Follow TV Tropes

Following

Headscratchers / Stranger Things

Go To

New entries on the bottom. Notice that the entries contain unmarked spoilers!

    open/close all folders 

Season 1

     Why did Barb have to die? 
  • According to the official guide for the series, it is noted that while Barb participated in the lot of volunteer and academic extracurriculars, she was also a varsity softball player. Softball can involve running fasted hitting things with a bat, things that could have helped her survive the upside down and even be indispensable to the Party as the series goes on. so why did Barb have to die after she was barely into the Upside Down?
    • She had that cut on her hand. Her blood attracted the Demodogs. And no matter what skills you may have, like softball, they mean jackshit when up against something from the Upside Down if you aren't prepared.
    • Cards on the table: Barb was not and was never supposed to be a main character, and someone in that position close to the characters (especially those not really connected to the Will storyline) had to die to demonstrate the danger of the Demogorgon and give them an emotional investment in battling it. Sucks for Barb, but no one said horror fiction was a kind place. As for softball skills, most of them are mainly useful if you happen to have a softball bat on hand — which Barb did not.
      • Adding to this, they probably also wanted to avoid queerbaiting (note: I'm not saying adding LGBT characters as a main character is a bad thing. Just that some writers don't want a LGBT character to be the only reason why people watch their show).
      • Lesbian troper here not understanding why people automatically assume Barb is LGBT. Is it because she is sassy? Or is worried about her female friend becoming someone she isn't? Or has short hair??? We have no idea what sexual orientation Barb identified as and to claim she was killed early to avoid "queerbaiting" is ridiculous. Barb died because our boy Demo was hungry, in the area, and we needed an innocent victim to establish the threat.
      • Gay troper here. While her sexuality is up for interpretation, yes, obviously those signs are why people thinks she's gay. She's very "butch". Writers wanting to avoid queerbaiting is a thing. Of course, not all examples of "avoiding queerbaiting" has the queer character killed off. OP was not only asking for the in-universe reason as to why she was killed off, but from a writing-standpoint as well.
      • Talking about "queerbaiting" here makes no sense whatsoever. Queerbaiting doesn’t mean "including an LGBT character to draw in LGBT viewers", it means "deliberately hinting at the possibility of a queer character or relationship but never bringing it to fruition". If anything killing off a supposedly-queer character early on is closer to "queerbaiting" than including one.

    Where is Hawkins? 
  • Has it ever been established where in Indiana the little town of Hawkins is supposed to be located?
    • One possibility: it's taking the place of Bloomington (keep in mind Bloomington wasn’t nearly as developed back in the 80s as it is today). Hawkins seems like it’s about an hour out from Indianapolis, just like Bloomington is. They both share the hilly landscape as well. There is both a rural/suburban feel to each place also. Both have a downtown square that are weirdly similar.
    • Another possibility: while Hawkins obviously doesn't exist, and neither does Roane County, there is a town called Roann (different spelling, same pronunciation) in Wabash County, in north central Indiana, and it is in a very wooded area. In Episode 5 in Season 2, when Bob is describing landmarks associated with the "vines", he mentions both the Eel River and Tippecanoe. The northern edge of Roann's downtown area is the Eel River, and Tippecanoe is a small town less than 20 miles away (it's also a river, a lake and a county, all less than 50 miles away). Roann is a very small town, nowhere near the size of Hawkins, but intended to be in Wabash County. The towns of North Manchester (also on the Eel River and only a couple of miles from Roann) and Wabash (home of an Air Force Base in the 80's) are the closest matches.
    • When it comes to the actual size of Hawkins, it's harder to make an exact estimate. We're told that it's basically supposed to be Smalltown, USA, so somewhere in the low tens of thousands is a pretty reasonable estimate. But we do get a few context clues:
      • Hawkins appears to be the seat of the fictional Roane County, Indiana (it's the location of the county coroner's office, anyways). That makes it one of the larger towns, if not the largest, in the county. The county itself appears to be relatively rural, though.
      • The sign on the police station describes Hawkins as the "City of Hawkins". For most people, "City" usually implies a larger population. However, the technical definition under Indiana law is that there are separate legislative and executive branches (basically mayor and city council). Season 3 makes clear that Hawkins has a mayor (Larry Kline) who makes executive decisions. Very small towns are often run by just a council, and if there is a mayor, he's often just a ceremonial job; yet it's pretty obvious that Larry Kline is doing more than just ceremonial things from the way he puts on the Fourth of July bash with the intention of courting over voters. Under Indiana law, cities may not have less than 2000 people. So being a "city" probably implies a large population, although it's definitely not a big city (like nearby Indianapolis, for example).
      • In some of the newspaper clippings at the end of the series, the hospital Will was taken to was described as "Hawkins General Hospital". If it's correct, having the regional hospital would make Hawkins one of the biggest places in the area (and is consistent with its status as a county seat).
      • The depiction of Hawkins' downtown square, which looks a lot like Bloomington, suggests a smaller town, although obviously there are probably other commercial areas and strip malls (consider the arcade, for example) in the city, and the whole season 3 plot point about Starcourt. Most of what we see is suburban.
      • We see Jonathan examine a map of Hawkins at one point, which suggests it's pretty small. However, this map probably isn't totally accurate. It's missing several streets named in the series, like Maple Street, where Mike lives.
      • In Season 2, we're shown that there are farms and farmers within Hawkins' city limits, which makes it at least semi-rural.
      • In conclusion, the City of Hawkins probably has somewhere in the low tens of thousands of people. It's almost entirely suburban, but includes small business districts, enough amenities, and at least some rural area. It's probably the biggest town in the county, but still small. A couple hours' drive to Indianapolis, it is probably outside the greater Indianapolis area, but still close enough.
        It's important to note that when the Duffers created Stranger Things, they switched the location from Montauk, New York (a real place) to Hawkins, Indiana (a fictional one). This shift, according to the Duffers, was partially done because it gave them more writing freedom, allowing them to do anything with their town without the constraints that come when you set a story in a real place. The result is that like Springfield, Hawkins shapeshifts a bit to meet the creators' needs—a small suburban city when the occasion calls for hospitals and businesses and such—but otherwise a small, suburban town way out in the country, where it's dark at night and a million stars dot the night sky.
      • A counterpoint to this would be Columbia City, which resembles Hawkins in many ways. It's the county seat and largest city in Whitley County. It's dwarfed by Fort Wayne to the east, Warsaw to the west, and Huntington to the south. It's had a fairly major hospital since the '50s, and had an arcade well into the '90s (though, to be fair, never anything on the scale of Starcourt,). Its mid-'80s population? About 5,500. And it's not really atypical of a smaller Indiana county seat - in fact, the next county seat to the north, Albion, is only the third-largest town in Noble County, with a population of less than 2,500.
    • The commonly used map for Hawkins is actually an edited version of the map for Marion, Indiana; which is off I-69 northeast of Indianapolis and southwest of Fort Wayne. If you watch the first Season 3 teaser advertising the mall, as it zooms in to Indiana it does look like it going to the same area. Of course, that area of Indiana doesn’t look like what we know Hawkins to be, they are few forests and it’s pretty flat.

    Will's communication from the other side 
  • When Will was in the Upside Down world, how exactly was he able to control the lights his mom put on the wall to such a degree that he could flash them individually with each alphabet? When others go to Upside Down, it seems the lights just automatically turn on when someone enters the room, so no such finesse seems possible. Also, how was Will able to hear everything her mom said while he was in the other dimension? When Nancy and Jonathan were there, they could just hear some faint echoes of what people were speaking on the other side, but somehow Will was able to have proper communication with Joyce?
    • What sets Will apart is that he's "good at hiding," and we see that he's spent days of real-world time hiding in his fort. He's apparently spent that time either consciously or instinctively learning how to reach across the divide and hear/manipulate things. If others had spent enough time in the Vale of Shadows, they might have figured out how to do that as well. Or perhaps as a roleplayer of a wizard, Will is specially suited to figuring out how to control a magic-like ability.
    • In episode 3, when Michael's little sister sees the lights at Joyce's house being lit and follows them, we later learns this means Will was walking through the hallway in the other dimension before going into his room, as the little girl does. She then sees all the lights inside rapidly flickering. This could be interpreted as Will testing how to manipulate the lights, before suddenly having to run as the demogorgon arrived. By the next time he returned, he figured out how to do it.
    • Also, considering we've been told the air in The Upside Down is full of spores and his slug coughing perhaps Will effects the lights like the Demogorgon but on a smaller and more intelligent scale.
    • I thought that the time Joyce and Hooper went into The Upside Down, the Christmas lights lightened up in our world because they pointed their flashlights at where the light were supposed to be? (And, by extension, any instance of lights flickering/lighting up/dimming was because of the interference with electronical devices, e.g. Will's walkie-talkie.)
    • The walls between different realities seems particularly weaker around Castle Byers, perhaps because it's so close to the lab and the portal. Remember, when Joyce is there, she can hear Jonathan faintly, but he can't hear her. So when Will was first trapped in the Upside Down, he could probably hear his family but they couldn't hear him, and his initial attempts at communication were just him frantically trying things to try and reach them. First thing to try, naturally, is the phone; he tries and gets through, but the connection is unstable and keeps shorting out of the phone. No good. But knowing he can have some limited interaction with the real world via electronics from this, he tries things like switching the light sockets on and off, his handheld radio, his stereo, and so on. When he hears his mother respond to this, he knows he's found a way of communicating with her. Initially it's a matter of "blink once for yes, twice for no" — or, in this case, switch the light switch on and off as needed. Then, he tries more complex things; maybe unscrewing or screwing the lights in, or just keeping the switch on and tapping the lights as needed, all the while listening out for reactions from his mother so he knows what probably works and what doesn't.
    • Season 4 finally shows us how the light trick works, with it seeming to be an aura around lights that you can touch. For whatever reason, lights make the walls between realities weaker.

    No repercussions for assaulting a cop? 
  • When Hopper goes to the morgue to investigate Will's body, he attacks a fellow police officer and punches him unconscious... Yet the next day no one appears to know this has happened, and Hopper isn't reprimanded in any way. The implication seems to be the government conspiracy somehow silenced the cop, but why would they do that? If Hopper was suspended from his duties and everyone would think he's gone crazy, that would be beneficial to the bad guys, as he would have fewer chances to investigate the case.
    • The bad guys were clearly holding the Idiot Ball when they didn't just kill Hopper in their basement, even though they had no qualms with killing poor Benny earlier. After that, any further Hopper-related idiocy should probably just be put down to Plot Armour.
    • It makes certain sense not to kill Hopper, since the bad guys don't want to draw too much attention to them. Faking the suicide of a random diner owner is one thing, but a cop dying while investigating a mysterious disappearance is bound to raise some questions. So it's justified that they don't shoot Hopper, but it doesn't make sense why they wouldn't let the assailed cop file a report and get Hopper suspended.
    • Who with? Hopper's the chief, they'd have to go to Mayor Kline and lean on him, which wouldn't be hard seeing as season 3 (where Kline is introduced) reveals him to be very crooked.
    • Hopper's a heavy drinker on what are apparently psychiatric meds, depressed after his daughter died and his wife left him. The mysterious disappearance of Will had already been "solved". It would be very easy for the bad guys to kill Hopper and make it look like a suicide.
    • I'm not sure if it's that easy... One suicide can be explained away, but two suicides (plus a dead kid) in a very small town in less than a week would probably start to look quite suspicious, especially if the second person to kill himself was the sheriff who investigated the other two cases. Also, the bad guys don't know how much Hopper knows and who he has spoken to. As far as they know, he might've told people, "If I die all of sudden and it looks like a suicide, it isn't, the guys at Hawkins Laboratory are responsible." So it makes certain sense not to kill him.
      • It looked like they might have actually hoped to kill him by what would look from outside like a depression-sparked substance-abuse binge. Except, they might have misjudged Hopper's tolerance to their mix of chemicals, partly thanks to his very history of steady, prolonged, not-so-under-the-table abuse (and Kline is aware of it). And, if it hadn't killed him, his deputies were miraculously in position to find him hungover/drugged out of his skull, which combined with a little nudging towards both Kline and the editor at the Hawkins Post would be enough to start proceedings to get him suspended. See also that whole "recovering quicker from the overdose than they might have expected" thing. Hopper barely escaped being labelled totally nuts, like Joyce had been... until the Conspiracy bollixed that up, too.
      • That's exactly why they shouldn't have killed Benny in the first place. There was no reason for that. Benny bought their cover and was cooperative. They could have questioned him thoroughly and let him go before making up an appropriate story. When Hopper started investigating the case, they could kill him, make it look like a suicide and fake a note (they faked a dead body for crying out loud, so they could fake a note) that a missing kid made him think of his daughter and drove to a suicide.
      • There actually was a reason for killing Benny, as outlined elsewhere on the page. When talking to the woman he believes to be the social worker, Benny makes a couple of passing comments, first about how quickly she arrived there and second about how her voice sounds different than it did on the phone. While it doesn't suggest he's realised she's a fake, it does suggest that he's unwittingly picked up on some discrepancies in her story, and it's potentially only a few short steps from there to wondering if she is who she says she is at all. Furthermore, it also suggests that an actual social worker might be on the way to Benny's place and might get there at any point (someone had to discover his body, after all) — and once she does, Benny will realise that the people he surrendered Eleven to were not social workers and will almost certainly immediately alert the police regarding a(nother) child in potential danger. In short, the longer Benny's alive, the more time he has to realise that something's up.
    • Perhaps they were letting him go on purpose, hoping that, by investigating the case, he could lead them to Eleven, which was eventually what happened.
    • When they killed Benny they just wanted to erase their and Eleven's trace and erase the potential threat of a big man aiding the girl. But then, when Will's disappearing, everything went bigger.
    • Actually, all they had to do was watch the Byers, you know, the people whose kid's body they faked. They had a man watching Lucas's house (for some reason), but not Will's?
    • Since these contractors were brought in "from the outside" and no one in town would know them, it makes more sense for the conspiracy to use its own security in costume (for presumably all but the initial reporting trooper, who had clearly been scared into silence). Using their own people (as they did with the repair/surveillance trucks) would be much safer than relying on actual, unknowing officers to do their jobs so blindly that they don't notice a fake body or become curious about odd jurisdictional irregularities—and basically become as much of a problem as Hopper was. In that case filing any report concerning a fake/nonexistent officer would have caused all sorts of unnecessary headaches for them.
    • The DOE (and NSA, etc.) are all federal, not state institutions anyway; it makes no sense for state police to have been involved in the first place.
      • They probably have contacts within state authorities, however, and while state troopers guarding a local morgue might be unusual, having it taken over by federal authorities is just going to draw more attention. Bringing in the state troopers allows them to exert some control over the situation in a more low-key fashion.
      • Having their own people impersonate state troopers would be even more effective for controlling the situation, and who in Hawkins was going to notice the difference?
    • Hopper also tries to bluff the guard with the name of the actual reporting state trooper he'd tracked down earlier. Significant in that the guard—supposedly also a state trooper involved in this case—claims not to know any O'Bannon.
      • If that state trooper is an actual state trooper, he might not even know who Hopper even is; he's likely an out-of-towner brought in for guard duty, and Hopper isn't wearing his uniform and doesn't ID himself. As far as the trooper knows, some guy walked up to him, tried to bluff his way in, and then slugged him. Which actually becomes rather disturbing when you remember that the people covering up the events of the series are clearly ruthless. On learning that Hopper got into the morgue and discovered the "body" they're unlikely to be happy with this trooper, and this guy might find himself having an "accident" of his own.

    No surveillance on Persons of Interest 
  • After Hopper broke into the morgue, discovered the fake cadaver, broke into the *facility*, discovered hints of Eleven's existence, and then saw the portal with his own eyes, the government spooks not only chose not to kill him (despite executing Benny for simply having made contact with Eleven), but their only form of followup on him (until he later breaks into the facility AGAIN) is by way of a single bug left in his home. The man knows about your coverup surrounding a young boy's disappearance and has seen the results of an experiment which were certainly classified up the wazoo — why on earth would you let him walk away from that without so much as a tail?
    • Joyce's situation prompts the same question — she clearly wasn't buying into the narrative that Will was dead, and it could be assumed that she was going to continue to dig into the circumstances surrounding his disappearance until she got what she wanted. Why not send just one person to keep an eye on her in order to be sure she doesn't get in the way of Brenner's search or otherwise cause problems for him?
    • As far as Joyce is concerned, they probably figured that no one would take her seriously, since she sounded like a crazy person. (Stringing up Christmas lights out of season to make a Ouija-board-like display, chopping holes in the wall of her house with a hatchet, and claiming that her son is communicating with her through a tangled-up bundle of lights). Also, alone, she didn't exactly have the kind of resources to pursue a determined investigation, being a single mother on a fixed income.
    • It's important to remember that this group of conspiring agencies is not all powerful with unlimited resources. They had a number of agents and men on call and are shown obtaining more men, first in the repair trucks and later with soldiers in trucks later on. They called in reinforcements and additional resources as the situation progressed and things got worse, but it took time. They are shown to have access to quite a number of resources before then such as the communications spying but they are still a group of people trying to do their best focusing on the most obvious paths without the insight the audience has.
    • They have enough resources to quickly fake a corpse, convincing enough for Jonathan to believe it's his brother, and for Hopper to believe it's a real body before he cuts it open. Perhaps they didn't call for reinforcements because they believed they could handle the situation themselves.
      • Although it's worth remembering, the corpse's effectiveness is literally only skin deep; Jonathan only sees it at a distance and only for a moment (he's quickly overwhelmed and runs off to vomit), Joyce rejects it utterly. When Hopper cuts into it, it's filled with cotton fluff. It might look relatively convincing at a distance in a darkened room (and even then it fails to convince the person who it's arguably primarily set up to convince), but up closer it's pretty clearly a little bit of a rush job.
      • Also, remember that the corpse has been dredged from a lake and the cover story is that he fell in from a height. Bodies which have been found floating in water can look quite unrecognizable due to both decomposition and bloating, and the body would have sustained damage from the fall, which would (in theory) explain why it's not a perfect match (this itself might've been to Hopper another blatant red flag that led him to suspect a cover-up, on top of the jurisdiction matter). They don't have to fake Will as he is in the prime of health, but what he would look like after falling off a clifftop into a quarry and floating in the water for a couple of days.
    • The conspiracy appears to be incompetent in general, constantly losing men to Eleven and the Demogorgon long after they should have realized how dangerous they are, and behaving in a heavy-handed and conspicuous fashion which regularly backfires on them.
    • There's something here that is important to remember: the events of the season, if looked at from the point of view of the villains, are incredibly chaotic and frustrating, because so much is being thrown at them at once. They've got cops investigating them who aren't falling for their distraction tactics, a raving mother running around refusing to buy any of their cover-ups, an interdimensional demon is on the loose and attacking people, including their own staff, other agencies and higher-ups are breathing down their necks and demanding answers, and on top of it all, they have to find a superpowered girl who escaped from them and is now being harbored by some annoyingly resourceful kids. It's actually a lot of extremely hectic stuff happening in a very short time frame, and their operation, while not tiny, doesn't seem huge, either. It's understandable that a lot of stuff slipped the net.
    • The short frame of time point seems particularly worthy of note; by the time Hopper's at the point where he's breaking into morgues and beating up state troopers, it appears likely that only two, maybe three days have passed at most.
    • Also remember that Hopper and Joyce are—for better or worse—more high-profile than Benny was. Benny was just the owner and operator of a low-end diner who happened to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. His "suicide" might come as a bit of a shock to his friends and loved ones, but these things happen. Hopper, however, is the police chief of a town who is investigating a fairly high-profile missing child case, and Joyce is the missing child's mother. Whacking those two might end up bringing more unwanted attention on themselves; Benny's "suicide" can be handwaved away, but add on two missing children, the death of the lead investigator and the mother of one of the kids on top of that, and they all might start to look more suspicious and cause more questions to be raised. In short, trope name aside, even for sinister government conspiracies, murder's not always the best go-to problem-solver.
    • As for surveillance, when you put someone under surveillance, you have to accept the risk that the tail will get spotted. Joyce and Hopper are both already highly suspicious (bordering on paranoid), so suddenly noticing someone they don't recognize following them would only increase that and draw attention to the organization instead of deflecting it (and, in Hopper's case, put someone else in his crosshairs he can beat some answers out of). Joyce was pretty easy to write off as crazy, and the attempt was made to start discrediting Hopper, but he turns out to be a lot better at his job than anyone gave him credit for. They thought Hopper was just some random backwoods hick Sheriff of a small town in the middle of flyover country, and didn't realize they had a competent, tenacious, and inventive lawman on their hands until it was too late. Putting Hopper under electronic surveillance was the best compromise. The bug can't tell Hopper anything he doesn't already know (the lab's up to no good and they want him to stay the hell out of it, please and thank you) if he discovers it, and if he doesn't, they can keep tabs on his actions. Though that does raise the question why the bug itself was never brought up as evidence of shady dealings. But at the end of the day, the bad guys have bigger fish to fry, between a tear in fabric of reality, an extradimensional monster running around killing people, and an escaped psychic living weapon. Joyce, on her own, can't really influence any of those events for better or worse, so they can just leave her be. Hopper's a bit more of a problem, but in the grand scheme of things, little more than a distraction from the real problems they're trying to solve.

