Spoilers follow for Stranger Things Season 5 and the Broadway/West End play, Stranger Things: The First Shadow.
We only have four more episodes to go until Stranger Things is done forever, and speculation is running high. Who will die? Who will live? And how important is the series’ spin-off Broadway show, The First Shadow, to the end of the series? While we may not know the answers to the first two questions yet, we have a pretty good idea about the answer to the last one, based on what happened in the first half of Season 5. The answer is “very important,” particularly in explaining Will’s (Noah Schnapp) power-up, where Max (Sadie Sink) is hiding, and even giving some serious clues about how the Hawkins gang might finally beat Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower).
That’s a lot to unpack, and if you don’t live in New York or London, your first question might be: Wait, there’s a Broadway show? There sure is, and the live-action play written by Stranger Things writer and co-executive producer Kate Trefry is crucially tied to the overall history laid out in the series and sets up a number of plot points in the final season.
In the play, we catch up with Henry Creel (aka, the kid who will eventually become Vecna) when he and his family move into what is later known as the Creel House in Season 4 of Stranger Things. Over the course of the play, we discover just how Henry got his psychic powers, how he met Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine on TV), and even get to see a tiny little version of Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown on TV) meeting Henry for the first time.
But the play doesn’t even start with Henry. There’s actually a prologue set in 1943 that depicts the United States performing experiments in what they call “Dimension X,” as they attempt to turn submarines invisible during World War II. Unfortunately for them, they get attacked by Demogorgons, and then the action switches to 1959 Hawkins. Dimension X sounds like the Upside Down, right? Well… not exactly. There’s actually a lot of debate about the difference between the two, particularly because neither the stage play nor the TV show have been explicit about how it all works, though franchise masterminds, the Duffer Brothers, have promised that all will be explained “pretty early on” in the upcoming batch of episodes.
The Duffer Brothers have promised that all will be explained “pretty early on” in the upcoming batch of episodes.As far as we understand now, there’s the “real” world; a place that’s been called the Hellscape – aka the area Henry Creel was sent to between dimensions where he was electrocuted by lightning strikes and got real gross looking in Season 4; and Dimension X, which is where Henry met the Mind Flayer again. Meanwhile, the Upside Down is an as-yet undefined extra area – either a parallel dimension, or a bridge between the Hellscape and Dimension X, or something else entirely.
Did we just say, “met the Mind Flayer again?” This is one of the wildest twists in the play, and has huge repercussions for the TV series as well. As you may recall from the first batch of episodes that dropped on Netflix for Season 5, Max Mayfield – or at least her mind – reappeared in a strange, sunny reality that seems to be made up of Henry Creel’s memories. She’s been hiding out in one of them – a cave that Henry is clearly too terrified to enter, which is where Max breaks down how she’s alive and what happened to her to Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher). While we don’t see that cave in The First Shadow, we do hear all about it.
Dr. Brenner’s father was the only person to survive the submarine experiment in 1943, passing his knowledge on to his son. Brenner the younger established something called the Nevada Experiment, which was meant to try and access Dimension X, but one scientist went rogue, stole the equipment, and headed to – you guessed it – a cave in Nevada. Remember the spyglass Holly was using in Season 5? That’s the same spyglass Henry used to explore the cave system, dropping it just like Holly does when she runs away scared in the TV episodes. In Henry’s case, however, he and the rogue scientist are accidentally sent to Dimension X for 12 hours; there, Henry was infected by the creature later known as the Mind Flayer, and not only gained his psychic powers, but was tortured, corrupted, and driven insane by the cloud creature. So rather than Henry creating the Mind Flayer, as we’re shown in Season 4 of the TV show, the Mind Flayer – or at least an aspect of it that exists in Dimension X – created Henry, and therefore Vecna.
To be 100% clear: If you thought Henry had naturally occurring psychic abilities, you were wrong. It all comes from the infection that happened to him over those 12 hours he was missing in Nevada, which is why he’s so scared of the caves. That’s where he was driven insane. That’s where he turned evil. That’s where it all went wrong.
The twists don’t stop there, though. Thanks to Henry reconnecting with Dr. Brenner in the second act of The First Shadow, Henry’s blood containing the infection from the Dimension X Mind Flayer is harvested and injected into prospective mothers as part of the MKUltra program codenamed Indigo. There are at least 10 psychically powered babies born in that program, including – you guessed it – Eleven.
