‘The First Shadow’ Play Is Unfortunately Really Important to the Finale of ‘Stranger Things’
If you watched the Stranger Things finale on New Year’s Eve and found yourself scratching your head because the whole Vecna-Mind Flayer thing was glossed over and not addressed, you’re not imagining things.
You just happen to be one of the millions of viewers who didn’t cough up Broadway ticket prices to watch a stage play that, despite what the Duffer Brothers promised, turns out to be pretty essential homework.
Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which has been running in London’s West End since December 2023 and on Broadway since April 2025, explores Henry Creel’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) origin story. It chronicles his transformation into Vecna, his first encounter with the Mind Flayer, and his connections to a young Joyce (Winona Ryder), Hopper (David Harbour), and Bob Newby’s sister.
The play has won several awards, which is all nice and good for theatre buffs, but not so much for the tens of millions of viewers worldwide who wish to know more about the Mind Flayer and the mysterious rock Henry comes into contact with in the memory sequences.
In a Variety interview before the finale aired, Matt Duffer assured fans they “absolutely do not have to have seen the play to understand” the final season, calling the play’s revelations “Easter eggs more than anything.”
The reality? Without watching the play (or at least reading a detailed recap), viewers will never fully understand what the stone in the briefcase was, how Vecna’s blood got changed, how he ended up on Dr. Brenner’s radar, and numerous other plot threads the final season treats as established knowledge.
There’s also the connection between Joyce Byers and Henry Creel. That, on its own, would’ve been a fun bit of lore, but given the developments of the series finale, where Joyce beheads Vecna with an ax—killing her former high school classmate—it’s now a pretty significant detail that the show just… doesn’t mention. The Duffers admitted to Variety that they “had to walk a fine line with the play” because acknowledging the Joyce-Henry-Hopper school connection on screen “would have been confusing” to audiences unfamiliar with The First Shadow.
What actually happens in The First Shadow
While it would be difficult to give you a full recap of everything that happened in The First Shadow, here’s enough to fill in the gaps of what you missed by not being in Manhattan this spring.
The play opens in 1959 with the Creel family relocating to Hawkins, proving this town has been a magnet for terrible decisions long before the Byers family moved in. Young Henry is the classic misunderstood loner at Hawkins High until he meets Patty Newby, the kind-hearted daughter of the school principal.
Meanwhile, a teenage Joyce is already displaying her signature tenacity, teaming up with a young Jim Hopper and Bob to investigate a string of mysterious animal killings terrorizing the town. What they don’t realize is that their classmate Henry is the unwitting culprit, his mind increasingly hijacked by a shadowy presence that compels him to do very bad things to the neighborhood pets.
Henry’s powers grow more volatile as he struggles against the voices in his head. He can access something called “the battlefield,” a void where he’s haunted by visions of a humanoid monster that fans will recognize as the Mind Flayer. When he uses his abilities to help Patty locate her biological mother, things go sideways and he loses control, nearly killing Patty’s father and beginning his descent toward becoming a monster.
The play also incorporates a 1943 prologue involving the USS Eldridge and secret government experiments. It’s the kind of shady Cold War nonsense that would eventually birth Hawkins Lab and Dr. Brenner’s whole child-soldier program. Henry’s psychic abilities catch Brenner’s attention, and he chooses the high schooler as a candidate for One.
The First Shadow is essentially Vecna’s villain origin story, revealing all the possible junctions where he might have been saved had he drawn a better hand with friends and family, not to mention the circumstances of his childhood.
(featured image: Netflix)
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