Whether you're a devoted Stranger Things fan looking for a refresher, or a casual fan looking
for a point of reference, we're digging into the history of Hawkins, Indiana's association
with the Upside Down, from the first experiments conducted at Hawkins Lab to the Battle of
Starcourt and beyond.
The chain of events that kicked things off actually began more than a decade before the
series itself.
In 1969, Dr. Martin Brenner arrives at Hawkins National Laboratory to oversee the MKUltra
program, which dosed test subjects with hallucinogenic drugs in an effort to manifest superhuman
abilities.
"She was part of some study in college."
"MKUltra."
"Yeah, that's the one."
It's through this new screening process that he eventually meets Terry Ives, who took part
in MKUltra trials at Hawkins in the early 1970s.
Though she apparently didn't know it at the time, Terry was pregnant when the trials began.
When he discovers this, Dr. Brenner hatches a plan to take control of Terry's eventual
baby at all costs.
After undergoing MKUltra trials that included some time in a sensory deprivation tank, Terry
Ives gives birth to a daughter.
She would've named her baby girl Jane, but Brenner immediately orchestrates a coverup,
claiming that Terry had actually miscarried before she was eventually discharged from
the trials.
Terry is convinced that she had a baby, and files lawsuits in an attempt to get information,
but her efforts fail.
Around 1974, Terry attempts to infiltrate Hawkins Lab and steal her baby back, but she's
apprehended.
In an effort to keep her baby secret, Brenner subjects her to intense electro-convulsive
therapy before releasing her back to her sister in a vegetative state.
For the rest of her life Terry can only repeat the sequence of events leading up to her capture
on an endless loop.
"Breathe.
Sunflower.
Rainbow.
Four fifty.
Breathe."
With the coverup seemingly secure, Brenner continues to groom Terry's daughter, who he
dubs Eleven, by forming a father-daughter bond with her and urging her to call him "Papa."
At some point in the 1970s, Eight manages to escape and flee to Chicago, where she forms
a chosen family of misfits and sets out to exact vengeance on anyone tied to the MKUltra
program.
As the '70s turn into the '80s, Brenner continues frequent testing of Eleven's abilities, which
ultimately include both telekinesis and telepathy.
He starts small, asking her to use her mind to crush a Coca-Cola can, but then attempts
to push her further by asking her to use the same ability on a living cat.
When she refuses, he attempts to confine her to a locked cell, and while resisting, Eleven
kills two guards with her mind, inadvertently granting Brenner a successful test of her
telekinesis on living tissue.
Next come more advanced tests of her telepathy, which begin by asking Eleven to listen to
the thoughts of a man elsewhere in the lab.
She's able to not only hear him, but to broadcast what he's saying over the lab loudspeakers.
Brenner then pushes further, putting Eleven in a sensory deprivation tank to test the
limits of her eavesdropping ability.
When she's pushed even further, she makes contact with a strange monster, apparently
from another world.
Brenner, intrigued by this, wants to dig deeper.
On November 6, 1983, Eleven is tasked with making contact with the monster again.
The mission goes wrong, and Eleven accidentally opens a gate between dimensions, allowing
the creature to break loose and kill scientists within Hawkins Lab before escaping.
In the chaos, Eleven also manages to flee the lab, triggering a wide search for her
during which government agents are constantly covering their tracks, on Brenner's orders.
The monster, later dubbed the Demogorgon, flees into the woods around Hawkins, and ultimately
abducts a young boy, Will Byers, who's on his way home after a game of Dungeons & Dragons
with his friends Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson, and Lucas Sinclair.
"It was a seven."
"Huh?"
"The roll.
It was a seven.
The Demogorgon.
It got me."
The Hawkins community begins an intensive search for Will, but it is ultimately his
mother, Joyce, who discovers that he's in another dimension.
During the search, another local, Barb Holland, is abducted by the Demogorgon during a party.
Will and Barb are both taken to the Demogorgon's home dimension, a dark place that the Hawkins
kids will later dub "The Upside Down."
Meanwhile, the hunt for Eleven continues, as government agents ruthlessly search for
her, killing witnesses to tie up loose ends, including the kindly owner of a local diner
who gave her food.
