Fridge Brilliance
- Abra taking on Emerald's appearance when Rose entered her mind makes sense largely because Emerald's semblance is hallucinations. Even more so when you realize that, like Abra, Emerald fights someone with the name of Rose (albeit it's Ruby's last name).
- Azzie, the hospice's cat, has the habit to visit patients whose death is imminent. One evening, Dan notices Azzie enters a room and points there's currently no patient in this one, yet Dan follows Azzie anyway, where he meets Dick Halloran's ghost and chats with him. Among other things, Dick tells Dan he won't visit him anymore, so... in a sense, Azzie did announce a (metaphorical) death.
- Also, it's Dick Halloran's *ghost*. His body might not be there, but it's still a dead person in the room.
- Danny setting up Rose the Hat's elaborate death "trap" of luring her to the Overlook Hotel seems like Complexity Addiction when Dan could simply try to shoot her, but it makes sense as Dan and Abra felt the Cruel and Unusual Death of Baseball Boy acutely through the Shining and would likely desire a measure of revenge against Rose. Indeed, Abra enjoys tormenting Rose with a similar shank used on Bradley when Rose gets suckered into Dan's mind world. It's also not farfetched that Dan would feel a measure of relief feeding Rose to the Overlook Hotel's starving ghosts. As a bonus, Dan is in a position to destroy the Overlook Hotel and exact revenge against the Genius Loci.
- This also ties well into the trap that Danny and Billy set up to take out the members of Rose's pack. It's likely that Danny or Abra knew that Rose would feel the deaths of her friends. They made sure that they suffered, so that Rose could feel that suffering too. Notably, when Danny and Billy snipe True Knot members with hunting rifles, the pseudo-immortality works against them by prolonging their dying rather than allowing a merciful Instant Death Bullet.
- One of the common mistakes initially pointed out between The Shining and Doctor Sleep is the fact that Danny Lloyd, who played Danny in the original film, has brown eyes. Ewan McGregor, who plays Danny in the followup, has blue eyes. In a couple of scenes that were in the Director's Cut, which were removed for the theatrical release, shows that Danny used his Shining ability to change his eye color because Wendy couldn't keep eye contact with him due to them being brown like his father's.
- Intentionally or not, the line "the mind is a blackboard, and [alcohol] is the eraser" in the bar scene between Danny and Jack, is reminiscent of a line from Locke & Key: "your body is a lock, and death is the key". This line is uttered in the final scene by Rendell Locke, the patriarch of the Locke family, to his adult son Tyler, who has temporarily brought him back from the grave for a chat. Locke & Key is, of course, written by Joe Hill, son of Stephen King. A line between a dead father and his living son, based on a line between a dead father and his living son, borrowed by an elder father from his younger son.
- Many have taken issue with the fact that the make-up used on Henry Thomas to make him look like Jack Torrance doesn't work and he doesn't look like how Jack did in the original movie. However, some people believe that this was done intentionally: Dan was only six years old when he and his family came to the Overlook, so it's likely that he doesn't have any accurate memories of what his father actually looked like.The Bartender: I'm afraid you've confused me with someone else.
- This would account for certain flashbacks to the events of The Shining that turn up in this film. One such example, when Rose is seeing Danny's memories as she consumes his steam, there is a shot of Danny running from Jack that is shown to be within the same hallway as Room 237, which is not seen in the original film (as Jack starts after Danny after killing Dick in the lobby, with Danny running through the first floor of the hotel before ending up outside to go to the hedge maze). Danny remembers being chased by his ax wielding and crazed father, but doesn't remember it quite right either (and probably remembers the chase being much longer).
- Abra's ability to 'push' is so powerful that, despite having never met Danny and knowing nothing of his experiences of the Overlook Hotel, when she panics at the death of Baseball Boy she is able to communicate to him with the word 'REDRUM' - a word she could only have known was important to him by jumping lightning-fast into his subconscious.