     The Upside-Down 

  • So what exactly IS the Upside-Down? Is it a hellish version of our world, an alternate dimension of some kind? Is it an alien dimension that lies parallel to ours?
    • Yes.
  • What did Will eat in the Upside-Down? Sure, it's possible to survive for a week without food, but... how hungry would a kid have to get before he'd start eating Meat Moss?
    • More urgently, what did Will drink in the Upside-Down? You can survive a week without food (by the end of which, Will is looking quite realistically debilitated) but not without water.
      • At the end of the season when Will sees a brief flash of the Upside-Down, the tap that he turned on in the regular world is also running in the Upside-Down. Between apparently functional plumbing and the multiple bodies of water in and around Hawkins, it probably wasn't too hard for Will to find water.
    • It's gross to think about, but those spore-things seem to go straight for the mouth. Maybe he ingested enough water and protein, or close enough facsimiles, to keep him alive. Also, does time work the same way in The Upside Down? Is a week in our dimension the same amount of time there? If his processes slowed down or ran in a way they don't here, then his need for food and water might be diminished, at least a little.
      • Time seems to move at the same rate in the Upside Down as it does in the real world as evidenced by Nancy's brief foray into the Upside Down and Jonathan pulling her out of the portal.
    • Maybe a case of Year Inside, Hour Outside but backwards? Will was just a couple of hours there but a week in our world (and psychologically still felt like days for him). Or alternatively the atmosphere there provides some kind of nurture as it is Another Dimension with different physical laws after all.

    Upside-Down cars 

  • The Upside Down has cars in it, parked in the streets, which are presumably shadow versions of cars in our world. But no people. So if a person in our world is driving a car down the street, is there a car in the Upside-Down driving down the same street by itself?!
    • Perhaps the Upside Down only reflects static objects. An unmoving car sits in one place, but if someone in our dimension drives it, then parks it somewhere else, it will change places in the Upside Down once its counterpart is stopped. Alternately, perhaps the Upside Down only reflects our dimension at the point that the gate was opened, so at that point they were identical but after that point things on either side can be changed without affecting the other too much. Personally I think that some version of the first is more likely.
    • Evidence suggests that the world created is a snapshot from the moment the portal opened. The biggest evidence of this is when we see the Byers house in the Upside-Down, because there's no signs of the damage, or lights, or other drastic changes that Mrs. Byers did.
      • This is definitely confirmed as of Season 4. The Upside Down is trapped on the day Will disappeared.
    • But then how does Will know where the Christmas lights are and what letters are painted under them? If it is a snapshot at the time of gate opening, it wouldn't include those. And as another piece of confusing evidence, at the end, Joyce and Hopper don't see bear traps on the floor as they walk through the Upside-Down version of her house.
    • Sometimes you can perceive one world from the other. There must have been a time when Will was able to see the Christmas lights, and he used the opportunity to signal his mom. Obviously it was a short-term opportunity, or else he probably would've come back the next day and sent a bunch more messages.
    • Or if it's a snapshot, perhaps the Upside-Down "updates", for lack of a better phrase, every time the Demogorgon or someone else opens a portal. Then all it takes is for the creature to enter our world sometime after Joyce puts up the lights, and the Upside-Down suddenly has lights in the same spot, which Will sees as he's hiding in/moving through the house. The fact that Billy's car from his original world suddenly appears in the Upside-Down along with him in season 3 seems to support this.
    • Season 4 has shown that the previous answer is indeed correct. (Well, mostly.) The Upside-Down is a snapshot created at the time Eleven opened the first gate, in 1983. Notably it does not update and continues to reflect the world as it was then, which becomes a small problem for the characters in season 4. The lights in our world can be interacted with even if they don't exist in the Upside-Down; only the location matters (which explains how Will was able to communicate with Joyce.) Thus, the answer to the original question is: The cars (and all other objects) are where they were when the first gate opened.

    Demogorgon and Upside-Down 
  • Did the Demogorgon live in the Upside-Down before the events of the series, or did it just come there in search of prey? Is that its home, or is it from someplace else entirely?
    • Eleven, when encountering it in the bathtub, sees it eating the same fungus that we later see is very common in the Upside-Down, so, presumably, it has been there for some time. That would appear to be the creature's home.

     Nancy's Immunity to Radiation Poisoning 
  • The Department of Energy believes that the Upside-Down's environment is radioactive, which is why everyone they send in wears hazmat suits. But if it really is, then that means Nancy should've got radiation poisoning when she was in there? Is she immune? Eleven might be because of her powers, but definitely not Nancy.
    • They believe it might be radioactive, and they take as many precautions as possible, but ultimately what they really know about the Upside-Down roughly translates to "fuck all". They just don't know for sure, so until it's confirmed that Nancy has been slowly dying from radiation poisoning, apparently it's either not radioactive or not as harmfully radioactive as they think.
    • Also, it seems that the hazmat suits are less about radioactivity, and more about the potential toxicity of the environment.
    • If there were some danger of exposure, the DOE guys would suit up. This doesn't mean it's so bad they'll quickly get sick. For example, maybe radiation there is 100x normal Earth background radiation. Not enough to make you quickly get sick, like say being exposed to 10,000x normal from a nuke (whatever the real numbers would be) but enough to substantially raise your risks of cancers and so forth. Also, these guys suiting up are expecting repeated and prolonged exposure. Also as mentioned above, they don't really fully know the dangers and it sure LOOKS toxic.

     Two different Upside-Downs? 

  • When Eleven goes to the Upside-Down it's a complete black, infinite plane, with some sort of flat, wet floor, and people she is looking for appear within walking distance. When anyone else goes to the Upside-Down it is a perfect recreation of our world, only dead and covered in Meat Moss. So are these different aspects of the Upside-Down, or is there more than one Upside-Down?
    • The black plane seems to be more like a liminal space between the Upside-Down and our reality. After all, she can also see parts of our reality in there, like the Russian spy.
    • The black plane isn't even a physical place (while the upside-down definitely is). It's implied to be a purely psychic space where Eleven can "tune out" all objects and people except for the one subject she's focusing on. Eleven's body remains in the "bath"; she doesn't physically travel anywhere. And by season 3, she's able to get there by simply tying a blindfold around her head and concentrating, without the need for the "bath".
    • Remember the flea? It can stand on more than just the top or bottom of the rope - it can go on the side.

     What was the Demogorgon eating? 

  • In flashbacks when Eleven encounters the Demogorgon in the Upside-Down for the very first time, it is eating something we can't see. Considering at this point the Demogorgon wasn't aware of our world, and the Upside-Down is a completely dead world, what could it have been eating?
    • The Upside-Down isn't necessarily a dead world, just devoid of human life. It's possible there are other creatures in the Upside-Down we just haven't seen—the egg Hopper finds, the tendril that was down Will's throat, and the slug-like things that come out of Will and Barbara's mouths all suggest that the Demogorgon reproduces in some way.
    • Alternately, since the Demogorgon can travel freely between the Upside-Down and our world, it's possible it used to travel to other planes of reality to feed.
    • Based on the color and shape, I'm strongly convinced that the Demogorgon was eating the egg-shaped thing Hopper later finds in the Upside-Down. If it wasn't the egg, there was no reason to show it in the Upside-Down. This of course poses the question of what it is. First, I had the impression that it is Demogorgon's literal egg, and it was eating the remnants of it because it had no other sustenance, but now I'm not so sure. The timeline is unclear enough that it's possible that in the scene in which Eleven spies on the Russian, she accidentally "comes across" the Demogorgon being born and Brenner has her make contact relatively soon. This in turn, however, would beg the question of what was the Demogorgon doing with the slugs if they are not its means of reproduction. Maybe the "egg" is just a rare Upside-Down fungus - after all, the only things in Upside-Down besides the slugs and Demogorgon are spores in the air.
    • We don't actually know that it ate any of its catches at all. The last two episodes show that the Demogorgon wasn't actually consuming its prey, but rather turning them into nurseries for its (presumed) offspring. One possibility is that the Demogorgon in its home ecosystem, when not being interfered with by our world, has a much slower life cycle — say, it only needs to hunt once every hundred years or so when it would normally reproduce. The sudden access to our world and its ready supply of prey triggered a hyperactive reproductive cycle, comparable to a sudden algae bloom.
    • Headcanon: That's its nest.

     The gun in the Byers' shed 

  • In the first episode, Will goes to the shed and grabs a shotgun while being chased by the Demogorgon. Later, however, Jonathan steals a revolver from one of the cars at Will's funeral. He also tells Nancy that he's only shot a gun once before, when Lonnie took him hunting as a kid. So... if the Byers keep a loaded gun in the shed behind their house, why has Jonathan never used it since the hunting trip, and why didn't he take that instead of the revolver? Even though he doesn't like guns, it seems like he should at least know how to use them if his family has one, and while he doesn't want to let Joyce know about his and Nancy's plan, taking his parents' shotgun from the shed still seems less risky than stealing a revolver out of the locked glove compartment of someone's car.
    • Even if Jonathan tried to find the rifle, he wouldn't be able to, because it disappeared along with Will. Notice that when Hopper searches the shed while looking for Will, he finds ammo but not the gun.
    • The rifle also wasn't kept loaded, since we clearly see Will remove, load, and reinsert the cartridge.
    • Given Jonathan knew right where to find it, it was almost certainly his father's car he broke into. Along with the hunting trip, the guns seem to have been their father's hobby, and the rifle probably lay there unused after Lonnie left. Will saw it and remembered enough to be able to load it, but Jonathan may simply have forgotten it was there, while remembering that his father habitually kept a revolver in his glove box.
    • That rifle doesn't actually look like it has a lot of stopping power. It looks more like a peashooter that Lonnie has made Will practice with, not the kind of gun you'd actually go out to hunt a reasonably large animal with if you had the choice. Will's probably just going for that one because it's the closest at hand and it's what he knows how to use, not because it's an especially useful gun in the situation. Jonathan may have dismissed it as a gun that's not going to be much good against a ravenous monster.
    • The rifle is a Mossberg 144 LS, chambered in .22 Long Rifle. I wouldn't be surprised if the rifle was a gift to either Jonathan or Will from Lonnie, as it's not uncommon for parents who like guns and/or hunting to gift their children small caliber guns, especially small caliber rifles, for things like hunting or target shooting. Given Will's apparent familiarity with the gun, I wouldn't be surprised if it was his rifle, especially if Lonnie wanted to get his son to be more traditionally masculine.

    Sharpshooting Nancy 
  • So Jonathan being a bad shot is something I get. But where did Nancy learn how to shoot so straight?
    • While it might be a bit of a stretch, it's possible that her parents taught her or paid for her to learn how to shoot as a self-defense measure; crime was a bit of a worry for middle-class types like them in the early 1980s (and it was pretty bad just a decade earlier), so they might have wanted their daughter to be able to defend herself if necessary. Ultimately though, it's probably just a bit of a joke on gender and class roles that Nancy "slightly prissy goodie-two-shoes" Wheeler from the safe middle-class suburbs turns out to be a natural crack shot while Jonathan "rough-around-the-edges" Byers from the wrong side of the tracks doesn't know what he's doing.
    • The dialogue certainly seems to establish that Nancy’s never used a gun before and that Nancy’s parents are definitely not the type to give her the opportunity to if they can help it (Jonathan: “You ever shot a gun before?” Nancy: “Have you met my parents?”).

     Why Will? 

  • Later on in the show, they mention the Demogorgon hunts by sensing blood, and Nancy and Jonathan even cut their hands so that it picks up their scents. When it first chases Will from the D&D campaign until when it catches him, he is uninjured. Maybe they cut a scene where he got hurt looking for his lost die?
    • Will's disappearance coincides with Eleven opening the first portal and letting the Demogorgon loose. It didn't seek him out to hunt him, it just came across him while running amok outside Hawkins Lab and went after him due to (basically) being Chaotic Evil. Based on how it chases other characters later in the series, we know it can still perceive people who aren't bleeding, just much less precisely—hence why the uninjured Will was able to survive so long.
    • Assuming he didn't skin up his knee when he fell off his bike, it could be possible that the it took Will not because he was bleeding, but as a potential snack for later. But due to Will managing to avoid being caught by the creature again while in the Upside Down, it wasn't able to eat him, thus leading it into our world, got Barb and attacked her right away.
    • The Demogorgon mainly centres in on its prey by focusing on spilled blood, but it's probably more than happy to chow down on something it comes across which isn't bleeding. It probably wasn't hunting Will especially, but just decided to go after him because he thought it'd make a nice snack.
    • Also, most hunting animals naturally tend to gravitate to prey that is significantly weaker than them for obvious reasons. While sensing blood is an obvious sign of weakness (it suggests the prey in question is injured and not capable of putting up a full fight), another is age. Will is a small child, and even compared to his friends and classmates is clearly rather scrawny, frail and weak-looking. The Demogorgon probably goes after him because he doesn't look like he's going to offer much in the way of resistance.

    The name "Eleven" 
  • How did she get that name? Obviously the implication is there were 10 others before her. But 10 other of what, exactly? 10 other psychic children born of former MKUltra test subjects?
    • Possibly. According to the show's Twitter, Eleven "is not the first experiment", which is later expanded upon in season 2 when we're introduced to Eight.
    • It could also be binary, meaning "011" is only Three.
    • Jossed in Season 2, as we are introduced to Eight, with a corresponding "008" tattoo.
    • Brenner calls her Eleven, making that unlikely.

    Why does Dr. Brenner treat Eleven so poorly? 
  • He doesn't appear to bear any particular animus toward her, and it's obvious even before she escapes that the sterile and deprived environment are making her dangerous herself to and everyone around her. Did he just toss her a teddy bear and some crayons, say "Eh, good enough", and call it a day?
    • While he doesn't seem to bear any hostility towards Eleven, he doesn't exactly care about her feelings either. He might have underestimated her and thought they could easily contain a little girl if she did try something. It's also possible he didn't want to risk any outside stimuli affecting the development of her powers.
    • Dr. Brenner seems to have a sociopath's understanding of child rearing: If the child disobeys you, apply punishment. If the child obeys you, apply compassion. He's clearly trying, just doing a rather terrible job of it. And let's note that in the end, Eleven didn't run away from him, she ran from the monster, and later from Connie and the others for killing Benny. His horrible parenting was mostly working until the rift broke open.
    • The act of having tattooed a serial number on a human test subject in the exact same manner and location infamously used by the Nazis demonstrates a wall-banging lack of self-awareness. There's actually a WMG theory that Brenner, given his German-sounding last name, and his approximate age (he looks to be in his late 50s to early 60s), is a former Nazi (or at least had family who were Nazis) and got recruited post-war by the US government.
    • Adding to all of the above: Dr. Brenner thinks of Eleven as a sort of machine, and not a real person. (In fact, I think he treats everyone this way.) All his interactions with her are based on making her obey. So no, he doesn't hate Eleven. He just doesn't give a damn about her feelings. All he wants is obedience. If he thinks he can get that obedience by acting nice, he'll act nice. If he thinks he can get obedience with harsh punishment, he'll do that. He switches tactics based on whatever he expects will be most effective.
    • Also, let's be blunt here; Brenner's clearly a bit warped. His cold and cruel treatment of Eleven is simply an extension of his maladjusted personality.
    • There's also the purely pragmatic situation of her psychic abilities to consider. Are her abilities more powerful and easier to tap when she's calm and happy, or when she's discomforted, frightened, and angry? If one emotional state provides superior results to another, invoking that mental state is just another aspect of "turning his machine on," as it were.
    • He's got human children in a grossly inhumane medical experiment that shouldn't be allowed. There are obvious parallels to Nazi human experimentation by Josef Mengele and others. Considering his quavering voice, I would peg him as at least 70, easily old enough to have directly participated in those experiments and later been brought to the US in some Operation Paperclip type scenario. But Nazi or not, or literal sociopath or not, he clearly has depraved morals. He treats the children as lab rats and merely applies whatever reward or punishment he deems effective. The grandfatherly vibe is the only thing that makes him not appear as the monster he is.
      • Matthew Modine was 57 when the first season was filmed, but even if the character was born in 1926, making him 57 in 1983, he could possibly have been a university student who worked with some Nazi-era clandestine research group during the war. Of course, the U.S. government sponsored a fair amount of research ranging from ethically dubious to utterly appalling in the mid-twentieth century as well, such as the infamous Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male – the "untreated" part continued for over twenty-five years after effective antibiotic treatments had been discovered – and the real MKUltra program.
    • The answer: Brenner has never been a good person (obviously), but he treats Eleven worse first because he can’t control her and then because she appeared to be the cause of the Massacre at Hawkins Lab in 1979. Except this is subverted, since Brenner quickly discovered the truth via the security footage, but treated Eleven the way he did anyway.
      • He seemed to blame Eleven just because One had tricked her into removing the device that blocked him from using his powers, and, perversely, for apparently killing One as well.

     Closing the gate to the Upside-Down? 
  • It seems that while Will has been saved, there has been no indication that the initial gate to the Upside-Down has been sealed, meaning things can still come out from there. And the tear has opened the way for other beings, like the Demogorgon, to open smaller tears to slip through, so I'm wondering how such a rip in reality can be fixed. Is it going to heal itself with some time, like the smaller tears do, or will it take something else to close it?
    • We can only assume that they'll tackle this in the second season.
    • Tackled.

