so everyone went to school together? not only that, at no point does Hopper bring up Henry when every boomer constantly will bring up memberberries from their teen years when interacting. Hopper's first line of dialogue would have been about henry being responsible if they planned this all from the beginning
The Duffer Brothers "clarified" this
in a recent interview with Variety magazine:
[Joyce] is, of course, decapitating the kid whom she cast in “Oklahoma.”
Matt Duffer: Yeah, I guess so!
Was there ever a scene in the 18 months after Season 4 when Hopper and Joyce realized that Henry Creel, aka Vecna, was the kid they went to high school with?
Ross Duffer: Yeah, I’m sure there was. We had a walk a fine line with the play — we don’t want to frustrate, because so much of our audience is unable to see it. To have them start talking about it would have been confusing in the context of someone who hasn’t seen the play. But I’m sure they did have that conversation.
Matt Duffer: We really needed the final season to be exactly as it would have been without the play. The play is Henry’s backstory after he’s infected by the Mind Flayer. But this is how the season was going to play out regardless.
So basically Joyce and Hopper totally realised Vecna was the weird kid in her play and discussed it, it just happened off screen! We didn't forget to write it into the show at all!
They do it with some other stuff as well:
One discussion online this morning is whether Mike made the whole thing up, or Eleven actually told him what her plan was. Or, that during the graduation, Mike realized that Eleven never could have gotten from the truck to the gate because of the kryptonite, so that’s not really her and was a projection. Discuss!
Matt Duffer: The only thing I’ll debunk is that Eleven does not communicate with Mike in any way. But what you just said at the end — yes, at graduation, he’s hearing the speakers distort because the principal is so angry, and it makes him realize that there was the kryptonite. So how could she have possibly made it all the way to the gate? Not only that: How could she have possibly used her powers to bring him into the void? But there are a lot of other questions. Could Kali have actually done that? Could she have possibly been alive? We like that it’s up to the audience. Obviously, we tell you what the characters choose.
And when you decided to bring Kali back, was it in your imagination that she could possibly help Eleven with a potential fake-out at the end? And is she alive long enough to do that?
Matt Duffer: Well, that’s the question. We wanted to bring her back for a lot of reasons. We wanted that story to have existed for a reason, and we’ve been looking for a way to bring Kali back and a reason to bring her back. And we found it this year.
This is clearly a response to the questions about Eleven's happy ending. How did Kali survive bleeding out in the Upside Down lab, the one that got exploded with C4 and immediately destabilised by the melty strange energy, and then know both when to make Eleven invisible so she could escape (when we're told Eleven couldn't have made it to the portal due to the sonar kryptonite) and also then know when to create an illusion of Eleven standing in front of the portal, especially when it's established that Kali can't do long distance illusions?
Duffer Brothers: Good question! Who knows? You can just decide what actually happened!
They doubled down on the Eleven stance in a podcast:
And as far as Eleven and the character of Eleven, we want, you know, that that was really the initial conversation that we were having is, you know, from a realistic standpoint, how does she continue to exist in the world? And we had that debate and have characters having that debate throughout the season. It's like what what could that look like? Is a happy ending? Is a happy ending possible? Like a fully happy ending where she's like married to Mike and they're living a perfectly happy life and the government has completely laid off them and they've ended their lab and their experiment and we just couldn't figure out a way for that to work. Um we love Eleven so much. So we you know we have but then there's Hopper's point of view, right, which is also extremely valid. So we we had Kali representing the point of view I just talked about and then we had Hopper representing uh the you know the the other point of view which is also very valid and I guess the the the question was is there an in between for her and that's what Mike lands on at the end and his answer is yes and that's what she chose and whether the audience believes that or not is is is up to them and we like leaving it up to them. I like to think that after having seen I don't know if you seen Wicked for Good. She's in the same place that Elphaba is at the end of Wicked for Good.
So who knows definitively? You guys have definitive answers in your head about what her ending actually is. So you write I don't know what the answer is. This is ambiguous. I mean you're writing from a point of view of understanding what the truth is, right? And the reality is-
Ross and I know and we were just talking to Millie about it, but I I don't you know, it's just I think it takes away the power of the ending if if you tell people what um what you were thinking as you were writing that.
So Millie knows definitively too? Does she have a take on this?
Yeah, I mean literally we were texting with her 30 minutes ago. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. I was gonna say
- he's not going to tell you. She's not going to tell you either. If you want to try to get
Yeah. Don't Don't waste your time.
Does Noah know?
No, no, no. Millie swore herself to secrecy.
In other words, "because we used Kali to establish the military would never leave Eleven alone, and if she got captured they'd just restart their evil world ending psychic kids program, Eleven had to kill herself. However we were scared the fanbase would get mad at us, so we tried to come up with a happy ending, but we couldn't write one that made sense so we just sort of half arsed "a wizard did it" and if you don't think it makes sense then you can choose to believe Eleven died instead".
There's other questions too. For example, if Vecna got magic powers from the magic space rock, and he's the only person who had those magic powers which is why his blood was so special, how did the scientist in the cave know to warn him that the mind flayer would take him over when the scientist himself clearly had not made contact with the mind flayer?
The Mind Flayer is the real evil, which we asked about in our Volume 1 postmortem. But if you had to define what that rock in the briefcase is, how would you describe it?
Matt Duffer: Hmm. How would we describe it?
What is it?!
Matt Duffer: I’m gonna be sketchy here, Kate, because I will say that is — can I say this, Ross? Because it’s just hard to
not say it.
Spinoffy?!
Matt Duffer: Spinoffy, yeah. You pinned us down. So annoying. I do want to explain, just because people’s expectations go in certain directions: The spinoff is going to delve into that and explain that, and you’re going to understand it. But it’s a completely different mythology. So it’s not a deep exploration of the Mind Flayer or anything like that. It’s very fresh and very new, but yes, it will answer some of the loose threads that are remaining.
Where are you with the spinoff?
Ross Duffer: We’re going to start working on it again on Monday. We’ve been working on it on and off. We’ll take a few days off.
The answer is... it's in the spinoff show we're going to make! Also we did actually explain in the play that the briefcase teleported Vecna and the scientist to Dimension X for 12 hours, but we've decided now that isn't what happened. This is a separate live action spinoff
that is not the cartoon series set in 1985 where the Stranger Things kid go on some wacky adventures including fighting off "Upside Down Pumpkin Zombies".
They ended up backpedalling on some of these questions on the podcast -
There was so much this my head is in a like I really shouldn't have done any of these postmortem interviews. I'm not in a good place. Like why the hell we did any why the hell we did any of them yesterday is beyond me.
That's the best time to talk to you when you're totally fried.
I'm like fried. I was like I'm getting over the flu, you know. So anyone mad at any answers we gave yesterday, just give me a break.
I think they'd gotten so used to explaining the plot in the series by literally getting the characters to explain what was happening, to the point of not even bothering to show the audience some of the stuff, that they thought they could plaster over plot holes by continuing to make stuff up.