- The final appearance of Lorraine Massey, the old woman in the bathroom. Not only is it the firing of Chekov's Gun in answer to Abra inviting her to "try it", it also hints that monsters like the Overlook ghosts can live on. The 'original' Massey, such as she was, is disnitegrated with the rest of the hotel - this version is a manifestation of Abra's traumatic memory of their encounter.
- Many people wonder how Dan would know that calling the police wouldn't help because the True Knot had control of them. The answer is simple: Abra gained access to Rose's mind and got as much information as she could, which could have included the fact that they have the police, which she relayed to Dan.
- When Danny meets "Jack"/"Lloyd", he's sitting while the bartender is standing, reminiscent of the way Danny can only ever remember Jack towering over him as an abusive and violent figure. In contrast, as he envisions Wendy in his final moments, she's crouched down to look eye-to-eye with him, because they survived together, and their bond never broke.
Fridge Horror
- On the trip to Iowa to exhume Bradley's remains, Abra demonstrates how she was able to read Rose's mind by doing her "push" technique. Except, unlike Abra's archive world which was made to resemble her home, Dan's archive world was designed after the Overlook Hotel as evidenced by the typewriter room and all the file cabinets reaching clear up to the ceiling, and the hedge maze covered in heavy snow where he keeps malicious spirits in the center, imprisoned in lock-boxes. This suggests that Danny has no fond place that he called home and could not get past his traumas at the Overlook Hotel. Abra "bumping into" Dan's lock-boxes suggests she came close to encountering all those Overlook ghosts before Dan told her to not go poking around in there again.
- There is another alternative: Rose's mind world was a cathedral, and being a psychic vampire of implied romani ancestry it's unlikely that it was a fond place for her, but she designed it like that as a testament to her ego (not-so-subtly celebrating her as a god). Abra's mind world resembling her house is because she is so used to her power that she doesn't even consider it something extraordinary. So, if the mind world is actually a representation of how they see themselves and their powers, Dan's being the Overlook Hotel gets another meaning: it's where he actually learned about his powers and, before meeting Abra and the True Knot, used them and needed them most, so for him his shining will always be related to the Overlook Hotel. The kicker? It means that, even after years of using his powers in a positive way, to help dying people get some peaceful last moments, he still can't help but think about all that horror first.
- Rose seems awfully upset that Danny and Billy got the drop on the True Knot and were able to put them down. Is this because she's known them all for so long, and thinks of them as treasured family members? Or is it because all of their Steam is escaping, when she's not around to gobble it up?
- When Danny & Abra finally arrive at the Overlook Hotel, we see that the hotel was hardly even looted and may items are left unmoved such as Jack Torrance's typewriter, and most of the furniture in the rooms we do see. If some people entered the Hotel to have a look around, they were probably frightened away by the Hotel messing with them, and Abra herself detects the place as like cancer. We don't get to see it, but Abra most likely got to see the way some of the former care takers murdered their family and then killed themselves, just like Danny bore witness to as a child. She also doesn't need much convincing by Danny to let him stay behind to detonate the boiler so that he can "close the door behind them", suggesting she's seen enough of how sick the place is to not try and stop him from walking to his physical doom.
- And in the final shot of the movie, we see how she's taken the lesson onboard, as she goes to deal with the old woman in the bath and literally closes the bathroom door behind her as she does it.
- The single word "Medicine", spoken by 'the Bartender', followed by his voice descending from Lloyd's silky comforting tones to Jack's growling, angry resentment. The unspoken implication that this is the Hotel's own intelligence, deep down, attempting to torture Danny into giving in. Oh, so Lloyd doesn't do anything for you? Let's try Jack instead...
- Furthermore, the fact that 'the Bartender' uses the phrase "Are you going to take your medicine?" not only calls back to the real Jack's usage of that phrase in The Shining, but to Danny himself using it while brutally beating an unlucky barfly at the beginning of Doctor Sleep. The implication being that those words have never stopped haunting Danny, and that the Overlook knows this just as well as he does.
