Stranger Things fans suspected from the start that El's number eleven tattoo meant she was
just one of several test subjects experimented upon at Hawkins Lab.
And Season 2 confirmed that with the appearance of Kali, aka number Eight.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers, it's Jan here, and today I want to delve deep into some hidden
clues you may have missed in Season 2 which reveal secrets about more young people likely
abducted by Hawkins Lab for experimentation and who may appear in Season 3 and beyond.
Obviously, I'll be discussing spoilers from both seasons, so take care if you're not up-to-date.
Kali and El's tattoos suggest there are at least nine other test subjects in Project
MK Ultra.
And given that the lost sisters, who spent time together in the Lab's Rainbow Room, have
different powers to each other, with Kali being able to cast illusions, we can assume
the other young people subjected to the Lab's experiments may also have developed different
abilities.
Although Kali herself doesn't mention any other Hawkins test subjects, Eleven learned
about her lost sister when she read her mother's mind and investigated further with the files
her Aunt Becky gave her.
And it's in those files that we get some glimpses of news reports about abductions and missing
children and mothers.
Kali's file was among those papers so it's very likely that Eleven's mother thought those
reports were connected to Project MK Ultra and the Hawkins Lab.
The first file that Eleven flips past is a news clipping about a Cleveland girl who's
gone missing in Indiana.
The report states that a 16-year old junior-high-school Honors student and girls-basketball team captain
from Ohio went missing at some point after leaving an Indiana junior-high gym to go back
to her bus that was returning home.
There's no date on this clipping, but it's eerie that this potentially has a connection
to the ending of season 2 where we see the Shadow Monster in the Upside Down looming
over the Hawkins Middle School gym.
The news report also states that the girl's father is a widower, so she has a missing
mother, and her father describes her as a genius and exceptionally strong for her age.
This could mean her mother was experimented on at Hawkins or elsewhere, and after leaving
the MKUltra project, gave birth to a girl with special gifts.
The mother could have later died from the effects of the experiments, but the Hawkins
Lab learned about the gifted girl and abducted her while she was visiting Indiana.
There's also another intriguing possibility, though, which is that the girl was actually
playing basketball at Hawkins Middle School itself, where we know there's a portal that
both a Demogorgon and Eleven used to cross between the Upside Down and the real world.
Well, if this girl was gifted like Eleven, she might have stumbled across the portal
and travelled to the Upside Down either willingly or accidentally, where perhaps she got lost.
Or maybe she even created that portal in Hawkins Middle School in the first place?
OK, so if that's not crazy enough yet, there's more in the clipping.
The news report continues, mentioning that a girl matching the missing girl's general
description was later discovered wandering around an Indiana suburb.
There are various possibilities here.
One is that this girl was abducted by the Hawkins Lab but she escaped and they managed
to find her and take her back to the facility before she got to safety.
Another possibility is that the Hawkins Lab guys arranged for a similar-looking girl to
be seen in the neighbourhood as a way of trying to hide the fact that the real girl had gone
missing or they could simply have had Kali use her powers to cast an illusion, making
it look like the girl was still out there.
Remember, they've done these kinds of things before, for example, releasing a fake dead
body for Will to cover up the fact that he'd gone missing in the Upside Down.
Alternatively, another pretty far-fetched possibility, which may have sped through your
mind if you're a fan of The Flash TV show, is that the Upside Down is a replica of our
world, just that's it's been corrupted by the Shadow Monster.
After all, we see the same buildings from Hawkins in the Upside Down, so could there
have been doppelganger versions of people somewhere in the alternate dimension, and
a doppelganger of the missing girl was sent to our world from the Upside Down?
OK, back to the other reports.
Behind the Cleveland clipping is another one that only has some very sparse details.
The title appears to read "Another Girl Lost" and you can see the words "go Police" mentioned
in the tiny bit of the report which is showing, perhaps suggesting that the Chicago police
were mentioned.
If that's the case, then it looks like a Chicago girl has disappeared too.
Another file which Eleven flicks past mentions a baby boy abducted from a Memphis hospital.
