave the order for Eleven to be gunned down as well. However, Eleven used her newly-revived telekinesis to crash the helicopter the sniper was aboard into the ground. Brenner died from his wounds and Eleven escaped with Mike, Will, Jonathan and Argyle (who unfortunately isn’t back for Season 5), but what happened to Owens was never revealed.

Why I Want Dr. Owens To Return

Dr. Owens is an important enough character that if Stranger Things was going to kill him off, we would have seen it. So then what happened to him? I assume Sullivan took him into custody, but has he simply been held in a prison cell since we last saw him? Or was Owens deemed important enough to be forced to work under Dr. Kay, whether it be at her base in the Upside Down or under watchful supervision elsewhere?

Whatever the answer is, I need to know it. Not only is it a pretty big plot thread that’s been left dangling, but Dr. Owens is arguably the sole sympathetic U.S. government character we’ve gotten on Stranger Things. That’s not to say he hasn’t made mistakes or always been on the right side of the line, but overall he’s been an ally to the main characters. He deserves more than to be condemned to the list of characters whose fates are left a permanent mystery.

We still have four episodes left to go in Stranger Things’ final season, and the series finale will be over two hours long. So there’s still plenty of time for Sam Owens to come back into the picture, but I’ll spend these next few weeks continuing to wonder if that will actually happen. The three Volume 2 episodes drop Christmas Day, and the last episode arrives on New Year’s Eve.