     Why not frame Joyce? 
  • It's kind of puzzling that the government people wouldn't bother trying to pin Will's disappearance on his mentally and emotionally unstable mother murdering him over something that could be easily fabricated for them. Why bother going to the trouble to make a stuffed fake body?
    • Finding a body and a plausible cause of death (should have) neatly wrapped up the mystery. Joyce was known to people in town as relatively normal before this, and this was long before decades of tragic news stories forced people to accept that some unremarkable neighbor could secretly be capable of horrific crimes. Trying to persuade the town in 1983 that any mother could have done something terrible to her own child, with inexplicable lack of motive or a body, would have been been very difficult and only dragged out the investigation.
    • At that, it might've been doable "with the local cops' cooperation", but that was very quickly out of the question.
    • Also, they're kind of flying by the seat of their pants and trying to manage everything in a rapid timeframe, so might not have the time and luxury to convincingly set up Joyce as a fall-person. On the other hand, having a bunch of fake stuffed bodies lying around that, with a bit of quick cosmetic alteration, could be dummied up to look like a missing kid who's been floating in a lake for a few days in order to fake his death sounds like the sort of thing that a Government Conspiracy might have more quickly on hand. Setting up a mother to have convincingly murdered her son requires time and effort that they might not have, whereas faking Will's death ended up requiring them to throw a dummy into a quarry. Quicker and easier, basically.
    • They were probably planning to do something like that, given how they tried to set up Hopper to die of a "drug overdose" and he went to warn Joyce of possible listening devices in her house. They were Genre Savvy enough to thwart the possible frame-up, that's all.

     How did Joyce afford the Atari? 
  • Joyce's family is tight on money at the beginning of the series. By the end, Joyce has missed at least a week of work, and their house clearly will need lots of expensive repairs. Yet, somehow she manages to get an Atari for Will for Christmas a month later. Could this actually be a case of Fridge Brilliance—did the Feds pay her off for her silence or something like that? We know the Men in Black were in touch with Hopper after everything that happened...
    • She may have gotten help from the town – after all her son was revealed to be alive, so everyone, her boss, maybe the neighbors, got together and raised some money so the family would be okay. Further support for this is that the house is clearly in better condition at Christmas, with fresh paint, the lights taken down and the wallpaper replaced to get rid of the Ouija alphabet, and overall looking not so poor and ratty. Perhaps the town held a charity drive to create a memorial fund initially? And/or some sort of celebratory donations after Will was found alive?
    • Given the fact that the state police became the scapegoat for Will's "death," I assumed the government just paid her a large compensation for everything that happened in exchange for her not suing them.
    • Between the middle of 1983 towards the middle of 1985, the price of Ataris took a dip into the ground. For some unknown reason... The expensively hot Christmas present of 1982 wasn't so pricey for under the tree in '83. And, depending on whether it was a January gift, it might even have been a "I don't want it anymore" second-hand reject from somebody else with their finger on the pulse. That, or a year's worth of trying to get ET to work without getting pit-looped quickly turned them off consoles for life; one of the two. Interesting side-note: for Africa, 1983-1984 was big for Atari console sales... mainly because they were trying to sell anything they could, anywhere they could and at any price they could manage, since the US market was busy crashing. It didn't work.
    • In the early 1980s, some stores had what was known as the Layaway system. It worked kinda like how cell phone payment plans are today, but not exactly: you would take an item to the back of the store, usually a department store like Sears, and put it on layaway. You'd then pay a small amount of money each week until it was paid off, and then pick it up and take it home.

     D&D naming 
  • Now I'm no D&D fan, but I've seen Demogorgan, and it looks nothing like the what they are calling the thing (faceless actually works a ton better) especially as they show a figurine, and it looks bugger all like the creature, anyone from D&D know of a more approp name for it? cuz demongorgan isn't stupid its just wrong, damn kids
    • As you said it, they're just "damn kids" so mixed things up (IE calling it "The" Demogorgon, even though Demogorgon is a name, not a type).
    • They refer to it as the "Demogorgon" because that is the miniature Eleven used to represent the creature in her attempt to explain the "Upside Down." Due to the last game they played, that miniature had represented the "very scary monster" which was the idea that Eleven wanted to communicate. Whether she could sense the significance of the mini or it was lucky dramatic coincidence is unclear, but she did manage to communicate a lot while saying very little.
    • As pointed out in Season 2, the use of D&D terminology is meant to help the kids, and in some cases the adults, in interpreting the situation by relating it to something they know. Another example of this is when Dustin brings up Lando from The Empire Strikes Back when it's suspected that Nancy is a turn coat while trying to reach them via walking-talkie and why they relate Eleven's powers to the Force and question if she got her abilities, using both X-Men and Green Lantern as examples of if she was born or given the abilities.
    • Also, they... kinda gotta name it something if they want to be able to clearly refer to it. They're D&D nerds and "Demogorgon" is as good a name as anything for an otherwise nameless interdimensional plant-demon-thing.
    • It got worse in the next seasons, they named the big bad the "Mind Flayer" despite it seeming to match more with something like the Otyugh creature from D&D in terms of at least appearance, also the Demogorgon looks more like a messed up Displacer Beast (not as cool name true but more accurate), if these kids were big fans they would of picked something more appropriate.
      • This is already covered above: The Mind Flayer was named based on what it does not what it looks like (at the time they didn't know what it really looked like except for Will's drawings, which pretty much just show a black tentacly shadow. In fact initially the Mind Flayer was simply called "The Shadow Monster," and didn't receive its name until the second to last episode of the season, once its behavior was better understood). The Demogorgon stuck because that was the figure El used when she tried to explain what happened to Will in the first season. No, it doesn't look like Demogorgon. No, it doesn't account for the fact that Demogorgon is a specific individual (which is forgivable because they're kids and may have just glossed over the Lore). What matters is context. In the first season El was unable to properly express herself, so had to resort to using the D&D miniatures to depict Will in the Upside Down. She picked Demogorgon's figure because the boys had recently used it in their campaign, and would comprehend the threat it represented despite it being a creature so far beyond their experience. The naming is a blending of Poor Communication Kills, You Cannot Grasp the True Form, and a A Form You Are Comfortable With.

    Eleven's disguise 
  • Why did the boys pretty much dress Eleven up as a girl when she had to go to school with them, when it would have been way easier for her to just borrow a slightly more school-appropriate outfit from Mike and pretend to be a boy? Not that her wig and dress weren't cute, but it definitely looked like a wig, none of the other girls at school were wearing frilly dresses with athletic socks, and at her age no one would be able to tell she's not a boy when she dresses like one. Would her haircut just be weird even for a boy? Or does it just not occur to the boys that to a stranger she just looks like a boy when she's wearing boys' clothes and her wig-and-dress outfit is way more conspicuous? Or did they just realize she'd like to dress up?
    • First off, the boys probably didn't put much thought into this beyond "Make her look normal." Secondly, if they dressed her up as a boy and then accidentally used female pronouns to refer to her, it would raise suspicion. Third, Eleven may have shown a preference for wearing feminine clothing, and they just went with that.
    • In-universe, anyone who meets Eleven instantly knows she's a girl. The only people who assume she's a boy are the ones who see her from far away, like was initially the case with Benny. So it might be even more suspicious if they pretend she's a boy and people note how feminine she looks – as well as her voice sounding like a girl's. The really distinctive thing about her is the shaved head – which would be odd on a boy too. In the 80s buzzcuts weren't part of the fashion. Today sure you might see a preteen boy with a buzz, but it would be unusual in the 80s. Maybe they might have considered pretending she's a boy, but they found plenty of things in Nancy's dress-up box for her – the wig and the make-up – so they didn't need to.
      • You *might* occasionally see a boy with a buzzcut now and then in the early eighties, but a pre-teen girl with hair that short was practically unheard of.
    • Also, they're kids. She's a girl, they just automatically default to dressing her in girl's stuff.
    • Also, The '80s. Conforming to traditional gender roles was a much bigger deal. So girls have to dress like girls. To the boys, anything else just would not compute, or be seen as deeply, deeply wrong.
    • They had the dress, wig, and makeup readily available because Mike had an older sister. The wig might have come from the time Nancy dressed up as an elf that Dustin mentions in the first episode. A more interesting question is how did Mike know how to apply makeup? That's not an especially common skill for a middle school boy to learn, then or now. It does, however, recall a similar moment in the Spielberg-produced J. J. Abrams film Super 8, which is set in small-town Ohio in 1979 and contains numerous homages to Spielberg's early work, just like Stranger Things.

    Murdering Benny 
  • Why kill Benny in the diner?
    • See above. It was early in their pursuit, and they wanted to erase all possibility of anyone talking about a girl in a hospital gown running around by herself. Like many things, they botched it, since the fellows in the diner when Benny found Eleven saw her.
    • The out of universe example is that there is a little bit of doubt on the protagonists' side that Eleven could have just been Will with a haircut. If Benny is alive then he can confirm the child was a girl, the children could go see him and find out more information much sooner. Killing Benny also serves as a cue for the audience that these are our villains and what they're about. Because they kill Benny, it gives the audience a sense of tension as to what they'll do to Eleven if they get her back. We eventually find out they were experimenting on her, but this tells the audience that they might kill her - or the children helping her.
    • Just simple covering their tracks, basically. Benny's seen the girl, no one can know the girl exists, Benny has to die.
    • Note also that mere seconds before Benny gets whacked, he says "Your voice sounds different on the phone." It's only a relative hop, skip and jump from "Hey, why does it sound different?" And another potential hop, skip and jump from that to "Hey, you're not from social services at all." The longer they're there and Benny's alive, the longer he potentially has to realise that they're not who they say they are.

    Murdering Benny, Part II 
  • From a Doylist standpoint it makes perfect sense why Benny had to be killed. It made the show feel unsafe and did not try to give plot armor to wholesome characters, thereby making it feel much more real and authentic. But from a Watsonian standpoint, I don't know why they thought it was necessary to kill Benny, seeing as it would've been better to just leave him alive.
    See, the reason why they found Eleven at the diner was because Benny had attempted to call social services to pick up Eleven. However, Frazier had control of the phone line, and pretended to be a social service woman. She promptly showed up a little later to the diner, entering and, after having a small conversation with Benny, turned on him and shot him, as Brenner and more agents showed up to catch Eleven (who luckily escaped).
    But killing Benny left WAY too many problems for Frazier and the Department of Energy, because when Hopper discovered his death later, he didn't believe it was a suicide even though it was staged to appear as if it were. That's because Hopper is very intelligent and knew Benny very well. Earl also confirmed Benny seemed very upbeat before he died so obviously he was not feeling suicidal. As Hopper knew Benny had been killed, he suspected something from the lab later. That eventually led to the events that exposed the lab.
    My point here, is that Benny thought Frazier was a social service woman before he was killed. She very well could have just taken Eleven and left Benny unharmed, without seeming suspicious at all. As soon as she'd gotten Eleven out of sight and out of earshot she and the rest of team could've just ambushed her then and smuggled her back to the lab. Benny would be left suspecting nothing but the fact that he'd just given a girl to social services so they could help her. And he'd be fine, leading to Hopper not becoming suspicious of anyone. This would have been the ideal plan for Frazier instead of just killing Benny and taking Eleven by force.
    The only potential fallacy in this argument is the fact that Eleven might have seen Frazier back in the lab and therefore would not trust her when she showed up at the diner, not enough to follow her. However, we should keep in mind that Frazier is a field agent, which means her job is mostly just putting bullets in people's heads, not actually doing anything particular in the lab. Eleven would not have come into contact with field agents, she would've known the scientists instead. She also doesn't really know anyone from the lab besides Dr. Brenner, which is a statement reinforced by two things:
    1. In one of her flashbacks from season 1, we see Brenner guiding her into the tank. Brenner tells her to ignore all the other workers and scientists and declares them as nothing more than "friends". Eleven's main relationship was with Brenner, and she likely didn't see many other lab workers except for those who tried to confine her if she refused to do as Brenner ordered.
    2. In "the Lost Sister" episode of season 2, Kali shows Eleven a board of identifications for several former Hawkins lab workers, and asks her if she recognizes any of them. Eleven only recognizes Ray Carroll, and even then, that was just because she saw him while exploring her mother's memories earlier that episode. So, she clearly does not remember or hasn't even seen the faces of most of the people who worked at the lab prior to season 1.
    So again, from a narrative standpoint it made perfect sense to kill Benny due to the fact that it made the show feel unsafe and authentic. But wouldn't acting non-suspicious and taking Eleven diplomatically have worked a lot more in both Frazier's favor?
    • While killing Benny does create some possibility of suspicion arising, this is in part due to bad luck. Hopper didn't suspect that Benny had been killed at first. That only came as he got deeper into the mystery. Sure, people may tell him that Benny didn't seem suicidal, and Hopper may have his suspicions, but ultimately there's no evidence. Hopper knew by the end, but only because he unraveled the bigger mystery (which wasn't because he was investigating Benny's death as a murder, but because he was investigating what he thought was a sighting of Will Byers). He never had proof. As far as we know, Benny's death is still on the books as a suicide.
      Conversely, by keeping Benny alive, they risk leaving behind a witness. Benny knew she was a girl (as opposed to the customers at a distance who mistook her as a boy), he knew her hair was close-cropped, she had a tattoo and identified herself as "Eleven". Word gets out, people who are a bit more in tune to the allegations about HNL hear about this.... Plus, they don't know what he knows. They don't know if she's displayed any of her powers to him (in the draft version of this scene, she actually does show him her powers in a very subtle way). Leaving him alive might be a huge liability. Had Benny lived, he would have similarly mentioned to people about the very strange missing girl he found. Word would have inevitably reached Hopper and... who knows. But in the end, it does seem that it was unwise of HNL to kill Benny so soon. It did backfire against them. It's probably meant to show the human fallacy of HNL. It seems that they learn from their mistakes later on, for they act far less drastically. Long story short, leaving Benny alive might have been a liability, but killing him also created more problems.
    • The lab didn't pretend to be social services over the phone. That would put the lab in danger when all those real social services calls come in, and if the lab picked up the phone pretending to be social services, people would wonder why social services never showed up. Remember, when Frazier shows up, Benny says her voice sounds different from the woman he spoke to on the phone. Benny reached the real social services along with everyone else in the region who needs social services, the lab listened in on the call the same way the lab heard Joyce call Florence (in season 1) and Nancy calling Barb's parents (in season 2). And while it's true that the lab could have captured Eleven more skillfully, it was not in the character of the lab to be competent. Look, we're talking about the same guys who accidentally unleashed a creature that killed lots of people at the lab, sent agents into the unknown to be killed, experimenting with the unknown. The sense is that the lab is not at all in control of the monsters they create and unleash into the world. And it works. The lab is bad, but something scarier is coming.
    • This also explains why Benny had to die, as questioned earlier. His call has been logged with the actual social services. As far as they know, there's an actual social worker on his or her way at that very moment — and the moment the actual person from social services shows up, Benny realises he's been lied to and handed a girl into the care of a total stranger. If Benny's dead, if nothing else he can't tell anyone about them.
    • And if Benny has told social services that there's a missing girl and they arrive to find him having seemingly committed suicide, there's the chance they could assume he was lying and they might not be as determined in trying to find the missing child.

    Phone 

  • Why did no one notice the phone off the hook the night Will disappeared?
    • They probably did, they just didn't think anything of it at the time. Since Jonathan and Joyce were both working late that night, when one or the other came home they were probably quite tired and just thought someone hadn't replaced it correctly, so hung it back up and went to bed without giving it another moment's thought. They had no real reason to suspect it might suggest something sinister had happened until they realized Will wasn't home.

    Tank 

  • If it's a sensory deprivation tank, why were they touching Eleven a lot?
    • It would be rough on Joyce to see someone lose touch with reality, she'd already lost Will.
    • In season two, we see that Eleven doesn't need full sensory deprivation to do her thing. It's just what she's used to. She wants Joyce to stay in contact, so it works.
    • It's so that they can reassure Eleven that she's not alone and that she's safe, no matter what she encounters. It's also a bit of a safety value; even leaving aside reasons of simple kindness and support, consider that the last time Eleven was completely immersed in sensory deprivation and encountered something terrifying without anyone to 'ground' her and remind her that she was safe, she freaked out so much she literally broke the universe. Putting Eleven in a state of complete sensory deprivation is, frankly, not a good idea.

    Finding her mother 

  • Is it an ethical issue that the adults did not immediately tell Eleven they may have found her mother before using her powers?
    • Hopper explicitly regrets doing so.
    • More pragmatically, maybe if she knew about her mother, that would distract her. Time is of the essence here, and Eleven needs to use her powers to find Will. If she suddenly knows her mother is alive, it could be harder for her to focus. They just assumed they'd be able to tell her after everything was over.
    • Even leaving this aside, priority-wise there are at least two missing people that they know off trapped in a toxic otherworldly under-dimension being hunted by a monster who need to be rescued, stat, and they come first. Ethical or not, saving Will and Barb's lives takes precedence over telling Eleven about Terry Ives. As noted, as far as Hopper and Joyce are concerned they can fill her in on her family history when, well, they've saved the people they need to save from possible death.
    • They also don't really have an opportune moment to tell her, really; from the point where Hopper and Joyce leave Terry Ives, events move quite rapidly. They're bouncing from bailing out Jonathan, to having to rescue Eleven, Mike and his friends from government agents, to building a rudimentary sensory deprivation tank, to being captured by said government agents and being shoved into a toxic under-dimension to try and find Will. There's not really much time for a heart-to-heart about Eleven's mother, sadly.