The killing in the diner, combined with Will Byers' disappearance, leads police chief Jim
Hopper to begin investigating these strange things in earnest.
Eleven, still on the run, meets up with Mike, Dustin, and Lucas, and ultimately convinces
them that she can help find Will.
Brenner and his government cronies engineer a dramatic cover-up, faking Will's death by
planting a dummy body in a local reservoir.
Everyone believes it's really Will except for Joyce and Eleven.
Eleven succeeds in convincing Mike by using her powers to project his voice from the Upside
Down, while Hopper follows Joyce's suspicion to the morgue and discovers the body is full
of cotton.
He decides to infiltrate the Hawkins Lab to find out what's really going on, and briefly
glimpses the gate before he's knocked unconscious and returned to his home under government
surveillance.
"You were right."
Hopper researches the lab and finds evidence of Terry Ives and the MKUltra trials.
He and Joyce travel to meet Terry and are told by her sister Becky that Terry always
believed she had a secret daughter.
Meanwhile, Barb's friend Nancy, who is also Mike's sister, and Will's brother Jonathan
have come to believe that a monster is responsible for Barb's disappearance, and Nancy briefly
enters the Upside Down while searching for it.
In an effort to amplify her eavesdropping powers, the boys build a sensory deprivation
tank for Eleven at Hawkins Middle School.
She discovers Barb died, but Will is alive, being pursued by the Demogorgon as it hops
dimensions.
Joyce and Hopper return to Hawkins Lab to confront Brenner, who reveals that he and
his men are unable to control the Demogorgon.
Meanwhile, Nancy and Jonathan return to the Byers house and set traps for the Demogorgon,
where Joyce has repeatedly seen both it and Will in the walls.
With the help of Nancy's boyfriend Steve they fight it, but it flees.
In the Upside Down, Joyce and Hopper locate Will, now pinned down and intertwined with
a large alien tendril.
They free him, and Hopper performs CPR until he's breathing again.
They return to Hawkins.
At the school, Brenner and his agents converge on Eleven when the Demogorgon suddenly appears.
Eleven confronts it directly and uses her power to apparently disintegrate it, but in
the process she herself vanishes.
A month after the Demogorgon is defeated, there are still echoes of what came before.
Brenner was attacked by the Demogorgon, and then seemed to disappear from Hawkins as the
lab came under new management.
Mike misses Eleven, and begins regular attempts to make contact with her on his radio.
Hopper, who received some mysterious information from someone in a car at the end of the first
season, begins leaving food out in the woods for Eleven to find, hoping to lure her back.
We later learn that Eleven's efforts sent her into the Upside Down.
At some point in November of 1983, she broke free, hiding in the woods before being secretly
taken in by Hopper.
Months later, in June of 1984, Russian scientists attempt to use a machine called the Key to
access the Upside Down.
They fail, and new plans are made to try to access the dark dimension from another location
via covert land purchases in Hawkins, Indiana.
In October of 1984, there's more trouble brewing.
Eleven is beginning to grow restless, using her powers to explore the possibility of contacting
Mike again.
Out in Hawkins proper, Hopper is bothered by a seemingly simple new problem: Complaints
of crop deterioration around the area, including the local pumpkin patch.
Meanwhile, Nancy and Jonathan learn that Barb's parents have convinced a private investigator
to look into their daughter's disappearance.
The biggest problem, however, is brewing within Will Byers.
Ever since he came back from the Upside Down, he's been experiencing strange symptoms connected
to it, including visions of a massive, spider-like creature towering over the horizon.
Finally, on Halloween night, Will has another vision and tells Mike that he's been seeing
things.
After a night spent trick-or-treating, Dustin comes across a strange lizard-like creature
from the Upside Down in the trash can behind his house.
Dustin names the creature D'Artagnan or "Dart" for short, and while it's initially small
enough to fit into a terrarium, it soon grows dramatically until it's the size of a dog.
Soon, the gang comes to discover there are more of them, and that they've invaded the
town through new entrances to the Upside Down in tunnels caused by the continued spread
of that dimension's influence.
As Will Byers opens up to his mother about his visions, which ultimately turn into seizures,
he begins scribbling out drawings to explain his psychic and physical links to a new creature
that the kids call the Mind Flayer.
