The countdown to Eleven and the gang's big showdown with Vecna and the Mind Flayer has
begun.
And it looks like the Upside Down's villains could well win the next battle,
It is over Eleven.
You have freed me.
You can't stop this now.
with El's failure to beat the big bad foreshadowed when Dustin rolled an 11 and failed to beat
Vecna in his D&D game at the start of Season 4.
That's a miss!
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers, I'm Jan and in this video I'm explaining all the clues to
why Eleven and co will need to use time travel to eventually defeat the show's villains.
Spoilers and speculation ahead, so take care.
The idea of time travel in Stranger Things was heavily hinted towards the end of Season
3, when Dustin, Erica, Steve and Robin stumbled into a screening of Back To The Future.
Einstein has just become the world's first time traveler!
And right off the bat in Season 4, in Eleven's opening scene she says this:
Today is Day 185.
Feels more like ten years.
Joyce says time is funny like that.
Emotions can make it speed up or slow down.
We are all time travellers if you think about it.
The idea that happy or sad feelings can affect the way we perceive time is analogous to how
Eleven draws on joyful memories, like her mother's love, to take down One in their first
confrontation, versus how Vecna exploits his victim's feelings of guilt and sorrow to trap
them, then kill them.
And there are clues right from the pilot episode, through seasons two and three, then four,
that time and its representation through clock motifs will be crucial to understanding and
defeating the villains of the Upside Down.
For starters, we know that One hated the way humans use time to impose their own sense
of order on the world, something we see during his villain's monologue while a young Henry
Creel stares at the Creel House grandfather clock
Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades.
Each life a faded, lesser copy of the one before.
The way he reverses the hands on the grandfather clock, not only points to his disdain for
the norms of how time usually works, but it's also a little clue to time reversal and travel
in the show.
And given the Alice in Wonderland reference via his sister's name,
It looks like a fairy tale.
when the young Henry kills a rabbit, it's not surprising as it's like he's killing the
character who was obsessed with time in the Lewis Carroll story.
It's also curious how all the way back in the first season, when Eleven makes her first
contact with the Demogorgon, the event that rips open a gate to the Upside Down in Hawkins,
there's the sound of a clock ticking while she's in the Void, hinting at Vecna's presence
in the background.
There's also a chiming sound effect in Season 1's first episode after Will sees the Demogorgon
and falls off his bike.
Then at the very end of Season 2 episode 4, after Hopper goes into the Mind Flayer's tunnels,
you can hear the sound of a clock ringing.
And in the third season, just after the Mind Flayer possesses Billy and he gets pulled
into the Upside Down, there's the sound of clocks chiming in the background.
What do you want?
And after Billy comes out of that vision, you can also hear a gong as he staggers around
suffering from being in the heat and the sun.
The Hawkins clocktower also appears in the first shot of the Horror in the Heartland
news report in Season 3, which is also another Back To The Future easter egg given the importance
of the clocktower to time travel in that movie.
And thanks to two of our amazing movie lovers, Rebecca Strain and Arianna, for noticing that
Max's counsellor Ms Kelly wears a clock necklace, which I think also looks rather like a key,
a possible hint that time will be the answer to how the gang eventually defeat Vecna.
Another possibility for this detail is that it's a hint that Ms Kelly is being used in
some way by Vecna or the Mind Flayer, similar to how Will and Billy were spies for the villain.
After all, Max discovered the therapist had been helping Chrissy and Fred, both of whom
end up as Vecna's victims.
Fred was seeing Ms. Kelley too.
Another clock-related detail that another of our awesome movie lovers Chris Vellner
pointed out is how Black Widow spiders often have hour glass markings on their abdomen,
something you can see when a young Henry Creel is drawing one, a lethal clue also to how
once Vecna ensnares you, the countdown begins to your death.
There's also a deep-cut time-related connection between One and Watchmen, as the same musical
theme plays when One reveals his origin story as also plays during the birth of Dr Manhattan.
Like Stranger Things, Watchmen heavily features clock motifs, and Dr Manhattan also has the
ability to experience time in a non-linear way.