    The main trio's actions in the first season 
  • In season one of the show, did Mike and Lucas come off as designated heroes? Mike and Lucas treat Eleven pretty badly, with Lucas outright picking on her the most and calling her a freak (even when its suggested that she's mentally handicapped, he still thinks of her as a freak) and Mike lashing out at her whenever they misinterpret her and make no real effort to really accommodate her, only using her as a way to find their friend. Really, the way they treat Eleven is no different from how the bullies treat them and especially Dustin, the member of the group with a physical handicap.
    • There's no comparison at all with how Troy and James treat the Party. It starts by the fact that none of the Party are malicious, cruel, and psychotic Jerk Asses. They're ultimately acting like kids without a lot of life experience informing them how to react to her. At worst there's a healthy dose of Values Dissonance because it's the early-80s, and the setting is quite a ways off from the wider understanding of PTSD and other mental and emotional disorders that exists in the late-2010s. To break it down by character:
      • Although Lucas is hostile and insulting from the start, he's also called out on it almost from the start, and later admits he was wrong to treat her badly. His treatment of Eleven is deliberately set up as a plot point and part of his character arc, so the series doesn't ignore his negative behavior at all.
      • At the same time, Lucas isn't necessarily wrong in his distrust. While he could have been more sensitive, it's not like he knows anything about her past like the audience does and Eleven isn't exactly forthcoming (which makes sense given her lack of social skills). As far as he knows, this strange girl appears out of nowhere while his best friend is missing, so he's understandably more concerned about his friend than this girl he doesn't know. He's not around her as much as Mike and, due to her lack of speaking skills, she just comes off as a danger and liar to him. It speaks much more to Lucas' character in that he does apologize for his behavior after she almost (accidentally) kills him and lies to them about the compasses.
      • Mike defends El from everything Lucas says about her, and the only time he really gets angry with her is justifiable: the fake corpse of Will has just been pulled from the quarry, and he reasonably believes she lied about him being alive (it's not until after this incident that El channels him in the Upside Down for the first time as proof he's alive). He doesn't even really get angry with her when he finds out she was fouling their compasses, because he accepts her reasoning that she was only trying to protect them right away. He even gets into a fight with Lucas because Lucas refuses to accept that explanation. And while he does rely on her powers to help find Will, he also takes care of El, protects her, and tries to help her in turn throughout the season. As for why he momentarily snaps at her after she uses her powers against Lucas, for all that they're having a tiff at that point Lucas is still one of his best friends, he cares deeply about him and is worried that he could be seriously hurt or even dead; he's panicking and lashing out, basically. Notice how as soon as he's assured that Lucas is okay and realizes that Eleven is missing, he immediately defaults to "find Eleven and make sure she's okay."
      • Mike displays exceptional compassion and tenderness right from the moment he first meets El. Watch the cold open of "The Weirdo on Maple Street" again – Dustin and Lucas are interrogating her to satisfy their excited curiosity (Dustin) and suspicion (Lucas), but everything Mike asks boils down to "how can I help you?" He asks if there's a number he can call for her parents, and then if she's in some kind of trouble (and as we see the next morning, his response when it turns out she is in trouble is to continue sheltering her, not turn her in to any sort of authority), and he deflects the other two boys' questioning – "That's enough, she's just scared and cold." He gives her dry, comfortable clothes to sleep in, essentially builds a nest for her in the basement rec room, and all but tucks her into bed by pulling the blanket he's set up as a curtain shut. He does all that, and makes the decision to conceal her from the "bad people" hunting her rather than call the police, before discovering that she has psychic abilities or that she believes she can use them to find Will.
      • Imagine the impact on a young girl who's been treated as a specimen, not a person, her whole life, raised by a paternal authority figure who hurt her, ordered or permitted others to hurt her, and only showed care when he wanted something from her. Benny was kind, but he still interrogated her, taking away the burger she was eating to get her to answer questions, and he called social services without telling her. El probably heard enough of his exchange with Connie to realize the agents were there because he'd reported her, whether or not she understood that he'd been trying to get help for her ("social services" probably wouldn't be part of her limited vocabulary). Mike is the first person she's ever met who helped her just because she needed help, defended her when other people with him were scaring her, and demanded nothing of her in return for his kindness. He doesn't have to pressure her to help find Will, that's something she wants to do – she can sense that he's alone and afraid and being hunted, and knowing how that feels, she's motivated by empathy to help the others rescue him.
      • The couple of times in Season 1 when Mike does express anger at El (when he thinks that Will is dead and she had lied about it, and when she attacks Lucas), it's because he feels betrayed by someone for whom he obviously cares a great deal. For her part, El's focus in that scene on locating Will in the Upside Down and channeling his voice through the walkie talkie to prove he's alive seems like a quietly desperate effort to regain Mike's trust. After the incident in the junkyard, it seems likely that she ran away as much out of guilt and shame for hurting Lucas as because Mike yelled at her. El lashing out at Lucas seemed more like an instinctive, panic-driven reaction to a perceived threat to Mike, rather than a consciously chosen, proportional response like her actions against Troy (blocking him from rushing Mike and making him wet himself in the first instance, and breaking his wrist to make him drop the knife with which he'd just threatened Dustin in the second).
      • Mike's reaction was also a bit of What the Hell, Hero? over Disproportionate Retribution. Mike and Lucas were having a fight, which degenerated into a physical brawl, and Eleven broke it up by hurling Lucas through the air and into a solid object so hard he got a concussion. That was not a reasonable use of force for that situation, and Lucas is absolutely in the right to be upset that he "could have been killed!" El might not have meant to "push" him so hard, but that doesn't change the fact that what she did was dangerous and an excessive use of force. Now, these being preteen boys, they explain this reasoning by screaming "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?" instead of discussing the finer points equivalent force response.
      • Dustin is at worst Innocently Insensitive mixed with No Social Skills. Yeah, some of the things he says and does are rude, (i.e. trying to get her to perform tricks with her powers) but the series establishes he doesn't really mean anything by it. While he thinks she's weird, he also finds it cool and doesn't seem to realize some of what he does around her is a bit demeaning.
      • Dustin's treatment of Eleven can also be directly compared with Dr Brenner to demonstrate how he is far from a Designated Hero or a bully. Dustin is a bit thoughtless and demeaning towards her, sure, and treats her like a bit of a lab rat at times – but it's only because he's genuinely excited by her abilities and wants to see them because he thinks they, and she, are absolutely awesome. He just doesn't fully understand the traumas she's gone through in order to acquire them; notice how in "The Monster", when she breaks down and he finally gets a real glimpse of how damaged she is, his immediate response is to join Mike in hugging and comforting her. He genuinely comes to like and care about her, he's just a bit thoughtless. Compare with Dr Brenner who actually treats Eleven like a lab rat; he's coldly abusive and unfeeling, manipulates her desire for a father figure to get her to perform dangerous stunts with her powers, and subjects her to cruel punishments when she disobeys. Dustin ultimately views Eleven as a superhero; Brenner ultimately views Eleven as a tool.
    • Also... these are kids. If we're expecting them to respond to a very stressful and confusing situation with perfect rational maturity, comprehension, wokeness and understanding, we're expecting too much of them.
    • And yes. . . it should be reiterated that it's The '80s: this kind of Values Dissonance leading to Innocently Insensitive was depressingly common.

     Giving up the chase 

  • So after Eleven flipped the incoming van, the vans behind them stopped and gave up chasing them? Can they really not drive around a van? There's plenty of space on either side of the van to clear them.
    • Probably an Oh, Crap! moment at the amount of power she just demonstrated. How would you react if someone just flipped a van about thirty or forty feet through the air with their mind. Also, maybe Brenner decided to cut his losses and realized that pushing the pursuit further at that stage wasn't going to go well, especially seeing as there were neighbors out who witnessed the whole thing.
    • The van was blocking the street, and there wasn't a lot of room on either side for the other vans to go around. If you re-watch, everyone did an Oh, Crap! take and then the kids took off again. By that point, it was probably better for the people from Hawkins Lab to try and find another way—they're 12 year old kids, after all, and have to go home eventually.

     Magnetic field? 

  • It's established in Season One that the magnetic field thrown off by the Gate is strong enough to mess up the kids' compasses. Why, then, doesn't it erase the audio cassette Jonathan and Nancy make or the mag locks on the doors, or any of the computers, etc.?
    • The same reason the earth's magnetic field doesn't.

    Giving up Eleven's location 
  • When the entire season 2 is about how much Hopper cares for Eleven, why would he compromise her safety and location in Season 1 by telling Brenner that she is hiding in the school gym?? It seems out of character for him, or am I missing something?
    • Because it's down to saving Will or saving Eleven. Will is who Hopper has been searching for the entire season, and he knows Joyce very well so there's an emotional aspect there too. Hopper only just met Eleven and knows very little about her at the end of Season 1. Something had to give, he had to pick between Will and Eleven, and it was a very tough decision that he no doubt feels immense guilt about. After he finds Eleven again in the time prior to Season 2, he gives her a good home and hides her for a year, as a way to apologize for what he did, though it's not entirely selfless since he's also using her to fill the void left by his daughter's death, the difference being that she is a much healthier alternative than drugs and booze. It's also possible that Hopper figured that Eleven had a good chance of defending herself with her powers.
      Will had zero chance of surviving the Upside Down unless someone went in and saved him, so as tough of a decision as it was for Hopper, it makes perfect sense why he would go in there to save him. The lab also wouldn't have let them go unless Hopper gave up Eleven's location. Brenner only allowed them to go into the Upside Down to save Will because he assumed it'd be a suicide mission and they'd die and be out of his business.
    • Also, we may be putting the cart before the horse a little here. It's highly likely that Season 2 is about how much Hopper cares for Eleven because he sold her out in Season 1; the man's got some atonin' to do.

    Erica at Will's funeral 
  • Why wasn't Erica at Will's funeral? Lucas' parents were.
    • They might have decided she was too young to go to a funeral and left her with a babysitter. When this troper's grandfather died, my brother and I would have been approximately Lucas and Erica's ages (perhaps a little younger), and my parents left me and my brother at home with a family friend or relative (on the other side of the family) to watch over us. Lucas is there because he's a close friend of Will, his parents are there to support Lucas and Will's family, but since there's no real relation to Erica beyond Lucas's friendship (and later seasons make clear that she's not particularly close to her brother's friends), there's no real reason for her to attend.
    • Seconded. I didn't go to a grandfather's funeral when I was ten, and for a week I was left in the care of my grandmother on the other side of the family.

    The Mind Flayer 
  • Why didn't Will encounter the Mind Flayer while he was trapped in the Upside Down?
    • Who says he didn't? When Joyce and Hopper find Will in the Upside Down, he's hooked up to... something in the Upside Down version of the library, and remember we don't actually see the unpleasant details of what the Demogorgon actually does to the people it hunts and captures. Everyone assumes it just eats them, but what if it was actually harvesting at least some of them for the Mind Flayer?
    • Will was used as a host for some of the Mind Flayer's larvae, given that the one that became D'Artagnan in season 2 came out of his mouth.

     Time to escape!... after I've changed my clothes. 
  • There appears to be an inconsistency with regards to the clothes that Eleven was wearing when she would have escaped, and the clothes she was first found in by Benny. When Eleven opens up the Gate, the events of which are implied to be (and presumably have to be) when she also escaped the Lab, she was in the sensory deprivation "bath" and was wearing what appears to be a specialised bathing suit for this purpose (as well as the helmet). When we first see her in the series, however, which is implied to be (and presumably has to be) not long after she's actually escaped, she's wearing nothing but a hospital gown. So either Eleven took time out of escaping from the Lab and the horrible interdimensional beast rampaging through it to change into a much less convenient hospital gown, or the guards and scientists took time out of recovering Eleven and transferring her back into custody to make her change out of her bathing suit back into a hospital gown, while presumably also dealing with said horrible interdimensional beast on a rampage through the lab at the same time, and Eleven escaped at a different point. Neither seems entirely practical under the circumstances.
    • Well the bathing suit was probably wet. While they don't treat her the best, any idiot knows that someone left in wet clothes is going to get sick, and test subjects in perfect health would be preferable.
    • This is a bit of a continuity error, likely based on the fact that Eleven stumbling around in just a hospital gown is a more immediately striking and mysterious visual image with which to introduce her. However, the bathing suit was wet, bulky, distinctive and rather difficult to move around fast in (especially if you find yourself having to crawl through rather narrow pipes), but a hospital gown — while not ideal — is a bit more anonymous and convenient for moving quickly. Eleven was slipping away in all the chaos of the Gate opening up, so we can speculate that she probably decided to strip into something a bit easier to move around in. As for the inconvenience of a hospital gown, it may have been the only thing available; it's not like they're running a kid's clothing store down there.
    • Alternatively, we don't see the full sequence of events, so it's possible to speculate that Eleven was overwhelmed by opening the Gate and collapsed, medical staff took charge of her and changed her into a hospital gown so as to better treat her, only for the chaos of the Demogorgon's arrival to overwhelm them. Eleven, meanwhile, wakes up and slips away in the confusion, now wearing a hospital gown instead of her bathing suit.

    Hopper selling out the kids 
  • Okay, Hopper traded this information about Eleven's whereabouts to look in the upside down, but I just don’t understand why he would put her and the kids in danger. What would the kids' reaction be if they found out about Hopper's deal?
    • Considering the struggles Eleven and Hopper have had (even with trust), this should never not be a big deal. In those kids' eyes, Hopper convinced them to trust him and offered them protection, then got the information he needed from Eleven and developed a plan to exchange her for Will. It almost backfired, with Eleven draining herself completely in order to save the boys from Connie and all of them almost getting captured. It was sheer luck that the Demogorgon showed up when it did.
      • If Brenner's men brought nonlethal weapons to capture Eleven it would have completely backfired. Eleven and the boys would have been captured. Eleven wouldn't have killed Connie and the agents which means the demogorgon wouldn't have been lured to the school. It would have certainly killed Hopper and Joyce. The only people "free" would have been Jonathan and Nancy. Who were at the Byers house. The agents would have certainly headed there to pick them up... Alternate universe they all are captured/die.
      • If the demogorgon had continued to focus on Nancy and Jonathan, and never been attracted to the blood at the school, then Eleven would still have reached for Mike and rejected Brenner who, having now lost control over his biggest weapon with telekinetic powers would then proceed to take Mike back to HNL so he could use him to control El. Taking Lucas and Dustin too would be too much of a liability, and they could not be returned to their homes because they would tell their parents and Mike's - so Brenner would've killed them both, blamed it on Eleven, and claimed that she disappeared, taking Mike with her. If that outcome sounds plausible, that is because it is. And Hopper would have indirectly caused that with his decision.
    • As for whether Hopper made the right call, well, most people find it easier to defend because the outcome wound up being the most favorable to everyone involved. Take this same situation and have 2 out of the 3 boys tragically dying in the hands of HNL agents and no one would feel that El or anyone should forgive Hopper for making this call. If no solution had been presented, very few people would spontaneously be suggesting that the best option would have been to turn El and the boys in. It is only seen as the "only option" in retrospect, because the end result was a favorable one.
  • Related question, would Will be on board with Hopper's decision? It literally put all of his friends at risk and it was done in his name. Plus, Eleven probably would not have needed saving in the woods, and would never have spent 2 months freezing and starving there, had Hopper never sold her out in the first place. It was something Joyce herself was not willing to do. Morally speaking, what Hopper did was something that realistically should not be easily forgiven. The only reason Hopper was privy to El's location (and to the method of how to save Will) was because she and the boys chose to trust him when he called them on the supercom and offered them protection. And yes, they could not have made it without Hopper, but they also expected to be kept safe after that - not sold out to HNL once Hopper got the information he needed.
    • Eleven and the boys were in a sticky situation when they asked Hopper for help and we do not know what would have happened to them if an alternate solution presented itself. As it were, the kids trusted Hopper and he sold her out. This is the sequence of events: HNL figures out what boys El is with, watches their houses and catches them. The kids narrowly escape HNL. Then Hopper, who at the time was in no way attached to El or those boys contacts Mike on his supercom and promises protection and help if they trust him. They decide to do so. They wind up at Joyce's house. At this point, no one in HNL suspects Joyce at all (to the point where her house hasn't even been bugged).
    • After these three points, Hopper makes the decisions. He decides to go to HNL knowing full well they would be captured. He decides to turn El and the boys in knowing they would be caught off guard and ambushed at the school. He took that risk and whatever happened after that would be a direct consequence of his decisions. It doesn't matter what could have happened had he not interfered at all because we have no way of knowing how that would have turned out. And even if it had been worse, it doesn't change the fact that Hopper was responsible for that particular outcome. That is just a fact.
    • One can argue that if Hopper sat in that room looking for a third option, Will would have died, and El and the rest of the kids would still be in danger. But at the same time, the agents didn't know where to look for Eleven. She had been able to hide from them in Hawkins for a week. Regardless, handing over four children under your protection to be at the mercy of dangerous agents who you know torture, kill and kidnap, just to save the life of another child is not a reasonable deal. Hopper was betting a lot for Eleven, Mike, Lucas and Dustin. To the point he probably turned them in because he cares more about Joyce than he did about those kids. From a moral perspective, he was wrong. To me, that was not an adequate solution even with the clock ticking.
      Yes, he only had Brenner's word, which isn't worth much. But that's not a chance he'd have taken had any of those four kids been his own. It's easy to risk something when you don't care so much about it. Had Lucas and Dustin ended up dead and Eleven and Mike kidnapped and tortured by HNL, no one would be saying Hopper's deal was a good one. And that was a real possibility. He is just lucky the demogorgon showed up when it did.

  • Look, to be frank this is all a bit of a Doorstopper and there's a lot to address and unpack here. But at the end of the day, the answer is simply that Hopper's in a terrible situation here, he doesn't have a lot of options here, he doesn't have a lot of cards to play that might get him out of it, and the ones he does have aren't good. I don't think anyone — including Hopper himself — is meant to see Hopper's betrayal as a good choice or a morally pure decision, but rather as the least worst choice available to him in that situation. A situation, it should be noted, which involves:
    • One child trapped in an alien environment who will certainly die if Hopper doesn't rescue him;
    • A mother imprisoned in a government facility who will almost certainly be murdered as part of a cover-up if Hopper doesn't negotiate for her release;
    • Three other children and (so far as Hopper is at that point aware) two teenagers who will likely be murdered if and when the government catches up with them, again as part of a cover-up, unless Hopper manages to negotiate their safety, and;
    • His own impending murder by government agents as part of a cover-up by government agents as part of a cover-up unless he can negotiate for his own safety (we seem to be overlooking that he's within seconds of being offed himself during the scene in question).
  • So that's one person definitely dead and six other people (not including himself) who are in with a strong-to-almost-certain chance of being murdered unless Hopper can do everything he can to guarantee their safety as much as possible, and pretty much the only possible way he can do that is by surrendering Eleven. And remember, at this point he doesn't have nearly the bond he will develop with Eleven in later seasons. He feels sorry for her, almost certainly doesn't approve of what the government is doing to her, but allowing her to remain free at the cost of another child's certain death and the quite-likely murders of others? It can be argued that that's a much more morally abhorrent position to take (especially since the government would almost certainly catch up with her eventually, given time). Especially since the one thing he knows that while Eleven will not have the best of lives in government captivity, she will at least be alive. As for what everyone thinks of him afterwards, that's tomorrow's problem, and at least if he does go through with it there's a better chance that they'll still be alive to think bad of him afterwards.
  • And it's kind of telling that while the OP post deconstructs at length the many problems, practically and morally, with Hopper's choice, there's no suggestion on what a better, more virtuous and more practical option that would guarantee as many people's safety as possible would be here. It's easy to self-righteously harp on him from the sidelines, but in all seriousness: what else is Hopper supposed to do — what else can Hopper do — in this situation? Terrible choice it may be, Hopper is simply doing the best he can with what he has available to him and hoping for the best.

