Stranger Things confirms Max return in Season 5 – but there’s a catch

One of the creators of Stranger Things has confirmed that Max Mayfield will return, but there’s a catch to it.

Netflix‘s break-out hit series Stranger Things is gearing up for its final run as filming for their fifth and final season is underway.

The show – which began in 2016 – follows a group of kids from Hawkins, Indiana as they continue to have run-ins with both supernatural and human threats to themselves and the world.

Stranger Things has a colorful cast of characters, most of which will be returning for Season 5, including fan favorite Max Mayfield. However, there’s a big catch to her return to the small screen.

Max is back in Stranger Things, but not in the way fans want

When we last saw Max, she was suffering the physical and psychological consequences of her battle with Vecna, the superpowered evil entity that is acting as the final boss of the series.

In the final moments of Season 4, fans were relieved to see that Max was still alive but was laid up in the hospital in a coma.

Ross Duffer, one of the co-creators of the series, recently posted a photo of Sadie Sink, who plays Max, to Instagram where she can be seen awake and smiling in a hospital bed, which led fans to believe Max’s return in the beginning of Season 5 will see her being awake from her coma.

However, Duffer did crush any hopes of her speedy recovery with the clarifying caption, “FYI this is a pic of Sadie, not Max. Max is in a coma.”

instagram.com/rossduffer

So, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like fans will be able to reunite with the sassy Max they know and love until further into Season 5… if it happens at all.

One of the biggest speculations around the final season of Stranger Things is that some of the main cast won’t make it out of the final battle in Hawkins, so there is a chance that Max could never wake from her coma and become one of Season 5’s biggest casualties.