The circumstances reported around the abduction are particularly suspect as the account states
that the boy went missing with a nurse who turned up for work unexpectedly after being
off sick for a week.
The article then states that the nurse was discovered dead from a gunshot wound at her
house, but the boy was missing.
It sounds like the nurse was probably used by the Hawkins Lab or MK Ultra project to
abduct the boy and then she was killed to avoid her squealing.
The fact she was off sick and then suddenly appeared at work may suggest she spent time,
either willingly or under coercion, at the Hawkins Lab or another secret government facility.
It seems like the MK Ultra project were looking for the child's mother because she was probably
an ex-test subject and they needed the nurse to find out when or where she was going to
give birth.
The fact that the show's gone to the effort of putting so much information and a photo
in this clipping makes me think this is another gifted character which the showrunners could
be setting up to appear in a future season.
There's also something intriguing in another newspaper clipping just behind the baby boy
article.
If you look carefully, there's some text about someone missing from San Diego.
San Diego is, of course, in California, and we know that two new main characters, Max
and Billy, moved from California to Hawkins in season 2, though we don't know where from
exactly.
We do know that Billy has a lot of issues though, some of which may be explained by
his authoritarian, bullying father, but we don't know anything about Billy's mother and
why his father is no longer with her.
In some ways, Billy's introduction in season 2 was a bit sketchy and perplexing as he was
a real jerk pretty much the whole time, so I do wonder whether the showrunners decided
to include him more for potential future storylines.
And, in fact, the Duffer Brothers have said that they wanted to have a 'human villain
in the [show] that could disrupt the lives of [their] characters.'
So, it's a long-shot, but I wonder if there's any potential connection between Billy's mother
and this possible missing child or person in San Diego.
There's also one more set of clippings which are a bit more cryptic.
One says a mother and daughter from Pawtucket have gone missing.
There's also a picture of a young boy which mentions a county hospital.
And another article seems to talk about a wave of disappearances of children and teens.
At the bottom of the piece, there's mention of the Gary Police Department and Gary is
a small city in Indiana, not far from Chicago.
Now, I don't expect we'll see all of these reported abductions or missing children in
future seasons.
Some of the children or adults may be dead, long gone or not important for the overall
storyline the Duffer Brothers want to tell in the show.
Some may also just be random reports that are unconnected to the Hawkins Lab.
However, I do think that the missing baby boy and the missing girls-basketball captain
are very specific and detailed reports that I think we'll see feed into either season
3 or 4.
By the way, if you cast your mind back to Season 1, you'll remember that, when Hopper
was reading newspaper articles about Dr Brenner, one of them mentioned six subjects coming
forward to give testimony about the Project MK Ultra experiments, and alongside that there
was a picture of young women dressed in the kind of hospital gown we see El wear when
she first escapes from the Lab.
So, just as Terry Ives, who took part in the MK Ultra Project, gave birth to a gifted daughter
in the form of Eleven, any of those women in that photograph could also be the mothers
of similarly gifted children who'll appear in the show going forward.
On top of that, given Kali's awesome power to make people see whatever she wants them
to, there's the possibility that Hopper's flashbacks to his last days with his daughter
are merely memories of illusions the Hawkins Lab made him see, and that really his daughter
Sara was also one of the children abducted and experimented on.
Something else I think is interesting is the strong X-Men vibe to the show, which has been
clear since the very first episode.
Eleven already has powers reminiscent of various X-Men like Professor X, Magneto and Jean Grey
and I wonder whether the Duffer Bros are considering potentially teaming El up with multiple gifted
individuals like Kali and others out there who we've yet to meet.
I love how the seasons have developed so far, but if the Shadow Monster is going to be an
ongoing big bad, at some point I imagine it will take more than just what Eleven can currently
do to defeat it.
It's possible that Eleven could continue to power up, as she has done this season, but
it wouldn't surprise me if eventually the monster's defeat ended up being a group effort.
So, what do you think about having more gifted children or individuals showing up in future
seasons of Stranger Things?
And do you have any theories or predictions on who they'll be and what powers they'll
have?
Let me know what you think in the comments below and don't forget to also subscribe to
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Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!