    Jonathan and Nancy's trap at the Byers house 
  • So, in the trap Jonathan and Nancy laid for the Demogorgon at the Byers house, what would've happened if Steve hadn't interrupted Jonathan and Nancy's moment? Would their trap have still worked out as planned without Steve to hit the Demogorgon with his bat? What reason did Steve even have to turn up in the first place?
    • Regarding the trap, it would've probably worked out very much okay. The plan seemed to be that Jonathan and Nancy would get the demogorgon's attention as it broke through the ceiling of the house. They would then lure it into the bear trap, and once it was ensared, they would light it up with a cigarette lighter, burning it, though Jonathan would be quick to grab the fire extinguisher and put out the flames to limit any fire damage to the house proper. The Demogorgon would still free itself and make its way to the school for the showdown with Eleven and the HNL officials.
    • Had Steve not shown up, that's what would've happened. He also wouldn't have interrupted their intimate moment on the couch, so Jonathan and Nancy would've probably had a kiss before the Demogorgon's arrival. Afterwards, Nancy would've waited for about a month or so for Jonathan to make advances on her (as she tells him in season 2 episode 5 at the motel), but instead of going back to Steve, she'd have probably stayed single. She'd still buy Jonathan a new camera to replace the one Steve broke.
    • Steve's motivations for showing up at the Byers' house is to apologize for his behavior, but it's rather abrupt. It's a rather sudden Heel–Face Turn where he suddenly out of nowhere decides to change for no reason whatsoever. In the span of a half hour of screen time, he goes from being a homophobic classist bully to Jonathan, and a dude with stalkerish tendencies to Nancy (climbing up to her window unannounced several times and insisting, pushing her to do stuff even when she’s said no, she even has to tell him no several times for him to back off in one scene; slutshaming her all over town and telling her "go to hell, Nancy Wheeler") to out of nowhere suddenly being tired of being an asshole and wanting to redeem himself. He literally goes from “Go to hell Nancy.” to “She actually cares about stuff, she’s not miserable like you” when all that’s happened in between is he got his ass kicked. The reason for this seems to be that midway through filming of season 1, Joe Keery charmed the pants of the Duffers and they decided that they wanted to keep Steve around, so they changed his character from an antagonist, using this sudden heel-face turn. The Duffers have been very telling, as in "Beyond Stranger Things" they said they didn’t know what to do with Steve after his relationship with Nancy ended but didn’t want to leave him on the down note of being dumped, so they randomly threw together with Dustin and the meme stuff happened. The reason the Duffers probably didn’t know what to do with Steve after his relationship with Nancy ended was because, if it weren't for his Heel–Face Turn here, he would've served his role in the plot to its conclusion. He would've been disappeared and never been seen again.
      • While Steve isn't exactly Mr. Morally Pure in Season 1, a lot of this seems a bit harsh, and more indicative of a personal dislike for a character rather than a plot hole. While the narrative might rush the details of Steve's redemption a little bit (and that's mainly because the show is about "OMG scary monster from Dimension X" rather than "'80s jock undergoes lengthy reevaluation of personality"; Steve is a minor character in Season 1, there is only so much time the show can devote to his character development), Steve's character development is clearly signposted throughout the season. He might not be 100% woke by 21st century standards or perfect in his dealings with the other gender / those less fortunate than himself, but there is still enough to suggest that he's far from an irredeemably bad person. He also wouldn't be the first person to reevaluate his life choices after getting into a fight that he came out of worse.
      • Yeah the fight probably did it, maybe not losing it as much realizing the extremely horrible things he said to Jonathan to provoke it. In the heat of the moment, he's furious because he thinks Jonathan stole his girl so he just unloads with everything he can think up, including suggesting Jonathan murdered Will. But there was no indication he was remotely this much of a jerk before this incident, so he might have been deeply ashamed at what he said. In the previous incident with the camera, what he said and did wasn't exactly wrong.
      • The original question at hand is well, people say Steve saved Jonathan and Nancy's asses...but what would've happened if he hadn't showed up and distracted them in the first place? Because that's a hard fact: Steve showing up distracted Jonathan and Nancy, things could've been different if they hadn't been. Steve's also a bit of a deus ex machina here as Jonathan and Nancy's arc has been building up to this showdown with the monster all season only to undercut it by having Steve fall backwards into saving them.
      • Never mind "a bit", that's not a deus ex machina in the least. A deus ex machina is when the writers basically pull something out of nowhere to instantly resolve the plot; it would be a deus ex machina if, having been given no sign of their existence up until this point, the Justice League suddenly showed up and took care of the Demogorgon. Steve's existence in the show and his reasons for possibly seeking out Jonathan at that point (getting into a fight with him, feeling bad about it, and wanting to apologise) are clearly set up in the previous episodes. What it is a plot complication based on that old friend of ours, the good old Rule of Drama. As is common in a lot of fiction, drama and conflict is produced by the narrative setting up events in a way that suggests to the audience and characters that events are going to happen in an expected fashion, only for the characters to face an unexpected development that complicates or ruins their existing plans and forces them to adapt. To wit, the narrative is set up so that it leads the characters and viewers to expect that Nancy and Jonathan, who are well aware of the Demogorgan's existence and have been preparing to fight it, are going to fight it according to plan. However, things going "according to plan" doesn't often lead to a very exciting climax, since the audience is prepared for what's going to happen. So instead, Steve — who is unaware of the Demogorgan's existence nor prepared to fight it — shows up looking to apologise, thus sending the narrative a different direction as Nancy and Jonathan have to quickly adjust their plan to account for this unexpected development, while Steve has to very quickly adjust to very suddenly discovering the existence of the Demogorgan and being thrown into a fight with it. The situation thus goes from "Jonathan and Nancy execute their trap for the Demogorgan flawlessly" to "will Jonathan and Nancy manage to execute their trap for the Demogorgan after Steve unwittingly blunders in and disrupts things?" coupled with "will Steve survive being unwittingly thrown into a situation where he must face an extradimensional demon without any preparation whatsoever?"
    • Also, Steve's arc has also arguably been building towards this moment as well — just from a different and more subtle direction. It's no coincidence that Steve has been utterly outside the main plot of the season until this very point, because it's representative of the main character flaw he's been dealing with (his self-absorption) and his main character arc (how his feelings for Nancy are changing him). Steve has clearly been unquestioned king of his own little bubble throughout much of his life, the almost stereotypically smooth, in-control, superficial and kind-of assholish '80s-movie jock who can get any girl he likes and then dumps her when he's had his fun. All of which has been challenged, both for him and the audience, by his developing feelings for Nancy, in ways that expose both his better side (the nice, slightly Adorkable guy who blunders up a drainpipe to help the girl he likes with her biology homework and ends up taking simple pleasure in being around her, even if she doesn't end up putting out for him) and his worse side (the vicious, spiteful asshole who publicly humiliates the girl he likes when he thinks she's been cheating on him and picks a fight with the guy who he thinks is going to be a weak target in order to teach him for muscling in on "his" girl). So, in order to find out which side is ultimately going to win out, Steve has to face who he is in a situation outside of the seemingly dramatic but ultimately kind of petty realm of teenage romance and in a situation of genuine life-or-death stakes — such as, say, a battle against an extradimensional demon that he's stumbled on entirely by accident — in which his intervention could make all the difference. Is he going to take the opportunity to flee, just ultimately showing that deep down he is just the stereotypical asshole jock, or is he going to go back, and prove to himself and us that he's a better person? When he goes back and starts whaling on said extradimensional demon with a baseball bat, both we and he get an answer.
    • Related question: how exactly is Steve stronger than the demogorgon? That thing's previously been shown to be lightning fast and lethal, while Steve gets the shit kicked out of him easily by Jonathan in season 1, Billy in season 2, and the Soviets in season 3.
      • Steve's not stronger than the Demogorgon. He is able to get the drop on the Demogorgon while armed with a baseball bat. Notice how he starts pummelling it from behind while it's preoccupied with attacking Jonathan, and then just keeps whacking it without letting it get a chance to get its bearings and regroup; you don't exactly have to be the world's toughest man to get the better of an opponent who wasn't expecting you. It's fast and lethal, but it's not omnipotent or invulnerable. To take a less fantastical hypothetical example: I have no doubt that if it was a straight-up fight between me and UFC Champion Stipe Miocic, Miocic would be able to kick my ass from here to Friday and back. However, if Miocic was occupied with beating up one of my friends, and I took him unawares from behind while I was armed with a baseball bat and he wasn't, then even I could probably get some pretty good hits in and make it a more even fight, for a little while at least.
      • Steve plays basketball as well, and that sport usually requires good reflexes and being able to think on one's feet.

    Demogorgons are selective about their food 
  • What the Demogorgon did to Will is not what it did to Barb. The Demogorgon sliced open Barb and chewed on her body in various places. Why didn't it do that to Will? Will doesn't appear to have any injuries on him whatsoever. Did it really just catch him, drag him to the library, cover him in gunk, and then let a tendril force his way down his throat? For what purpose?
    Point is, why did the Demogorgon treat Will differently Barb? Was it saving him for a snack? It had plenty of time to just slice and dice. From what we've seen, it's first instinct is to slice and dice or bite. Sure, it also hesitated with Jonathan, but it was clearly going to bite him. And we only saw it jump Brenner, but if it didn't kill Brenner, it's only because it was so distracted with everything else. The Upside Down had no distractions when it found Will, it could've done whatever.
    If it treated Will the exact same way as it did Barb, what in heavens name burst out of Barb? Is this evidence that all the slugs from season 2 actually came from her body after all? They just multiplied inside until they burst out and then chewed on her body after the fact?

    Jonathan not a suspect? 
  • Wouldn't Jonathan who is viewed as a weirdo and a pervert be the prime suspect for the disappearance of Barb? He was the last one to see her alive.
    • He certainly would have been if the show didn’t progress so quickly. Nancy sees a flash of some “creature” in the woods, and then sees a figure of something in one of Jonathan’s photos shortly after (which is why she didn’t suspect him). At this point, the police were focused on Will’s "body" that had been removed from the water. Barb’s disappearance wasn’t even on their radar and it had been several days. Nancy finally reports it to the police, by which point Hopper basically realizes something weird/supernatural/conspiracy is going on and has also determined that the "body" was a fake. Hard for Jonathan to be a suspect when Hopper is the police chief and sees that something weird is going on. Not to mention that the police had no info about Jonathan’s photos.
    • The cops aren't looking for suspects because HNL moved Barb's car to a bus stop, then had the State Police "find" it (similar to Will's "body"), declaring her to be a runaway. Since she was never considered "missing", officially, there were never any suspects.
    • In real life, the police likely would publicly state that Barb was a possible runaway but behind the scenes they would be treating it as a missing person under suspicious circumstances. Jonathan probably would have been a witness but not a suspect.
    • And in Season 2, Barb is still considered missing rather than dead.

    Six victims 
  • When he was speaking to Joyce in episode 8, Dr Brenner mentions that six people have gone missing as a result of the Demogorgon, but who are the six? We know that includes Will and Barb, and I’m guessing Brenner was also counting the scientist who is killed in the first episode and the guy who they send into the portal on the tether. So, who were the other two victims?
    • It's a throw-away bit of dialogue, but there was mention of two locals who hadn't come home from a camping/hunting trip in the area in the first couple episodes.

     Lights in the Upside-Down? 
  • How did Will figure out that there are lights that corresponds to the writing on the wall? If one were to notice in episode 8, there's no copy of the christmas lights in the Upside-Down, so it seems to me that there isn't any form of electricity at all in the Upside-Down. So did Will just, I dunno, press the words or something while in the Upside-Down?

    Nancy going back to Steve...why? 
  • Why would Nancy go back to Steve, after all the behavior he did in season 1?
  1. He publicly humiliates Jonathan and breaks his expensive camera even though he knows that he is an outcast with poor social skills who likes taking pictures and is living in a literal hell with a missing and probably dead brother and a mother on the verge of collapse.
  2. He slutshames Nancy in front of the whole town.
  3. He shows no concern for Nancy's best friend being missing and possibly dead and only thinks about what the consequences will be for him.
  4. He tells Jonathan: "You're just a screw-up like your father. That house is full of screw-ups [...] I mean, your mom - I'm not even surprised what happened to your brother. [...] They Byers family is a disgrace to the entire...". Keep in mind that he is saying this while Jonathan's brother has been missing for days and his mother is having a breakdown.
  5. Even before this, he pressures Nancy quite a bit in the beginning, showing up to her house when she has explicitly told him not too and in general just being an entitled douche. However, this is more common teenage behavior and can be forgiven. But the other stuff is not normal, so how could Nancy feel okay going back to this guy?
    • Well, there's two answers for this:
      • The Doylist answer is that this was the only believable way the writers could keep Steve around after the first season. If you read some of the original planned material for the show when it was originally set in and called Montauk, Steve originally was supposed to sexually assault Nancy (he's basically drunk and coerces her into sex, and meanwhile Barb goes missing). He was characterized as an irredeemable asshole, who was killed by the Demogorgon. However, when Joe Keery was cast, the Duffers really liked him, and wanted to keep him around. But as they didn't actually have a plan for Steve, there wasn't any reason why he would still be around in season 2 unless Nancy was still dating him, so she had to take him back. The originally planned characterization for Steve was repurposed for Billy Hargrove in seasons 2 and 3.
      • As for a Watsonian reason for Nancy to take him back...it's suggested Nancy's reasons were probably pretty complicated. Namely surrounding Barb's death. The reason Barb was alone that night by the Harringtons' pool is because Nancy chose to stay with Steve rather than leave with her. Obviously what happened wasn't Nancy's fault, as she couldn't have known what was out there, but we see that she blamed herself in season 2. So if, from Nancy's point of view, her best friend died because Nancy wanted to have sex with Steve, then what did Barb die for if Nancy didn't want to be with Steve anymore? If she can make things work with Steve, if she can convince herself that she loves him, then she can let herself believe that her choice that night wasn't for nothing.
        And there was probably also a fear of being alone after everything. Jonathan had to take care of his family, Mike had his own loss to grieve, and her parents have no clue what had just happened to their kids. Steve was really all she had at the time. And he did show up to help with the Demogorgon and right the wrongs he did to her and Jonathan. Nancy seems to be a pretty forgiving person in some circumstances, as she doesn't hold the things Steve did against him, or hold the photos against Jonathan. And of course, due to the show's habit of timeskips, we don't know what Steve might have done in that one-month time to try and earn her forgiveness either.
    • And there's some cultural context going on here as well. Nancy had already slept with Steve, and the mid-80s were not the most progressive time in terms of female sexuality. They didn't just date for a little while; they'd slept together, and Nancy has been raised by a rather conservative family. Nancy may have felt an obligation to try and make it work with Steve so that she didn't feel like a slut (remember that most 80s horror movies really seemed to love punishing young women for having premarital sex). Women becoming more sexually liberated didn't really take off until the 90s.

Season 2

    Mike's jerkass behavior 
  • Why is Mike much more of a jerkass in season 2? Why does he disapprove of Max so much? Sure, he's still kind to his friends, but he's noticeably rougher around the edges, prone to emotional outbursts and was very hostile to Max. His parents explicitly bring this up, listing off his behavior changes over the last year, eg: getting in fights at school, stealing from Nancy, etc. Fortunately, there may be some answers for him to behave this way:
    • He seems to be deeply depressed and traumatized by Eleven's disappearance. He simply hates the mere idea of another girl taking her place. In Real Life, it is very common that people with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder tend to behave hostile and aggressive towards others.
    • Mike being horribly bullied by Troy in season 1, both physically and mentally. As also demonstrated with Billy, many victims of bullying and abuse have ended up being bullies themselves.
    • Perhaps both things contributed to his behavior?
    • In complete fairness, "bullying" seems a bit of a harsh way to describe Mike's behavior here. He's definitely unwelcoming towards Max, but he doesn't exactly go out of his way to make her feel uncomfortable, hurt or belittled either; he just doesn't particularly want anything to do with her. And even he starts to warm to her gradually; in episode three, he can clearly be seen starting to relax around her when she is showing off her skateboard skills, and when she's knocked off the board by Eleven, Mike's first instinct is to rush to her and make sure she's okay. He is a bit unnecessarily curt later when excluding her from the group's meeting about what's happening with Will ("Party members only!"), but that can perhaps be explained by stress over worrying about what's happening to Will, coupled with the fact that at that point they legitimately do have to keep things secret from Max (lest she spill the beans to the wrong person and get them all in trouble) keeping him from being as polite as he perhaps could or should be.
    • Also, notice how his voice is a bit deeper than the previous season (which, admittedly, might have more to do with Finn Wolfhard going through puberty than being a conscious acting choice, but even so). He's probably heading into the early stages of puberty, which means "hormonal imbalances", which — as I can testify from memory — can equal "being a stroppy little fucker".
    • Also, while it's not really brought up or dwelt upon, remember that Max's step-brother was perfectly willing to run them over at one point while she was in the car. While that's not her fault, and Dustin and Lucas are willing to shrug it off, it's not entirely unsurprising or unreasonable that Mike (or anyone else) might initially be less willing to do so or a little wary towards her as a result.
    • Mike probably doesn't even realize why he doesn't like Max, but it's precisely because he's still mourning Eleven (as Hopper is keeping secret the fact Eleven is alive). He's afraid that letting another girl in the party is disrespectful to El's memory, and afraid that if he lets in another girl and happens to like her (even if he doesn't "like" like her) that it means what he felt with El wasn't as "special." Also, if he lets himself move on from thinking about El, missing El, wanting to get El back, then he's forgetting her, treating her like she doesn't matter anymore. All logically illogical emotions to be running through the brain of a thirteen-year-old kid, and without anyone to really help him process those emotions in a healthy manner, he resorts to lashing out at what he perceives as the source of all this pain: Max. As for pre-Max informed behavior: the kid's got a heaping pile of PTSD served up to him. His best friend went missing in an alien dimension and nearly died, his party was fractured with turmoil surrounding that loss, he watched his first crush vaporize herself (so it seems) to save them all (and kill a lot of other people along the way), and found his own life in danger on several occasions. Frankly, it's kind of amazing he's as functional as he is this season.
    • In addition to everything else raised, Mike simply appears to be the kind of person who doesn't like sudden change and having new circumstances forced on him, and reacts by stubbornly digging his heels in and objecting to them even if it turns out he likes the change more than he lets on. When Max is just the new girl, he's just as curious as the others about her and displays no particular animus towards her. It's when Dustin and Lucas unilaterally decide that she's now in the group without discussing it with him that his nose starts to get put out of joint. Had events been allowed to occur a bit more slowly and naturally, and keeping in mind the rich cocktail of other issues surrounding Eleven and letting others into the group that he's also having to work through, he might have ended up being a bit more welcoming to her.

    Will, survival expert? 
  • It's already been asked how Will survived a week in the Upside-Down without anything to eat or drink...but how did he even survive in the first place? The Demogorgan took him there personally, and when the same thing happened to Barb, it killed her right afterwards. Are we supposed to believe that the Demogorgon took Will, somehow completely lost him despite being an apex predator two feet away from its prey, then spent the next week being outwitted on its own turf by a ten-year-old? It's not like he was huddled in a cave for the entire time, either; Will has at least one more extremely close encounter with the Demogorgon while talking to his mother, and it somehow dropped the ball that time as well.
    • First of all, the Demogorgon isn't an "apex predator," it's a telepathically controlled foot soldier of the Mind Flayer. Second of all, the Mind Flayer wants to use Will as a host rather than as food for its pets. Last of all, the Demogorgons seem to have an odd form of sense where they can't see, just hear. Will was never bleeding, an independent Demogorgon's way of easily tracking down enemies, and otherwise it has to rely on sound.
    • Wasn't the Mind Flayer described as an infection that had taken over the Demodogs? I don't recall them ever confirming whether the first season's Demogorgon was infected by the Mind Flayer.
    • Context clues make it very clear that Season One's Demogorgon was a servant of the Mind Flayer, with its collection of humans to "breed" with being a means for the Mind Flayer to create an army and conquer this world the same as it did the Upside Down. The Mind Flayer is never shown to have the need to "fill" the Demodogs with itself like it did for Will, suggesting their connection to it is innate, and there's the noises of several them at its side in the Upside Down, where presumably most of them were "hatched," and yet the ones who were in our world from the get-go already serve it. Therefore, S1's Demogorgon was an advance scout of the Mind Flayer and tasked with helping incubate its army, the first stage in its invasion plan, and one that presumably would have went on longer had the Demogorgon not been destroyed.
    • Sorry but, as the previous troper I was also under the impression that the Mind Flayer just took over the Demogorgons' dimension in a similar way how it wanted to take over ours, thus the Demogorgon in the first season wasn't under the Mind Flayer control yet IMO. In any case, we don't know how its senses works, it could be that there was something about Will that make him harder to sense for the Demogorgon (that has no eyes), maybe the size or some other factor. And we don't know how smart the Demogorgon is, might be smart enough to know that Will will lure others into proximity thus keeping him alive on purpose to have further prey.
    • The other possibility, after Season 4 Volume 1, is that Will wasn't taken by the Demogorgon at all. After all, whatever got him was capable of opening the lock on the Byers' house's door from the "wrong side", which is something the Demogorgon never shows capability for at any other point.

