Stranger Things Season 5 Requires Knowledge Of The Spin-Off You Probably Haven't Seen
by Joe Roberts · /FilmThis post contains spoilers for "Stranger Things" season 5, episode 5, "Shock Jock."
"Stranger Things" is finally coming to an end with season 5, and the show is doing its best to tie up all its loose ends before the finale. That's going to be a tough task, though, because there are a ton of loose ends to tie in a show this lore-dense. A flashback in episode 5 has confirmed that season 5 is linked directly to "Stranger Things: The First Shadow," the stage show that not everyone will have seen. That means there's some required reading if you really want to understand the final season of "Stranger Things," which frankly feels like a terrible move on the part of the Duffer Brothers.
Netflix's "Stranger Things" stage play explored the origins of the Upside Down, which was simultaneously exciting and a bit of a bummer for fans who didn't want to buy pricey theater tickets just to learn an important piece of lore about the show. "The First Shadow" was conceived by show creators Matt and Ross Duffer and written by Kate Trefry, debuted in December 2023, and acted as a prequel to the Netflix series, telling the origin story of Henry Creel (played in the show by Jamie Campbell Bower). In the series, Henry eventually becomes Vecna, the disfigured big bad who, in season 5 of "Stranger Things," is more deadly than he's ever been. In the stage play, he starts out as little Henry Creel.
"The First Shadow" reveals how Henry is effectively patient zero for all the telekinetically-gifted kids in the "Stranger Things"-verse and how he gave rise to the Eleven (Milly Bobby Brown) we all know. If you haven't seen the play, however, episode 5 of "Stranger Things" season 5 might be a tad confusing.
Stranger Things: The First Shadow reveals the true origin of Henry and Eleven
"Stranger Things: The First Shadow" tells the story of how Henry Creel struggled with his telekinetic abilities as a child and was plagued by visions of the mind-flayer, which at one point caused him to injure his own father. After this, Henry's mother sends her son to Dr. Martin Brenner, who, in the show, was played by Matthew Modine (who hates his character). The doctor grew up obsessed with paranormal phenomena following an incident experienced by his father, and becomes part of a project in the 1950s known as the Nevada Experiment, which aimed to recreate the events of that earlier incident. Ultimately, Brenner tries to harness the power imbued into his own father and eventually Henry by their exposure to an alternate dimension known as Dimension X. It's already confusing, isn't it?
In the stage play's epilogue, we learn that Brenner eventually took Henry's blood and infused test subjects with it as part of his experiments in Hawkins. This is how Milly Bobby Brown's Eleven gained her powers in the first place, and we even get a glimpse at a young Eleven meeting Henry for the first time.
Now, the show itself has established a direct link to the play via Kali Prasad's (Linnea Berthelsen) episode 5 flashback, in which she recounts how she escaped from Dr. Kay's (Linda Hamilton) lab and discovered rooms with pregnant women being pumped full of blood. She then confirms that Dr. Brenner injected Eleven's pregnant mother with Henry's blood, which means that Henry/Vecna essentially created Eleven. But if you haven't seen the stage play, you might have wondered what all this "injecting pregnant women" stuff was about.
The last thing Stranger Things needs is more dense lore
It's always a drag when you have to do extensive homework just to understand how things are supposed to have played out in the world of your favorite show or movie. It's part of the reason the MCU became such a slog, with multiple streaming series piling up and resulting in fans often having to watch middling shows just to be able to fully understand the movies. Unfortunately, the "Stranger Things" timeline now practically demands this type of homework — especially if you haven't seen "The First Shadow."
The show was already getting pretty complicated before season 5 arrived. Across the previous four seasons, we've learned so much about the mysterious happenings in Hawkins that it's quite a lot to ask audiences to retain it all between seasons, no matter how many swift recaps you tack on to the beginning of each season. It also means characters are constantly reiterating things and saying out loud what's happening, which just makes for some less-than-impressive writing. Now we're also expected to have some knowledge of the stage play in order to understand Kali's flashback and fully comprehend what in the heck is actually going on in season 5? That would be bad enough, but the play itself is also a labyrinth of a story, spanning multiple time periods and introducing a whole new dimension that's similar to the Upside Down but not actually the same.
If you're a "Stranger Things" die-hard, no doubt this is all thrilling stuff. But if, like the majority of viewers, you tune in for some '80s nostalgia and high-budget sci-fi horror adventures, however, it's probably just tedious, and season 5 isn't really helping in that regard.
"Stranger Things" season 5, volume 2 is now streaming on Netflix.