Listen up nerds! Stranger Things is back and that means it’s time to tease up our hair, slap on our denim vests, and roll the twenty-sided die! Going back into the world of Hawkins means this article is going to be full of demigorgons, eighties homages, curses, and of course some very large spoilers. So if you haven’t seen the season yet, or you care about spoilers at all, please read no further. Because this whole article is one big spoiler! I can not stress this enough! Spoilers ahead!
The Mystery of Stranger Things Season 4
When we left our gang in season 3, the Hawkins mall was mostly destroyed, Billy was killed, Hopper was presumed dead, and The Byers family (with Eleven in tow) was sent to California in order to lay low and presumably get a fresh start. When season 4 picks up, we see that the kids have not been adjusting to high school, (or any of their new surroundings) well.
Lucas is on the basketball team and trying to distance himself from his nerdy friends. Dustin and Mike have joined up with Eddie “the Freak’s” D&D club. Max is pushing everyone away while she struggles to cope with her brother’s death. Nancy and Jonathan are trying to make a long-distance relationship work, but Jonathan is sucking as per usual. Steve and Robin are working in a video store, trying to be each other’s wingman. Joyce discovers that Hopper is alive and a prisoner in a Russian gulag. Eleven, now without her powers, is being bullied at her new school and hiding it from Mike, while Will is frustrated, mostly because he is now a fully grown man with a Dumb and Dumber style bowl cut. Oh yes, and freaky teen murders are once again popping up all over Hawkins.
These murders obviously have a connection to the Upside Down and that means once again Eleven is tapped to come in a stop them. However, because her powers are now blocked, Sam Owens brings Eleven back to the nefarious, and strangely attractive “Papa” (Matthew Modine), so that he can unlock them. This means taking Eleven back to her earliest memories in the lab and forcing her to confront some very dark truths about her past. While sifting back through her memories she returns again and again to her time with a friendly orderly played by Jamie Campbell Bower. The orderly bonds with her and reveals to her secrets about the lab and “Papa.”
Who is Henry Creel?
Meanwhile, the gang back in Hawkins has connected the murders to a powerful psychic being (who they refer to as Vecna, one of the antagonists in their D&D game) in the Upside Down who traps people in their worst memories before killing them in an extremely gruesome manner. They discover that a similar series of murders were committed back in the 1950s when a man named Victor Creel was convicted of killing his entire family. He now lives locked up in the local insane asylum. When they visit him, he tells them that it was actually a demon that haunted his family, first killing small animals around their property, and then murdering his wife Virginia, along with his daughter Alice, and son Henry.
What is his fate?
This is Stranger Things, and that means everything is connected. The friendly orderly that has befriended Eleven, reveals himself to be One – the very first psychic child brought into the lab. Unfortunately for Eleven, when she helps him remove a special chip that was blocking his abilities, he retaliated by murdering all of the other children in the lab and many of the guards and scientists. Because it turns out that One’s real name is Henry Creel, Victor’s not actually dead son. Not only that, but Henry was the one responsible for murdering his family, not his father. He used his psychic powers for evil, practicing on animals before killing his family when his mother figured it out.
When Eleven refuses to join him in his mad quest for world domination, he attacks her and she unleashes the full force of her powers for the first time, and in doing so sends him into the Upside Down. The force of this ejection mutilates his body and also in a way infuses it with the strange matter of the alternate dimension… transforming him into the tentacled monster the kids in Hawkins have dubbed Vecna. He is the one that has been terrorizing the town via his psychic connections to the hidden pain and suffering of Hawkin’s youth. Henry is One is Vecna.
But will Eleven and her friends be able to stop him again? Unfortunately, we have to wait for Volume 2 to find out!
(Image: Netflix)
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