    The Hot Bath 
  • Why did Joyce not insist on Will taking a hot bath and in fact let him suffer hypothermia? Will would not wanted it and struggled against it due to the Mind Flayer's influence but Joyce shows shockingly little concern for his physical well-being at that time.
    • I think she felt that if Will was comfortable, the Mind Flayer wouldn't harm him. It ended up not being the case, but it seems that was her line of thinking.
    • Despite the fact that his temperature is low, he's not showing any of the symptoms of hypothermia. He's not freezing to death; he seems fine. So Joyce was willing to let it slide. Remember that Will has been through hell already, and Joyce doesn't want to make him uncomfortable if she doesn't have to. Will seems uncomfortable with the idea of taking a hot bath, so Joyce doesn't press him. It's only later that she realized that heat is the only way to save him from the Mind Flayer.
    • Also, she's probably just trying to adjust to what's going on and trying to work around it as best she can. In her mind, if he doesn't want to take a bath, after everything the kid's been through she's not going to force him to take a bath.

    Dustin and D'Artagnan/Dart 
  • It's understandable that Dustin would want to keep a stray pet, especially for the "cool/gross" factor for a boy his age. But as Dart grows and becomes the first "Demodog" introduced in Season 2, why does he insist on keeping it, and then has the rest of the crew searching for it when he knows where it is the whole time?
    • Steve mentioned he did it to impress Max and Dustin didn't deny it. It's a poor decision, but kids can be that way at times, even if it's a smart kid like Dustin.
    • Once it reveals itself as a carnivorous Demi-something, Dustin's plan seemed to be to try and contain it until he can get help with it. He does send Steve in after it with the spiked baseball bat as soon as he can get him.
    • As for why he keeps Dart hidden when the others are searching for him, he fears — not entirely unjustifiably — that the others will squish Dart as soon as they find him, and Dustin initially wants to nurture him. It turns out to be ill-advised, but it's out of naivete more than anything else.
    • When he finds out the creature is a demodog (and it eats his cat), he immediately goes to "they were right, we need to get rid of it" mode. It's just that by then he can't reach any of the rest of the Party, so he ends up asking for Steve's help to deal with it instead.

    How did Dr. Owens survive? 
  • The demogorgons eat human flesh, as we saw with poor Bob Newby, and the first season established they have an excellent sense of smell and can smell blood from far away. So how is it possible they just left Dr. Owens bleeding in the stairwell and didn't finish him off, like they did with Bob?
    • It's possible they had just started attacking him when the party set fire to the hub in the tunnels, or when El started closing the gate, and were called away to assist, leaving Owens wounded but not finished off. Judging by the blood on the handrails, it looked like he was already wounded and trying to escape when he collapsed in the stairwell.
    • The party hasn't set the fire yet when they meet Dr. Owens, so that doesn't explain it. The fire happens when El and Hopper are at the basement level near the gate, but they find Owens before that, in the staircase while they're on their way to the basement.
    • Perhaps the demogorgons had eaten their fill, and injured Owens to keep him stationary until they were hungry again. This can be seen in real wildlife as well.
    • Maybe they decided to keep him alive for later use as an "incubator", just like they used Will in the first season. (Presumably there are some features that distinguish incubator-worthy humans, like Will, from unworthy ones like Barb and Bob.)
    • He might have been able to fight it off when it attacked him, then made his way down to the staircase. Hopper manages to kill one of them with a shotgun so they aren't completely indestructible, a bullet in the mouth might have put it down.
    • Very, very few of those attacked by the demodogs were nommed. . . in fact, Bob's the only one we see getting eaten. Most of the bodies just have some wounds, enough to kill them, but no sign of having been eaten. Perhaps not all, or even the majority, of humans are palatable to demodogs? Perhaps they can only feed when the Mind Flayer commands it, and otherwise just kill? And perhaps, for whatever reason, they didn't realize they hadn't killed Dr. Owens, or realized that without assistance he was a goner anyway and were content with him dying eventually.

    What about Bob? 
  • According to the news report in the season finale, the government is now saying Barb died because of hazardous chemicals they were experimenting with in Hawkins. But the only death the news mention is Barb's. Presumably all the scientists and soldiers the demodogs killed at the Hawkins lab were working under extreme confidentiality, so no one knows they died there... But what about Bob Newby? He'd been living in Hawkins his whole life, he had a job there, and most likely friends and family too. Isn't anyone gonna wonder what happened to him?
    • He mentioned several times he wanted to move to Maine. Maybe that's the cover story. Or, on a rewatch...Barb's death was attributed to asphyxiation from a chemical leak. Maybe the rest of the deaths at the lab are explained the same way.
    • If that's the case, why is only Barb's death mentioned in the news report?
    • I assume he gets coverage with his "Employee of the Month" portrait being shown.
    • Probably because Nancy, Jonathan, and Murray were on a mission to specifically get closure for Barb, the journalists used the "human interest" angle of Barb's family as their story. No one talks about all the other red-shirts at the lab who died, or Owens or anyone else, which suggests the news report didn't get much information at all from the lab's spokespeople.
    • And speaking realistically, a young girl with her whole life ahead of her is going to draw far more media attention that a forty-something man. Men Are the Expendable Gender after all. Plus, Barb had been missing for months and Bob died immediately before the story broke.

     Eleven's powers increasing? 
  • How come in the first season it was shown several times that El needed a complicated set-up of salted water and darkness to be able to see people through her supernatural vision, yet in season 2, all she has to do is wear a blindfold and listen to static from the tv to achieve the same ability? I'm assuming the implication is that she's become stronger, but it would have been nice to have it at least explained or questioned in-universe.
    • What she is creating is the Ganzfeld Effect. It's basically a discount version of sensory deprivation. She was locked in that cabin for over 300 days with nothing to do but experiment with her powers. She knew it had to do with blocking out senses, so it makes sense that she would eventually stumble on the tv static and blindfold method.
    • Show, Don't Tell. We don't need her power boost spelled out since we can SEE it happen. Also, that's part of the purpose of "The Lost Sister."
    • This specific thing is probably less an increase or expansion in her powers as it is simple practice at using this particular ability. As she gets more practice at doing it, she can do it in increasingly casual environments. (Note that by mid-Season 3 or so, she doesn't need the white noise of TV static and can even answer questions from the people around her.)
    • Elle probably wasn't as good at using her powers in the first season because she's been used to being in a lab and treated horribly - so there would be added pressure to making progress. And when she does it at first, she's being hunted and in a constant state of fear. By Season 2, she's been safe from harm for a while and can practice at her own pace, as well as being on her own in peace and quiet (as opposed to a bunch of scientists watching her).

     Why does Billy hate Lucas? 
  • Billy seems to have a particular animus for Lucas which goes beyond his general Jerkass personality and disdain for Hawkins and its populace as a whole, repeatedly ordering Max to stay away from him, and this is never really explained. You almost start to suspect it might have something to do with Lucas being the only member of the core group of kids who's black. However, Billy is from California - not someplace where people stereotypically might hold on to bigoted attitudes about interracial romances like the Deep South - so while it's not impossible that Billy is just a racist it seems a little strange.
    • the Duffer brothers agree he's racist.
    • Lucas is also the member of the Party that Max has the most interactions with, and happens to be the one who's typically present when Billy arrives. So it's as much a matter of opportunity as it is anything else. Had it been Mike, Dustin, or even Will, Billy's response would likely have been the same.
    • As someone who grew up in California in the 1980s, I don't find it strange that Billy might be racist. Remember, this show takes place about halfway between the Watts riots and the Rodney King riots. There was plenty of racial hostility going on for various reasons, and since the Hargroves are apparently working-class people they may well have been living in areas most affected by it.
      • I suppose it's a moot point now with Word of Dante but this so much. You would be surprised to learn how racist California could get during the 80s.
    • That still just makes it fanon. Until it's made explicit in the show that he's a racist, that's all it is: Fanon. As it is, Billy never once makes a comment about Lucas that's contingent upon his race.
      • True, but the issue here is that he didn't just hate Lucas specifically. He didn't say "stay away from that kid"; he said something more like "stay away from that kind of person". He seems to think that Lucas belongs to some sort of group, and that the whole group is bad. Since he never has any personal interaction with Lucas, and only really sees him from a distance, the most obvious group he might be talking about is his racial group. The only other thing that comes to mind is that Lucas is a nerd, but if Billy had a problem with nerds then I doubt he'd be willing to drive Max to the arcade all the time.
      • Or he could be lumping him in with the small-town residents of a place it's clearly established he openly resents. His appearances build up that he hates being in Hawkins period and that's part of what he's taking out on Max.
      • Oh, right. That would make sense. But then apparently he thinks that Max should never make any friends at all, at least not while the family lives in Hawkins. But ok, yeah, it's obvious that Billy is being cruel and unreasonable, so that fits too.
      • Actually, I don't think he wants Max to have friends at all. It's already clear that he considers her very existence an unwelcome burden. Her having friends means the possibility of him having to play chaperone, or give her and her friends rides, and less time for him doing what HE wants to do. In short, it makes an inconvenience even more inconvenient. (And he's the kind of prick that would derive satisfaction from her being lonely and miserable... it'd drag her down to his level.)
      • Runaway Max makes it clear you are right. He just hates Max having friends, it had nothing to with Lucas being black. Also his dad is racist, so if he caught Max with Lucas Billy would get beaten.
    • I think it's pretty strongly implied that Lucas's race is the issue. Even if Billy weren't rabidly racist, he might object to his step-sister getting into an interracial relationships, which were more taboo in the 1980s than today, even in California. Plus, Billy's father is pretty bigoted, with his casual talk of "faggots" and "whores," and it's implied that that's where Billy gets most of his issues from. Billy could easily have gotten some bigoted beliefs from his father about race and interracial relationships.
      • And yet with the casual talk of "faggots" and "whores" we don't once got a racial slur. Even Troy called Lucas "Midnight" in season one, but Billy never says anything that unambiguously refers to Lucas's race.
      • This one is probably due to real-life N-Word Privileges, though.
      • No it was made clear they it was due to the racial content getting removed in order to alter his motivation for hating Lucas. Troy didn't have to say the n-word to make it clear he was racist. Caleb himself denies Billy being racist.
    • Incidentally, Actor Dacre Montgomery himself outright denies racial context for Billy's behavior, and confirms he singles out Lucas simply because Lucas is the character who happens to be around.
      • The Duffer brothers, however, think otherwise, explicitely calling him racist.
      • Caleb also denies Billy being racist and unlike Darce there is no reason for him to deny it. The Duffers also state they think he's racist not that he is for a fact.
    • This doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, fellow tropers. It can be the case that Billy has it in for Lucas especially because he interacts with Lucas more than the others, because he doesn't like nerds like Lucas and because he has some subconscious (or conscious) racist attitudes that lead him to single Lucas out more. In other words, it's all a rich tapestry of utter shitheadedness on Billy's part.
    • It's a case of Schrodinger's Racism.
    • I can definitely see it as a bit of racism. It was the 80's in Indiana, and although Billy grew up in California, we see that his dad is an abuser who beats women, and casually calls his son a faggot for getting himself ready for a date with a "whore", so we can guess that Billy didn't have a good role model growing up. Billy also refers to Lucas as one of the people in this world that you stay away from, which just feels racist. But I don't think it was just racism, I think at the time Billy just was a jerk because he could. I don't think it was a genuine concern for Max like some people think, I think he just saw a chance to control and bully her. When it comes to him almost beating Lucas up when Max ran away, I think it was misplaced anger. His dad had just punched him and humiliated him. Why? Because Max ran away, and why did Max run away? Because Lucas came to the house and got her. So instead of blaming the real problem, his dad, it's easier to blame Lucas.

     Why weren't Jonathan and Nancy searched? 
  • A major factor in the "Justice for Barb" story was that after Jonathan and Nancy were picked up by the Lab personnel for going to tell Barb's parents, they're given a tour of the Lab and exposited at... while Nancy had a tape recorder in her bag. The two were clearly antagonistic, clearly being treated like criminals and you don't even look inside their bag? What if they brought a gun? Does no one know how to do basic security anymore?
    • Owens was trying to establish that, while the Lab was still ready to take whatever measures they deemed necessary to keep a lid on what happened the previous year, they're now ultimately on the same side. So not searching them may have been his attempt to establish a degree of trust.
    • It really doesn't make any sense. The security team was completely on-point in all other respects: tracking their calls, following them to the meeting, sabotaging their car and forcibly abducting them. You don't kidnap someone and bring them into your top-secret military base without looking inside their purse. Owens might have tried to get them to trust him, but he certainly didn't trust them.
    • What would they be looking for exactly? Nancy and Jonathan aren't stupid enough to carry weapons into a government facility, and portable recording equipment were very rare among civilians. Even if recorded, Owens knows what Bauman told them after - the public wouldn't find it palatable enough for it to cause an outrage. Maybe he thought it worth the risk, or maybe it really was just a case of having an Idiot Ball.
      • If you're running a secret government lab, you're not gonna skip out on searching visitors just because "They'd be too stupid to try to bring weapons in here." The smart thing to do is actually check for weapons, and while you're at it check for anything else that seems weird. Such a protocol would have led them to discover the recording device, if they'd bothered.
      • Portable tape recorders were not that rare. As anyone who has watched Dark Shadows knows, civilian tape recorders have been around since 1968; and, in the Back to the Future novelization, (set and written in 1985) Marty has a Walkman even in the original timeline where his parents are losers. So the idea of someone using a Walkman to covertly tape someone should have occurred to anyone who was as Properly Paranoid as Owens was supposed to be.
      • Also, there's the fact that Owens is a scientist, not a commanding officer. He doesn't seem to know that much about security (when they are locked in the camera room it is Bob and not Owens who realizes that the system has to be rebooted and knows how to do it), so not really a surprise he'd overlook something like this body search matter.
    • Nancy was possibly Beneath Suspicion because she's a girl as well. 80s attitudes towards young women - especially in an older man like Owens - would assume she's all bark and no bite. She's just emotionally doing crazy things but no real harm. They might not have thought Nancy - who from their point of view is a prissy middle-class Girly Girl - would be smart enough to sneak a tape recorder in. Hell, maybe they searched Jonathan but not her.
    • It's possible she just did a good job of hiding it. Nancy's bag is relatively large and slouchy rather than structured, and when she pulls out the recorder, she opens a zippered pocket of some kind, rather than just opening her bag. It's not terribly hard to conceal something of that size in a bag of that size, depending on the construction. They could have banked (correctly) that Nancy's belongings wouldn't be searched very closely and that the searchers would be looking for guns not tape recorders.

     Nobody at the lab notices the tunnel network 
  • So, the gate that leads to the upside-down is in the lab, right? They have this gate under 24/7 surveillance, and they periodically send soldiers in to observe it up close and/or hit it with a flamethrower. So how the heck does a massive multi-acre tunnel network start emanating from the gate without the scientists ever noticing? Before Hopper raised a fuss, the scientists apparently had no idea that anything was happening.
    • The scientists apparently thought that the gate is a two-dimensional portal in a wall and didn't think that there's anything behind or below it. Even if they did think about excavating around the gate to investigate its dimensions, they might not want to risk making the gate wider. The tendrils were coming from below the gate, which the scientists didn't think was possible, and the tendrils can't be detected because they're behind the facility's walls and below its floors, in the solid earth. Presumably tendrils weren't making vibrations with their tunneling, and the tunnels weren't making the earth shift around the facility, so they're not giving off any clues to the scientists that something is amiss.

    Absent parents 
  • Why aren’t the parents of the other kids, except for Joyce obviously, worried for their children spending days out of their houses without contact of any kind? Dustin’s mother seem somewhat overprotective like to notice that her son is still outside late at night, same with Lucas’ parents. But the most obvious case are Mike’s parents considering that Mike spent several days in the government’ facility.
    • Did they spend multiple days in the military facility? Otherwise, it's just a case of Free-Range Children and Deliberate Values Dissonance, as the show takes place in the 1980s, when parents didn't put their kids under constant supervision as they tend to do today.
    • Don't the kids often use a cover story that they're all staying over at someone else's house? Even in the first episode, they stayed late at Mike's to play D&D. It might often be that they say they're at Will's (possibly to tug the sympathy of the parents who'll think they just want to be with their friend who went missing and therefore more likely to let it slide). In that case, Joyce would probably be in on it. And actually, the thing that tips off the Mind Flayer that they're in the Byers house is the phone ringing in the middle of the night - possibly someone else's parents checking up on them?
    • It's Played Up a bit, but the idea was that in the 1980s, parents were just way less hovering of their children than they are these days, and that Hawkins was a super-safe small town where parents didn't worry about their kids. Even at the very beginning of the series, Mike and the others biked around on their own, went trick-or-treating alone the next year, etc. Karen is a stay-at-home mom who wants to spend more time with her older kids, and of course Joyce Byers is portrayed as a bit overprotective even before everything happened to Will, and they still both saw it as normal for their kids to run around town on their own for extended periods.

    Kali’s Powers 
  • It is established that Kali’s power is to create illusions in the minds of others with objects and occurances that aren’t really there (a crumbling bridge, an overflowing toilet). However, she apparently has the power to make herself and others completely invisible when the police raid their hideout. If she can do that, why even bother creating a distraction when they can just appear to not even be there in the first place? That whole car chase at the beginning could have been avoided if they had just parked in one spot and let the cops drive right past them while cloaked in invisibility or while they raided that convience store.
    • As an area effect, the cloaking may be harder for Kali to pull off - for sure it's easier to target one person's mind instead of affecting everyone around. Likewise, it may be simply easier to create an illusion than to erase something that's visible. And while they might be invisible, they are not immaterial, so just sitting around in an area swarming with cops harbours the danger that one of them still accidentally bumps into them (this almost happens in the scene where they are invisible).
      • If she had made them appear as hazards for the police to walk around, like the barrels that were around them, that could have avoided the problem of them running into each other. Apparently they filmed it in a manner of having the actors simply step out of the shot when the camera was off of them instead of doing something more elaborate.
    • The answer, I believe, lies in a similar answer to the question below; for all their protestations of nobility, Kali and her gang enjoy the thrill of being superpowered outlaws more than they value taking the safe, sensible option. Hence, why they lead the cops on an exciting chase instead of just pulling into a dark alley and casting Invisibility.
    • There seems to be a limit on her ability to target people. She can target someone she can see, or someone whose presence she can reasonably infer (eg "the driver of that police car") or even a group of such people. But she can't just blanket broadcast "we're just a pile of boxes" and get anyone who happens to be looking. The boxes will fool the first cop car-full she was aware of when she set it up, but then when another one comes around the corner, she has to effectively "cast the spell" again for them, meaning they'd see her for a moment before she's replaced by boxes.

    Gas Station Robbery 
  • As previously established, Kali can create illusions, and it is easier to create simple illusions for one person than complex illusions for multiple people. However, this still leads the Gas Station robbery to make no sense. Kali creates the illusion of the overflowing toilet to distract the attendant so they could rob the store. However, he is only distracted for a little while and eventually catches on to the plot. Wouldn't it have been safer and simpler to go into the station, pick what they wanted, and then check out normally, but instead of handing the attendant cash, they hand him scrap paper or something? That way they could walk out with the attendant not suspicious at all. The toilet seems needlessly complicated and prone to error.
    • The most likely explanation is that it would require handing the attendant something tangible, and there's the possibility that would spoil the illusion. Paper currency is printed on a special kind of paper, with a particular texture and feel. Kali may be able to make people see what she wants them to, but feeling is something else.
      • Theoretically, she could scam the cashier by handing over a $1 bill and making him see it as a $50 (or whatever).
She'd get you all the goods AND whatever change he thinks he owes as a bonus. So it would seem that, as suggested below, they prefer doing something more entertaining.
  • It's also rather heavily implied that, protestations of noble Punisher-esque vigilantism aside, Kali and her group like being reckless outlaws with a superpowered gang leader. Given the choice between doing things the safe way and the fun way, they'll pick the fun way.