Both the awakening of Henry Creel's powers and Dr Manhattan's birth take place in 1959,
and on top of that the main events of Season 4 take place in 1986, the same year that the
Watchmen comics were first published.
And the way Eleven evaporates One into dust, sending him into the Upside Down where he
becomes Vecna, has parallels with the way Jon Osterman is evaporated by accident during
a radioactive particle test and disappears before becoming Dr Manhattan.
Now, a character a lot of you have been asking about is Eight, aka Kali, Eleven's lost sister
who she met back in Season 2.
She's mentioned in Season 4 by One when he's talking to Eleven:
Do you remember the day a strange woman came to see you?
This would've been when Eight was still here.
It seems pretty clear then that Eight used her powers to cast illusions to escape the
lab before One went on his rampage and killed the other test subjects.
And I think she'll be back before everything is over to help Eleven take down Vecna and
the Mind Flayer.
Or, given her hatred of Brenner and the Hawkins lab, it's possible she could ally with One
instead.
In fact, there was some foreshadowing of her return in the crossword that Brenner completes
in the opening scene.
One of the clues is for the "Wife of Shiva", the answer to which is Kali.
In the Hindu tradition, Kali is the Goddess of Time, Change and Death, and perhaps together
with Eleven, they will find a way to reverse an event in time.
Also next to the crossword in that newspaper is another clock-related easter egg with an
ad for a jewellers and watchmakers who offer "watch repairing" services.
Now, if any of these clues seem too coincidental, it's worth remembering that the Duffer Brothers
have said that right from the very beginning of the series, they wrote a 25-page document
which outlined all the mythology for the show and the Upside Down and how it worked.
Plus, the show's set decorator has said that 'every item, every tiny piece of set dressing,
is intentional.'
So, Dustin's Sherlock Holmes quote...
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
... is basically telling us that the clues and answers to the mysteries behind Stranger
Things are all laid out in little details in the show.
On top of that, before it was renamed Stranger Things, the original title for the show was
Montauk.
Montauk is the name of a real-life place on Long Island which has inspired numerous conspiracy
theories about experiments carried out at the military base there.
According to Wikipedia, a book called "The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time" claims
experiments at the government facility opened "a porthole in time" that "allowed […] travel
[to] anywhere in time or space" via a "time tunnel".
The book also describes the time an alien monster travelled through the tunnel, causing
damage and killing numerous people before it was killed.
A lot of evidence then points to time travel playing some crucial part in Stranger Things
before the final season is over, and the Duffer Brothers have said that the first part of
Season 4 is the beginning of the end, so to quote the Time-manipulating wizard Doctor
Strange, We're in the Endgame now.
I think it's possible that Season 4 will end on a cliffhanger, perhaps a tragedy affecting
one of the main characters that will need some kind of time travel to fix.
This could be similar to Avengers: Infinity War where the heroes lose, and many of them
seemingly die, only to eventually return in Endgame when the Avengers use time travel
to fix things.
The most extreme outcome could be that all the show's events are undone so that Eleven
is never taken from her mother and lives a normal, happy life.
I don't think wiping out the entire story would be especially popular though, so let's
hope whatever is planned is something more interesting than that.
Funnily enough, there was a Rick and Morty easter egg in Season 4, via the name Rick
Sanchez which appears on the list of Ricks that the gang searches for at the video store.
Interestingly, Rick and Morty, a show which features multiple alternate universes, initially
had a no-time-travel rule until it introduced a whole episode to show why time travel was
such a bad idea.
Of course, Stranger Things is always loaded with incredible details, such as the hidden
sound effect that reveals how as a child Henry Creel might have got his powers from the Upside
Down, which I explain in my Season 4 easter eggs video.
Tap here to watch that or follow the link in the video description.
So, movie lovers, how do you think time travel will end up being used in Stranger Things?
Or do you think there's another way to defeat Vecna and the Mind Flayer?
Let me know in the comments below.
Next, tap here for my full breakdown of the ending of Volume 1 and what else to expect
in the big Part 2 finale.
And if you liked this video, do leave a thumbs-up, I really appreciate it.
Thanks for enjoying Stranger Things with me and hope you have a marvellous movie-loving
week!
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!