These drawings form a map that corresponds to the dead crops Hopper's been seeing.
"The Eno River.
And there it is.
That's the Eno, don't you see it?"
When he investigates these things directly, he falls into the tunnels, revealing just
how far the contamination has spread.
Meanwhile, Eleven has begun digging through Hopper's old evidence files for information
about her mother.
She reconnects with Terry through a psychic link, uncovering Terry's failed attempt to
save her baby.
"Jane."
"Mama?"
Having recognized her mother, Eleven hitch-hikes to the Ives home, convincing Becky to let
her see Terry.
As she probes her mother's mind, Eleven is shown a vision of a little girl she used to
play with in the lab, and with the help of old photos Becky provides her, she heads for
Chicago.
There, Eleven meets Kali, who's been in hiding after her time in the lab for years, using
her perception-altering powers to survive while nurturing a group of misfits.
Kali helps Eleven to realize the full extent of her gifts, and helps her to feel as though
she isn't alone in the world.
She also lets Eleven in on her mission: Finding and killing those who were responsible for
ripping them from their families and experimenting on them.
At first, Eleven is eager to exact vengeance on bad people who harmed her and her mother,
but when she realizes Kali is asking her to purposefully and mercilessly kill people in
cold blood, she ultimately declines to be part of it, and after seeing a vision of Mike
and Hopper in danger in Hawkins as a result of the escalating activity of the Mind Flayer,
she decides to go home.
Will's increasing physical deterioration at the hands of the Mind Flayer, coupled with
the violence of the Demodogs, all suggest some sort of hive mind is at work.
This all leads to a showdown in Hawkins Lab in which numerous people, including Joyce's
boyfriend Bob, are killed.
Their struggle is helped along by the return of Eleven, and a plan is hatched: To keep
the Mind Flayer blind and distracted, Joyce, Jonathan, and Nancy will take a sedated Will
to Hopper's cabin and try to use intense heat to drive the Flayer out.
Meanwhile Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Steve, and their new friend Max will set fire to the
tunnels as a distraction.
Eleven and Hopper will sneak back into the lab, where Eleven will use her powers to close
the gate she inadvertently opened a year earlier.
The plan ultimately works.
The Mind Flayer is forced out of Will, Eleven closes the gate, and the kids all escape the
tunnels alive, with the threats from the Upside Down apparently at an end.
Due to evidence Jonathan and Nancy gathered throughout the season, Hawkins Lab is shut
down after a public outcry, and Barb is given a proper funeral.
Hopper meets with the lab's new director, Sam Owens, who grants him legal custody of
Eleven through a forged birth certificate, cementing their father-daughter relationship.
As the season ends in December of 1984, all the kids get together for the annual Snow
Ball dance, during which Eleven and Mike finally become a couple, and Max and Lucas also get
together.
As they celebrate, it's revealed that the Mind Flayer is still very much alive, and
is watching them all from the Upside Down, signaling that it's not done with its attempt
to conquer just yet.
In the early months of 1985, Russian scientists make some illicit land deals with Hawkins'
Mayor Larry Kline.
After buying property, they move into a clandestine facility beneath the Starcourt Mall and construct
a new version of the key, which marks the beginning of a new connection between our
world and the Upside Down.
On June 28, 1984, a blackout hits Hawkins and rats in the area begin flocking to the
old Brimborn Steelworks on the edge of town for unknown reasons.
This escalates when Billy Hargrove, Max's older stepbrother, crashes his car near the
Steelworks on the night of June 29.
In a daze, Billy is swept into the Steelworks and possessed by the Mind Flayer.
With the gate slowly reopening, the Mind Flayer has found a way to re-establish its hivemind
in Hawkins, breaking down the rats' bodies and using them as raw material to build itself
a horrifying new form.
Meanwhile on a hilltop outside of town, Dustin sets up a radio antenna he built while at
summer camp in an effort to communicate with his long-distance girlfriend, Susie.
He's unable to reach her, but he does pick up a strange message in Russian, which he
records and takes to Steve, who now works at the local mall.
"Pleasure to meet you.