    Bob and the Demodogs 
  • So in Episode 8, where Bob was killed by the demodogs, why did the demodogs specifically gang up on him? I mean, all the bodies we had seen before were dead, but the most of their body was completely intact. So why did all the demodogs in the lab gang up on Bob to maul him?
    • A theory is that the Mind Flayer does not have complete and utter control over the Demodogs, most likely due to the fact that it's still trying to strengthen its connection to our world. It can command the Demodogs around, but only for urgent tasks, such as clearing the building of threats. When it's doing that, the Demodogs act more methodical- they kill the soldiers and technicians, then move on without actually feeding. Notice that only one Demodog is actually attacking Bob while Joyce and the others are in the building; the rest ignore him and instead chase after the group. When they fail to catch them, the Mind Flayer eases up on the control, allowing the Demodogs to follow their natural instincts. In this case, they could finally eat, and Bob's body was closest and freshest.

    No Emergency Protocol at Hawkins Lab? 
  • Once the Gate is breached and the Demodogs start invading the lab, Dr. Owens triggers an alarm, which seems to only be building-wide. Then nearly everyone at the lab is killed off. No one outside of Hawkins seems aware of this. Hopper later even tries to call in reinforcements, but admits that whomever he talked to might not have believed him. Certainly no one shows up until long after the threat has been dealt with by our heroes.
    The problem with this is that Hawkins Lab is the site of a highly-dangerous and unpredictable threat of national-security severity, which has already claimed multiple lives. The U.S. government is well-aware of this. How is there no "panic button" in the Lab which immediately summons a full-scale military contingent to control the situation? (Something like the H.E.C.U. from Half-Life.) Even if it's not a literal button, surely a single phone call from the lab on a dedicated line should be enough. There were at least a few minutes to make that call while the Demodogs overran the facility. Dr. Owens didn't even try. Did absolutely no one from the government develop any sort of plan for an emergency situation at Hawkins?
    Keep in mind that this is all during the Cold War. Even without the Gate there, there should already be a "Hostile agents (e.g. Soviets) have infiltrated this highly-secure government facility. Send help!" protocol in place. But instead it's like Hawkins Lab is left completely self-manage with no external resources available.
    • Dr. Owens firmly believes that if the Soviet Union found out about the gate they would attempt to replicate it and end up causing another incursion that would claim more lives, his plan for protecting it was to keep as few people involved as possible and not give any indication that this one lab was any more important than any other lab (not that this meant anything since season 3 suggests the Soviets' lab under Starcourt was already up and running). Having any kind of abnormal protocol for a full-scale military operation would be the same as putting a giant neon sign above the lab and saying "Hey there's something important here!" We also don't know what the militaries' response would have been since the time from the invasion of the lab to the closure of the gate is measured in a few hours, for all we know that phone call that tipped the Mind Flayer off was the military calling Hopper back to get more details.
      There's also complacency, as they had gone a full year without any kind of incident at all. They only find out that not all is well the day before the attack and up until their strike team was ambushed they had everything under control. They lab was prepared for the threats they were expecting, and believed that their airlock and monitoring would be enough to see anything coming from the Upside Down from far away and get ready.

    Turn on all the sprinklers. 
  • If turning on one sprinkler scared off one demodog, why not turn on all the sprinklers and scare off every demodog? Made even more egregious considering Bob was the one who first realized the tendrils were avoiding water.
    Even if the demodogs can still operate in water, causing a bunch of noise and impeding scent diffusion seems like the best possible way to hide from creatures who rely on sound and smell to hunt.
    • Actually he didn't turn on the sprinklers to scare off the demodogs, he turned them on to attract them. The demodog is in the West stairwell, and we can see on the screen that Bob turns them on somewhere at the East of the building. It's not so much about the water than the noise it makes.
    • The reason the tunnels don't run through water is. . . they're tunnels. Tunnel into a river or lake, and you get a flooded tunnel. The demodogs might be able to function in water, but they're not fully amphibious.

    Portals Portals Everywhere... 
  • My question is simple, why would closing the portal between our world and the Upside Down do anything to the Mind Flayer and it's puppet creatures? The Demogorgon in season 1 was able to freely open portals between the Upside Down and our world and vise versa whenever it wanted, so what stops the Mindflayer and it's Demodogs from doing the same thing?
    • The Demogorgon seems to be smarter than the Mind Flayer or the Demodogs. The Mind Flayer is too big to find its way through without a giant portal. And the Demodogs just seem to run around looking for stuff to eat. This is mostly WMG, but the Demogorgon seems to have a sort of reasoning/learning capability that the others don't, so maybe it understands "doorways" a little better. Or here's an even creepier thought: Notice how it's always looking to breed? Maybe it's a Demogorgon-human hybrid and the "human" genes are what make it a little smarter...
    • Like with Half-Life, it's possible the smaller temporary portals can only exist because of the larger main portal.
    • Perhaps the Demogoron wasn't making new portals, but rather the main portal was causing temporary portals to open and close, and the Demogorgon just took advantage of them.

    What was causing the pumpkin blights? 
  • Besides the portals to the Upside Down, what exactly was killing off the crops in the farms around the lab?
    • It's heavily implied to be the tendrils growing out from the Upside Down. We do know that their spores are toxic.

    What if others were there when Billy went to the Byers house? 
  • What if Jonathan was there when Billy went to Castle Byers looking for Max? Would Max still fear the situation when she hears Billy's car? Would Jonathan stop Billy from grabbing Lucas? Would Jonathan's inclusion change the scene and the episode? What if Hopper and/or Joyce hadn't yet left the house when Billy showed up? Would Billy have still lost his shit and beaten up the adults (forcing Hopper and Joyce to make a detour to the police station to have Billy booked for assault)?
    • If Jonathan was there, things would have played out much the same, only between him and Steve they would have overpowered and probably beaten Billy senseless. If Joyce was there, Billy would have still attacked, and things would have probably played out similar. If Hopper was still there, Billy would have left. He might be unstable, but he's not stupid enough to pick a fight with town's chief of police (especially if he's that much bigger than him and has a gun). Or maybe not. He might just as well pick a fight with Hopper because he's that kind of guy.
    • If Jonathan was there, he would’ve gotten beaten up. When he won that fight with Steve, it was a no-holds barred beatdown where Steve was provoking Jonathan. Jonathan was filled with rage and Steve was pushing just the right buttons to push him over the edge. Otherwise, Jonathan is not exactly the fighting type. He’d try to protect the kids though. He wouldn’t have opened the door for Billy probably and just threatened to call the police. Unlike with Steve and Billy, Jonathan could care less about Billy’s whole situation and has way more things to worry about. If it came down to a fight and protecting the kids, he’d try, but he'd not win against a muscle head. But, if he’s anything like his mother, Jonathan would grab a weapon such as a hammer or axe immediately. But, there’s almost no scenario where Jonathan is home with the kids and not with his mom and Will during the exorcism.
    • If Hopper were still there, Hopper would’ve told Billy "Beat it, punk. I’m the police chief and I’ll throw your ass in jail if you don’t leave." Billy is probably scared of adult men authority figures because of his father and Hopper is way bigger than his dad. And even if Max were standing right next to Hopper, Hopper would probably lie that Max isn’t there, and never has been; in fact, he has no idea who Max is, so he’d better leave or else. (That's assuming Hopper caught on that Billy is no good and Max is safer sticking around than being near her own step-brother)

    Why wasn't Billy arrested? 
  • What Billy did was downright illegal – not only horrible and abusive and racist (in Lucas’s case) but illegal. But why didn't Hopper (who would’ve found out about it; they probably all met back up at the Byers’) have him arrested, or the boys press charges against him? Steve’s bloody and bruised face and obvious concussion was absolutely enough evidence, even if Lucas didn’t say that Steve was protecting him from Billy (which he would have because he’s Lucas). Hell, Steve very easily could have DIED from that beating from Billy. Being knocked out for ANY amount of time is A) a concussion and B) very dangerous. Even if it’s only losing consciousness for a second. The longer you’re unconscious the worse and more dangerous the injury. Steve was knocked out long enough for the kids to get him into the car AND drive halfway to the tunnels before he came to. That’s probably around 10min. That is SUPER DANGEROUS with a head injurynote , and if Billy had continued to hit him while he was already unconscious (which he would have for God knows how long if Max hadn’t stopped him) then he absolutely would have killed Steve. So at least Steve should've been pressing charges against him.
    • A) They're children and might possibly fear worse things happening if they reported it, which is one of the reasons why bullying and abuse has been allowed to go on for years well past the 80s setting. B) Concussions and head injuries weren't fully understood until well into the 2000s, and Steve seems like the type to shrug off any injury and have the "take it like a man" attitude, so he may not have realised the severity of what Billy did. C) Reporting Billy also risks questions about what Max was doing at the Byers house in the middle of the night, and potential ramifications from their stepfather. So yes, while pressing charges against him would have been an option, they all decided to take a different one.

     How could Max's mother marry such a horrible person? 
  • How could someone so seemingly sweet and gentle like Susan (Max's mother) marry such a horrible man, with an equally nasty son? Is she even aware of how cruel her step-son is to her own daughter?
    • Abusers are good at hiding their behavior and usually only let it show over time in relationships. By the time Susan realized Neil's true colors, she was probably already so deeply invested in the relationship that she wouldn't or couldn't back out—financial dependence and emotional attachment are both common reasons people in real life stay in abusive situations. As for Billy, he probably limits his abuse of Max to when their parents aren't around and intimidates her into not telling her mom, or Max told her and wasn't believed.
    • Also, while I hate to defend an abuser at all, their daughter had gone missing while Billy was responsible for her safety. By 1980s standards, the dad's behavior was "strict," not abusive. If Hopper had been there with the three Hargroves, for example, he probably would've said "hey, take it easy on him" or something, but not actually intervened, let alone arrested him for child abuse.
    • Also, IIRC abuse victims tend to be drawn to people who turn out to be abusive in their relationships. I wouldn't be entirely surprised to learn that Susan herself was a victim of abuse at some point; a cycle keeps perpetuating.
    • Abuse can happen to many different people from different walks of life. It may have manifested gradually, and she might rationalize it with "well he had a bad day" or "he's sometimes really nice". And perhaps she honestly doesn't know much about Billy; he might just seem like a typical aloof teenage boy when around his parents. Max also doesn't seem like the type of child who'd complain if he was mistreating her. Susan could possibly view it as the two simply not getting on.
    • One of the tie-in novels for the series describes Susan as having a history of getting involved with awful men. Moreover, by the time they moved to Hawkins, she seemed to be financially reliant on Neil - when he abandons them in Season 4, Susan and Max are left so destitute that Susan has to work two jobs just to afford a trailer for them to live in.
    • Season 4 shows that Susan is now an alcoholic too, suggesting that the trauma of her relationship with Neil caught up with her once he was out of the picture. It's actually quite a realistic reaction if that's the case - some people just ignore and repress to cope, but then when the partner is gone or out of their lives, then the full force of it finally hits them.

     Why can't Eleven's aunt adopt her? 
  • The end of the second season sees Hopper adopting Eleven as his daughter. But Eleven has at least one surviving family member in the form of her aunt. While her birth mother is clearly in no shape to be raising her, her aunt seems perfectly capable of doing so, so how come Hopper is the adoptive parent? I don't remember if this was explained.
    • What would arouse more suspicion with the government? Jim Hopper — who was established in season 1 to be a bit of a philanderer — revealing he has a daughter? Or Jane Ives miraculously returning home to her mother's family? With Hop it would be possible for El to hide in plain sight. Also, it was presumably Hopper himself who pushed Owens, and since El had come to recognize him and the Party as her family he likely considered her feelings when making the arrangements.
    • And while the audience knows Hopper formed a special bond with Eleven during the time he was hiding her, no one in the government does. They knew each other for a week at most, and it's not until a year later that the adoption papers are drawn up. And with Hopper's backstory of having lost a daughter in the past, it wouldn't seem unusual that he adopted a new child. Obviously, El chooses to stay in Hawkins with her friends, and it's more convenient for Hopper to take care of her.
    • Also her aunt is already a full-time caregiver for her mother. Being a caregiver to someone in the mom's position is a lot of work, and adding in a volatile traumatized child in the mix might not be ideal.
    • Hopper also reveals that he was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and his biological daughter died of cancer, so it wouldn't look too suspicious that he chooses to adopt; an adopted child obviously wouldn't inherit any medical conditions of his.
    • Legally, Hopper didn't adopt El; Owens didn't give him adoption papers, he gave him a falsified birth certificate showing Hopper as her biological father. This subterfuge was doubtless made easier to pull off by the fact that there was no existing Certificate of Live Birth on file; officially, Jane Hopper was stillborn, thanks to Brenner's manipulations.

    Other 
  • A humorous one in season 2 episode 2. We're treated to a flashback to the day Eleven disappeared, but if one listens to Mike's voice while talking to the police officers, compared to season 1 episode 8, Finn Wolfhard obviously has matured some between the seasons, causing his voice to be slightly deeper in the flashback than it originally was that episode.
  • In season 2 episode 8, when they try to interrogate Will, while the Mind Flayer is forcing Will to say whatever it wants, the actual Will is tapping out what he wants to say in Morse code. It is unlikely (though not impossible) that Will memorized how to communicate using Morse code, as the only person seen who actually has it memorized is Hopper. Even the kids had to use a decoding sheet in order to translate what he was saying.

Season 3

     Dustin's Surprise 
  • Did Dustin forget he has a friend who can move things with her mind? Why, upon seeing his toys move by themselves, does he assume he must be dreaming?
    • We really don't know the full context of the scene's setup yet. For all we know, Dustin may have believed all of his friends had gone to summer camp like he did or on vacation with their families (And Dr. Owen suggested waiting a year before allowing Eleven to go out in public, so maybe he thought Eleven was at Hopper's cabin, staying hidden until the time elapsed time was up). Or, maybe Dustin ran into his friends earlier to the scene and they acted like they didn't care so they could surprise him (Dustin himself says in the scene before the toys started to move, "At least somebody's glad to see I'm home" to his turtle, indicating that he either ran into his friends who pretended not to care he was back from camp, or that he believed they weren't in town/staying hidden a year just to be on the safe side).
    • It's also worth remembering that pretty much every time Dustin has asked Eleven to use her powers for some frivolous purposes (hello, Millennium Falcon), he's been rebuffed. He's probably just gotten used to the idea that Eleven doesn't use her powers for trivial things and so isn't expecting her to break them out as part of a "welcome home" surprise.
    • Dustin also knows there's plenty of weird shit out there unrelated to Eleven. His first thought upon seeing the toys move was probably something along the lines of "Holy shit, what if this is another Demogorgon/Mind Flayer/whatever" hence him attacking Lucas in a panic.
    • Another thing: the toys are not only moving, but talking, and the whole setup (even if they’re advanced toys that have prerecorded messages) shows a level of subtlety and refinement that Dustin — and we — have not seen out of Eleven. Lifting vans is one thing; it just requires brute strength. Even unlocking a door is a simple enough motion. However, manipulating multiple toys, getting them to gather round a target and talk, all simultaneously, takes a much greater level of finesse.

     How do you miss that? 
  • Episode 8 has the Mind Flayer's avatar pursuing Eleven through the town, how did nobody see that? It's the fourth of July, one night when a ton of people are guaranteed to be out and about and this thing goes into the mall which would logically be in a more urban area. Multiple people definitely should have spotted the fifty-foot meat spider!
    • Since it's the 4th of July, it's reasonable to assume that everyone in town who's out (recall that this is a small town) would be at the fair. The Mind Flayer was mostly moving through the forest and only just showed up to the Starcourt Mall when it was presumably closing, which by proxy should tell the viewer that it's probably late, thus the lack of any onlookers on and off the road. The fireworks also did a good job of masking its noisy stomping and rampaging, for the most part.
    • But it still would have needed to go through the town just to reach the mall.
    • Not if the steel mill it came from and the mall are both on the same side and more towards the edge of town. The mall was specifically built near the edge of the town, since that's where the land the Soviets wanted for their Elaborate Underground Base was.
    • First of all, it's dark, making it hard to make out the Mind Flayer's features. Second, any adult who spots it is likely to shrug it off as an illusion or hallucination; that's what people do. And if by some chance someone does see it and does conclude it's some kind of supernatural or otherworldly being, who would believe that person? And what difference would it make to the story? The person wouldn't have much of an opportunity to pursue the matter further; it would just be an isolated event that would do little more than spook the person. The most extreme scenario is that multiple people see it and report it – but even there, it simply would enter the realm of urban legend and would be subject to the theories of various kooks and conspiracy nuts who would most likely misinterpret its true nature. (We got a sense of that at the end with the tabloid-ish news report speculating that the strange events in Hawkins might be demonic in origin.) So in sum, if people did see the monster, the real question is, so what? It wouldn't significantly change anything in the plot.
    • The steel mill was definitely outside the residential area of Hawkins. From there, the Meat Flayer initially went to Hopper and El's cabin, which is also in a secluded, wooded area, and from there it pursued the heroes to Starcourt Mall – which is also implied to be on the edge of town, like most of the new malls that sprang up in the vicinity of small towns in the seventies and eighties. Most of the mall was already closed; typically, mall stores and eateries close at 8:00 or 9:00 PM, with only the movie theater (if there is one) remaining open later. We can infer that the showing of Back to the Future in which Dustin, Steve, Robin, and Erica hid was the last show to let out that night, so once the moviegoers left nobody remained in Starcourt except the protagonists and the Russians.

     The chemicals 
  • Was it ever explained why the Mind Flayer had all its victims eat all those chemicals? I think they implied that it was to help build its physical body, but I'm not sure how exactly.
    • Perhaps it was simply to poison them and make their bodies frail, so that they would deteriorate easily when it was ready to use the flesh? Most of the chemicals being sought out are fairly caustic.
    • From my understanding, it was necessary for them in order to melt and be incorporated into its flesh avatar.
    • More or less the above; keep in mind, most of what was being eaten was either fertilizer or household cleaners (stuff like Comet and Ajax), all of which tend to have warning labels indicating they're flesh irritants or corrosive. The household cleaners in particular, tend to be nasty as most note that their chemical mixtures don't react well when mixed with one another.
    • Will and Nancy hypothesize that the flayed are eating chemicals to make a "new substance." Later, the flayed all become part of the Mind Flayer. The Mind Flayer is the "new substance." Its chemical composition is apparently different from human flesh, requiring the addition of other chemicals.