So again, to be ultra-clear – MKUltra clear, if you will – the world of Stranger Things isn’t a Firestarter or X-Men situation where some folks are born naturally with psychic abilities. Instead, they all come from the infection Henry contracted in Dimension X. This also means that if the Mind Flayer in Dimension X was destroyed or cut off, there would potentially be no more psychic powers on Earth, including those used by Vecna and Eleven.
That said, it’s possible there could be still another twist, with Eleven being the lone exception. In the play, we’re shown a family tree with all the program kids branching off from Henry, except Eleven, who he meets in the closing moments of the show. It’s possible that Eleven could be something different than Henry and his “children...” or not. Who knows?
In a roundabout way, though, this also explains how Will shockingly got powers in the final moments of “The Sorcerer.” As we saw at the beginning of Season 5, young Will was pumped full of goop during his first trip to the Upside Down, connecting him to the Hive Mind that is ostensibly controlled by Vecna. But as explained in The First Shadow, Vecna’s power comes from Dimension X. Will does not have powers on his own, because they all – Vecna, Eleven, Will, even Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) – come from the same central source. In Will’s case, he is very specifically drawing from Vecna’s power… but it all goes back to Dimension X.
There are other aspects of the play we need to discuss. When Max first describes traveling through Henry’s memories, we see a scene of Hawkins High School featuring younger versions of the parents from the TV show, and the reveal of a leaflet advertising a performance of Oklahoma featuring, among others, Henry Creel. In a nutshell, that’s the main plot of The First Shadow, following a production mounted by Joyce (played on TV by Winona Ryder), starring Henry and Patty Newby, Bob’s (played on TV by Sean Astin) sister. Henry and Patty sort of fall in love, with Patty ultimately leaving Hawkins to find her mother in Las Vegas, which is why she hasn’t appeared on the show yet. So Joyce, Hopper (played on TV by David Harbour), and Bob (RIP) all knew Henry back in high school, and even worked on a play with him. Will that ever get mentioned? It did look like Joyce wanted to shout “Henry, come on,” in that final sequence in Season 5’s fourth episode before he flipped her into the air.
Also possibly of note: In The First Shadow, Bob is hosting a pirate radio show out of a mobile rig he built that he carts around school. Well, on the TV series, Season 5’s fifth episode is titled “Shock Jock.” Though the online speculation around the episode has pointed to Robin (Maya Hawke) and Steve’s (Joe Kerry) show on WSQK, and the fact that they pointed out one could get electrocuted by the radio tower in the first episode, is it possible the shock jock of the title isn’t either of our ’80s kids getting literally shocked – it’s Bob Newby circa 1959? Given the subsequent episode is titled “Escape From Camazotz,” which references a key location in A Wrinkle in Time and suggests Holly and Max will try to flee Henry’s mindscape (which is a whole other explainer), it’s possible we could be getting some flashbacks to specific events from The First Shadow in the next episode. That could definitely establish how Joyce and Hopper know Henry, as well as why they haven’t brought it up yet. Regardless, this seems to be too important a detail not to bring up in some capacity, particularly as that otherwise extremely confusing flyer was seen on the TV series. This brings us nicely to how this whole thing might directly set up how to beat Vecna: They don’t.
There’s a running theme throughout Stranger Things that love is far more powerful than hate. If you’ve been paying attention to what we’ve laid out so far, most of what’s happened on Stranger Things isn’t Henry’s fault. He was corrupted by the Dimension X Mind Flayer, used and abused by Dr. Brenner, and even tried to escape the influence of the creature in the play thanks to his love for Patty. Joyce and Hopper know him as a weirdo, but not a bad one (at least not initially), and there’s every chance this is what Max and Holly will discover once they more fully explore his memories. Certainly it seems incredibly likely they’ll find out what happened to Henry in the cave in Nevada, and discover that he has been infected… and can potentially be cured.
There’s a running theme throughout Stranger Things that love is far more powerful than hate. That’s true in The First Shadow as well, though in that case, hate – at least with Henry – ultimately wins. In the TV show, it’s looking increasingly likely that the way to beat Vecna isn’t to kill him, but to bring him back to humanity, cut him off from Dimension X, and save the day. Beat him with love, not hate? That would definitely be worth the price of admission.
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