Uh, is he here?"
"Is who here?"
"Henderson! Henderson!
He's back!"
Steve's coworker at the Scoops Ahoy ice cream shop, Robin, believes she can decipher the
code with the help of a Russian dictionary.
The now-possessed Billy abducts his co-worker at the local pool, Heather, and exposes her
to the Mind Flayer's possession as well.
As part of a sleepover prank, Eleven eavesdrops on Billy's mind and suspects something is
amiss.
Eleven and Max begin to investigate, while Jonathan and Nancy investigate the rats.
Meanwhile, Joyce alerts Hopper to some strange magnetic activity she's noticed around town,
and asks him to take her back to the Lab.
"You stand me up, no phone call, no apology, because you had to go to Scott Clark's house?"
"Yeah."
They begin investigating while Robin, Steve, and Dustin realize that the Russian message
is a code related to the Starcourt Mall itself.
Joyce and Hopper intimidate Kline, who comes clean about his ties to secret land purchases
around town.
They visit one of the properties, a farm house, and discover Russians at work in the basement,
confirming a Soviet presence in town even as the Scoops Troop at the mall is also uncovering
similar details.
Meanwhile, Will tells his friends that he can sense the Mind Flayer's presence, and
they suspect that Billy has been taken over.
The kids trap Billy in the sauna at the pool, confirming the presence of the Mind Flayer
and its hivemind, which has now infected the residents of Hawkins.
As the kids try to figure out what to do about the Mind Flayer, Dustin, Robin, Steve, and
Lucas' little sister Erica have accidentally infiltrated a Russian facility beneath the
mall.
Joyce and Hopper manage to capture Alexei, a Russian scientist, and take him to Murray
Bauman to get him to translate.
After being bribed with a Slurpee, Alexei explains the entire plot to use the key to
open the gate to the Upside Down again in Hawkins, and Hopper places a call to Owens
to ask the government to intervene.
"Dude.
You did it!
You won a fight!"
Back in Hawkins, the Mind Flayer is now aware that the kids are onto it, and begins sending
possessed people to attempt to kill or convert them.
Robin and Steve are captured in the facility and Erica and Dustin hide, and Eleven goes
into the Void, and discovers the Mind Flayer, who reveals its plan to convert all of Hawkins
to its cause, growing until it breaks out of the Steelworks.
On the night of July 4, 1985, all of the major players in Hawkins converge on Starcourt Mall.The
kids head there after Eleven sees Dustin in the Void and Dustin, Erica, Steve, and Robin
all manage to escape the underground facility.
The Mind Flayer pursues them, hoping to possess or destroy Eleven once and for all, while
Joyce and Hopper head into the facility to destroy the key and close the gate once again.
A battle ensues, with the kids distracting the Mind Flayer by throwing fireworks at it.
Down in the Soviet facility, the other team gets a little help from Dustin's girlfriend
Suzie, who provides Planck's Constant via the radio to help them gain access after singing
the theme to The Neverending Story.
Billy appears to stop Eleven, but when she uses memories of his childhood to get through
to him, Billy remembers who he really is and sacrifices himself to save her.
At the same time, Hopper battles the Terminator-like Grigori near the key, then tells Joyce to
shut the machine down.
The key explodes, the Gate closes, the Mind Flayer is destroyed, and Hopper is apparently
killed in the blast.
Outside, Sam Owens and a squadron of government agents arrive.
In October of 1985, three months after the battle of Starcourt, the Byers family, now
including Eleven as Joyce's adopted daughter, plan to move away from Hawkins.
Mayor Kline has been arrested, the Russian plot discovered, and Hawkins has become something
of a conspiracy theorist's dream town.
The biggest change of all, though, seems to be that Eleven no longer has her powers, having
been drained by her battle with the Mind Flayer.
She and Mike make a pact to see each other again for the holidays, and the Byers drive
away, after Eleven reads a speech about what Hopper wanted for her future.
At an unknown date sometime later, at a facility in Kamchatka, Russia, soldiers are shown feeding
an unnamed man to a captive Demogorgon.
Before they do, though, they mention "The American" in another cell.
The American is not named, but it's implied that it could be Jim Hopper, still alive.
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