     How in the world... 
  • Was an entire Detachment of the Soviet Armed Forces able to build an entire secret base under a mall, staffed by at least three squads of troops, in the middle of Indiana without anyone noticing at all??? The sheer amount of coordination to move all of that across borders, to keep it secret, it would involve a massive undertaking with huge amounts of risk. Even if they were not doing stuff like opening portals to the Upside Down, the mere existence of said base could very well provoke World War III.
    • Gets even worse once you realize...malls don’t usually have men in black, carrying assault rifles. What are they meant for exactly? If the FBI storms the place they’re screwed. If the local cops engage them in a fire fight, the feds get involved, and the spies are screwed. If a couple of kids try to steal a box, and go missing, the cops come in, and the spies are screwed. Honestly, they’d be better off hiring minimum wage locals to move stuff around.
    • What's even more egregious, is the Soviets aren't even covert about their presence. They're walking around above ground, guarding rooms with clearly Russian rifles (they couldn't source some American/European firearms to blend in? They have to use AK-type rifles?) and speak loudly in what is clearly Russian. Given that it's the Cold War, and most Americans are still paranoid about Russian infiltration, this whole ruse should have raised some suspicion very quickly.
      • Given this overtness, it's no wonder Murray was led in season 2 to think Eleven was a product of Russian spies.
      • Another troper pointed out that Alexei claiming no one could break into the base was actually him falling for Russian propaganda. Considering this, maybe the Russians are overconfident in themselves to the point that they wouldn't care about how suspicious they looked. That, or probably because they're a parody of clichéd, Obviously Evil villains that all hold a small Villain Ball at least, considering how this series is inspired by old Amblin Entertainment movies, Stephen King and 80's movies (etc.) in general.
    • Considering how Larry Kline was in kahoots with the Russians, there might have been more than one person pulling the strings to keep news about the secret base quiet, maybe against their wills...

  • Alexei specifically mentioned that they only moved to the USA because it was already "unstable" thanks to El opening the gate by accident. The real question is how they got wind of what the Americans had been doing in HNL and, in one year, were able to come up with the technology to replicate the energy required to open a portal to a different dimension that had already been closed by the only known human capable of manipulating such portals (even with the lame excuse that the land in Hawkins was "unstable", which they would also need to discover). All this while also using tons of resources to secretly buy land inside the United States at the height of the Cold War, build a mall and a huge underground lab complete with Russian uniforms and golf carts to get around, risking discovery of their plans and being forced to leave their expensive discovery to the Americans.
    • Obviously, they had Russian spies inside of America. Said spy might actually be the very same Russian that El was told to spy on in episode 2.
    • There's a lot of suspension of disbelief to make this even plausible. The fourth season of Better Call Saul has a subplot where Gus Fring wants excavate underneath an industrial laundry to build a meth superlab in absolute secrecy. The project ends up being a huge logistical hassle, takes close to a year to even get halfway done, keeps going over deadline, and has to be abandoned temporarily when information about the project gets leaked to one of Gus's rivals so that the rival doesn't figure out the truth etc. And that's just to make what basically amounted a really big basement. Now try to imagine a vast complex 10-30 stories down with miles of tunnels being built in total secrecy in that same amount of time.
      • I actually remember this being discussed. It's made quite clear that the people in the mall were also working for the Russians, but it's more likely that the spies themselves blackmailed or forced them to keep their entire operation a huge secret. "Considering how Larry Kline was in kahoots with the Russians, there might have been more than one person pulling the strings to keep news about the secret base quiet, maybe against their wills...". Also, it's not a suspension of belief if it's literally canon that they have Russian spies in America. Did you watch season 3?
      • You're misreading this. It's one thing for Russian spies to be in America, and it's easy to believe that some of them would be in Hawkins by this point in time (in season 2, Murray initially thought Eleven was some sort of Russian experiment). But the idea that a foreign government infiltrated a small town in Indiana, constructed miles worth of fully lit and embellished concrete walking tunnels that were at least 10-30 stories underground based on the elevator ride; miles worth of concrete, lighting, and piping were built for the facility; created a fully functioning (and quite fancy) laboratory with imported machinery; a facility big enough to have air ducts big enough for people to crawl through; had a full team of Russian military, lab techs, and scientists to working in this location; built an entire mall as a cover-up with the mayor’s compliance; all of this was done in under a year; and absolutely no one in the town or otherwise noticed this happening? I call bupkis. In that timeframe, it's more likely they would've cut corners and just tried using the old tunnels from season 2 to find their portal to the Upside-Down (they have to still be there in some capacity, possibly caving in or deteriorating, but they conveniently lead right back into the underground beneath the lab’s basement; the U.S. military abandoned the lab, so that’s no issue. And the tunnels actually lead below the basement level, so they wouldn’t even need to use the old lab and would never be seen by the military cameras.)
      • You're right, people would likely find out and they did. Again, yes, they did manage to keep everyone's mouth shut, as crazy as that apparently sounds. Pretty much no one, unless they're an Action Hero, is willing to go against people that would threaten their lives and/or loved ones, and that's probably the most canon explanation we'll ever get. For the people that don't have those, like what they did to Hopper, almost definitely locked them up somewhere, likely in the very same place where Hopper was in (I mean, did you notice how easy it was for a bunch of kids and teens to sneak into their base and escape? Now imagine if other people tried the same, but all ended up like Hopper. "Let's rush the Russian base, they can't lock us all up!" Said no one unironically ever.). Perhaps you're just going to need some Suspension of Disbelief for this one. Alternatively, they're in KAHOOTS with the Americans. Or maybe some of them, due to a collaboration of the portal-gun to the Upside-Down.
      • We all know Stranger Things borrows tropes from a variety of contemporary sources, such as Stephen King novels and Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter films. The Russian base plot in Season 3 was straight out of a Roger Moore-era 007 movie. The whole season is decidedly campy, with much broader humor than any of the other seasons – the Flanderization of Hopper into a stereotypical Boyfriend-Blocking Dad, the ridiculous rom-com drama between Mike and Eleven that results from Hopper's intimidation of Mike (aggravated by Max and Lucas's highly dubious relationship advice), Hopper's own quarrel with Joyce and unwarranted jealousy of Mr. Clarke, Karen and the other bored housewives ogling Billy at the pool, Robin's snarky observations on Steve's attempts to attract a date while working at Scoops Ahoy, everything about Erica's role in the story, Dustin and Suzie's musical interlude and cutesy nicknames for each other, etc. Even the horror shifts from atmospheric dread toward gross-out gruesomeness with the Mind Flayer's physical manifestation. It all requires a much thicker cable from which to suspend your disbelief than the preceding seasons.

     Why would the Mind Flayer do that 
  • Since it apparently developed a personal grudge toward Eleven and wanted to get revenge on her, why the Melted Flesh Abomination plan when it would have been easy to take control of the entire town of Hawkins? We saw from its little speech through Billy that the Mind Flayer does understand the concept of love and friendship, so it should have known that taking control of the kids would have been a way better way to proceed.
    • For one thing, it would have needed to catch the kids. And not for lack of effort on its part they managed to slip its grasp whenever it was close enough to even try. And at the time it was still reliant on Billy to acquire victims, who managed enough Fighting from the Inside to not take Karen when he had the chance. Who knows whether the Mind Flayer would have actually been able to force him to kidnap Max or one of her friends (to say nothing of the fact that by the time he even had the opportunity, the Party was already suspicious).

     How would there be a chance Hopper survived? 
  • The blast radius that vaporized the scientists hit the entire room, there's no way he could have escaped that.
    • Unless he got behind something able to protect him from the blast and he was nowhere to be seen when the thing actually exploded.
    • There's actually a trope for that. In almost those exact words.
    • We don't know what that explosion actually does. It might have just send him to the Upside Down much like Eleven was in the first season. She even left the same cloud of ashes afterwards.
    • General consensus is that he either jumped over the railing and attempted to reach a lower exit, or he just straight-up jumped through the gate to the Upside Down. Or the explosion itself somehow sent him there (although the scientists in the opening scene were pretty clearly just reduced to mulch). Still, the lack of any obvious remains would seem to indicate he's alive. The scientists didn't just up and disappear, they died very messily.
    • The shot of the exploding machine also made it clear that there was a ladder leading to a lower floor - perhaps he hightailed it down there somehow?
    • Latest teaser confirms he survived and is in a Soviet labor camp in Kamchatka.
      • More specifically, he jumped away from the beam and got taken by the Russians. Don’t think about it too hard.

    Joyce moving out 
  • Regarding Joyce leaving and taking Will and Eleven with her, I understand her grief and there not being too many happy memories for her in Hawkins. But at the same time, is it really the best idea to uproot two traumatized children (Will and Eleven) from the only people who can relate to them? Couldn't she just leave for a year or two and leave Will and El in the care of Jonathan and Nancy?
    • Perhaps not, but it's not like Joyce is a trained psychologist or expert in trauma therapy or anything; she's just an over-stressed working class single mother who's had to deal with her own traumas over the last few years, and has likely just reached the point where as far as she's concerned everyone could just do with a complete break from the past and a fresh start somewhere without painful memories, secret government interdimensional projects or terrifying demon-monsters. Besides which, she might not have had much of a choice; she's lost her job, there probably aren't a wealth of possible alternatives in Hawkins, and it's not like Jonathan and Nancy are earning much more to enable them to support Will and Eleven on top of themselves or are easier equipped to deal with two traumatised early-teenagers. So it's just easier if everyone moves with Joyce.
    • Basically while it was a bad idea to uproot Will and Eleven, Joyce didn't have any real alternative.
    • It's about more than just grief and painful memories- over the course of less than two years, there have been three separate incidents involving the Gate that have endangered or killed people close to Joyce. At this point, she likely figures that living anywhere near the Gate is way too dangerous, and while she can't make the choice for everyone, she's definitely getting her family out of there.
      • 30 people have died in Hawkins in really strange conditions. Including kids. So if it wasn't already sad enough for Joyce and Eleven to grieve Hopper and be reminded of him everywhere around Hawkins, imagine the mood of the town grieving together this immense tragedy for everyone else who died. Then add the pressure of the media attention with its conspiracy theories asking questions which might've ended up knowing about the kids' involvement in all of this (like Will. How did he come back from the dead? Who is this young stepsister girl and who are her parents?). Plus the government would probably also question the kids and might get interested in Eleven's powers.
      • And if you're Joyce, how do you wake up every day and walk past the living room where Bob used to snuggle with you on the couch? Past the wall where Hopper first believed you about your son being alive?
    • Sure, Joyce has bad memories of Hawkins, but is it really the best choice to just uproot her kids from their lives with the people they love so dearly (especially in the middle of Jonathan’s senior year) to move to a new place where they’ll be all alone without their support system or friends or anyone who knows what they’ve been through? I would wait a year and then reassess?
      • Again, the Gate isn't just a source of bad memories- it's an extreme, ongoing threat to anyone nearby. Every option kind of sucks, but Joyce probably figures that it's better to leave Hawkins and take her kids from their support group than stay and put their lives at risk. She's already given Hawkins a second and third chance, and it's resulted in her having to watch people she cares about die- it makes total sense that she's not willing to wait a year to see if she and her kids are put in mortal danger a fourth time.
      • And also again; Joyce is a struggling working class single mother with (now) three young people dependent on her, no job, and a generous heaping of trauma herself. We're criticising and judging her on making a choice that, in all likelihood, she didn't have a heck of a lot of choice in making for numerous reasons (lack of money, lack of space, three traumatised young people to think of as well as herself, etc.). It's easy to suggest she "wait a year" from behind a computer screen, but in Joyce's shoes that's a year having lost her job and without much prospect of finding another one in a town where most of the work she's qualified for has just disappeared, thus being without money to pay for rent/utilities/groceries/etc., in an increasingly small and cramped house with three teenage kids who need their own beds and space, etc. Moving them away might not be the best choice from a removed standpoint focussing purely on the psychological aspect, but for numerous reasons she probably didn't have the option of a "best choice"; just a whole bunch of less-than-optimal ones, of which moving away might actually have been one of the better ones. And given that, also again, she's not a qualified psychologist or trauma therapist, we can perhaps forgive her for not having the training or instincts that would help her realise that from a psychological perspective, she might be making a mistake.
      • She might have more options later. Her job in Hawkins wasn't great but it'd be easy to get a similar one in a new town, El having been formally adopted by Hopper is probably due survivor benefits as the child of an officer killed in the line of duty, presumably Jonathan has a portfolio so even if there are no non-Mind Flayer-victims left at the Hawkins Post to offer a reference it might not be too hard for him to find work as a photographer so money pressures might not be that bad.
      • They might be lessened slightly with the above, but financially the family is still probably not in that great a position. Any benefits from Hopper's job probably wouldn't stretch much beyond the basics for supporting El herself (the other two kids and Joyce herself wouldn't be entitled to anything), and Jonathan's a high school student whose portfolio at that stage probably wouldn't get him much beyond getting him a low-to-unpaid internship somewhere (assuming that other such opportunities exist in a small rural town like Hawkins) or into a photography school (which would cost more money than it would bring in). All of which might bring in a little cash but almost certainly not enough to get anywhere near to supporting a family of four. And if Joyce can only get a new job in a different town, it would almost certainly be cheaper and more convenient to move the family there rather than commuting from Hawkins on a daily basis. In any case it still means that, financially, sticking around in Hawkins for any lengthy period of time is probably not that viable an option for them under the circumstances.
      • The little news clip of "welcome to Hell (Hawkins)" was the nail in the coffin for Hawkins. There's no coming back from that. The two hub centers of activity are both utterly abandoned. Even the farmers are moving away, the same ones that were growing pumpkins in season 2. Melvald General Store started slowly dying once the mall came in, and even though the mall got cratered by the Mind Flayer, that doesn't mean those customers are gonna come back. So, there goes that job. Plus, most of the staff at the Hawkins Post was liquified into Mind Flayer meat paste, so there goes Jonathan's paycheck too. Hawkins is a metaphorically dying small town that is probably going to become a literally dying small town in a season or two. Even without all the nightmare monsters, they might have needed to move just to get decent work and a place they can afford. It's not hard to imagine that by season 4 we'll see that some of the other families will also move.
      • Money shouldn't have been a problem. At least, let's be realistic, the US government should have paid the Byers a ton of money for what Will has been put through and to keep them quiet. At bare minimum, enough to pay for Jonathan’s tuition to NYU. Lawsuits were definitely a thing even in the 1980s. Joyce also could have sued the state of Indiana for millions of dollars. I guess the official story with the fake body in season 1 was that they buried the wrong kid? That’s at least malpractice on the part of the coroners, and emotional distress for telling her Will was dead when he wasn’t. The funeral was a huge expense for Joyce and Jonathan, considering they barely scraped enough money together to pay for a few hundred photocopies.
      • Joyce and Hopper's agreement with the government at the end of Season 1 was that in exchange for allowing them to go after Will, they would pretend nothing ever happened. Season 2 also shows that the government "repaid" Joyce in free therapy and treatment for Will, a service which they would undoubtedly pull if she tried to take any action against them. Not to mention, the people responsible for what happened to the Byers family were mostly shadowy government figures working on behalf of a conspiracy, which would make a lawsuit even more difficult (for example, the coroner who "misidentified" Will's body wasn't the actual coroner, but rather an unidentified person from the state police working on behalf of Hawkins Lab). Also, on a more practical level, she may not have had the money for a good lawyer or didn't want to put her family, especially Will, through the stress and trauma of a lawsuit.
    • It's confirmed that Dr. Owens relocated them. At the end of the day, Joyce was trying to balance her kids physical safety with her kids' emotional wellbeing, and understandably chose the former.
    • The epilogue and Joyce booking it out of town was three months after the Fourth of July, so sometime around early October. That's faster than most house sales, but not too unrealistic, because of several factors:
      • For one, she needed to sell her house. Selling a house isn’t easy, especially not her house. For some real life information, the house that they used for filming the Byers house was built in 1900. It’s old and rickety and from what we know, it’s on the outskirts of town. Not to mention, she used to live there and she has quite the reputation. It probably took her a whole three months to sell that house and honestly, that's pretty fast.
      • Second is mortgage. As Jonathan spilled, it seems the Byers are still paying a mortgage. That means Joyce would need to go through a process after selling the home to close the mortgage. To my understanding, you usually have to get an agent for that. That’s a whole 'nother bureaucratic process to go through.
      • Third, she needed to find a new house. Joyce has probably been looking for new places to go. She needed to find a new place to live. It seems they might be moving out of the state, or at least to Indianapolis, making things more difficult. Remember that this was the 1980s, before the Internet. Joyce would've had to visit a location where she wanted to move and ask for local real estate listings. Whether that’s in Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, wherever she decided to move (we don't know where Hawkins is in Indiana, but arguably the closest state border to Hawkins would be Joyce's likeliest option), that's a lot of driving, scouting, bargaining, etc etc.
      • Speaking of that mortgage, once she'd settled on a new town to relocate to, she'd have to shop around for a new lender who would give her a mortgage for her new house. If the Byers financial situation isn’t great, this is probably a very difficult task.
      • And of course, the biggest time waster, closing a house. If you've read horror stories about closing a house, it takes forever. As in, you can expect to usually take about 46 days to complete, and 49 days for a mortgage refinance. FHA loans take just about the same amount of time 45-46 days on average. There’s a lot going on with closing. The realtors and all those other people come, and appraise the house to make sure repairs are done. They make sure all your payments are up to snuff. Gotta make sure all paperwork is good to go. All kinds of stuff. And if one of these things are wrong, the house closing gets delayed. So when Joyce got their new place (if she bought a house), she would have to wait for about a month and a half to actually be able to move into the new place. But, she would also have to wait for the closing on her old house too, but I assume she left before it was finished closing. She doesn’t have to live there while it’s closing after all.
      • TLDR: if Joyce bought a house, moving out of town in only 3 months is actually REALLY fast. Especially since she wasn’t even sure she was going to move prior to the events of season 3. 3 months might seem like forever, but when it comes to buying and selling a house? That is… very fast.
    • It actually seems like Joyce may have been starting the process to move to another town before the events of season 3 kicked off, based on some dialogue she has with Hopper as they're entering the lab where Bob died. This suggests they initially were going to move because the mall was putting small downtown shops out of business (including the general store, where Joyce works). However, at the end, when the mall is destroyed, this probably wouldn't be an issue. But then you remember, Bob asked Joyce to move out of Hawkins with her in season 2. In season 2 episode 2, Bob is dancing with Joyce and he asks her to move out of Hawkins with him, to get away from all the trauma that happened in Hawkins. She says no initially, but with what happened to Bob at the end of season 2, and Hopper now in season 3, it's likely that Bob's remarks there stuck with her.
      • Joyce told Hopper that she listed their house for sale because it was too hard to live there after Bob died. She only considered staying because she developed feelings for Hopper and only decided to definitely move because Hopper died. Ignoring Hopper's character derailment in season 3, he did say, "I want you and your family to feel safe, like Hawkins can still be your home." It's implied over the course of months, any small thing that seemed a little bit weird sent her into a tizzy. The magnets is just the most recently incident (and apparently the only real one). For THREE WHOLE YEARS something has happened specifically in Hawkins that not only threatened her, but it threatened her kids and her kids' friends. For two of those years, the threat was entirely focused on her youngest child. Any responsible parent would move out of there are the earliest opportunity. The only reason she didn't move after season 1 was because she needed Hawkins Lab to look after Will's health because Dr. Owens and Hopper were the only individuals suited to handling the situation. Each year, they've barely made it out alive from these supernatural threats. After almost losing Will the first year, losing Bob the second year, and this year the only other adult in Hawkins that could help her with this kind of stuff. Best to get a fresh start elsewhere and hope the Upside Down doesn't follow them there. I think that they are living close enough though, that they can still contact each other by phone and see each other often, seeing as how I doubt Joyce could afford to drive/fly cross country for all four of them to visit for holidays. It's probably just to another town that's less than an hour's drive away, somewhere that is similar enough that the production team doesn't have to go too far to find another town for filming.
    • Finances would be a big factor in Joyce's decision to move as well. It's possible things have been even rougher for them since season 2. Thing is, not knowing more about what’s going on with the Byers financially is exactly what happens when you don’t have Joyce and Jonathan have a scene for two seasons, because that’s where we got some of the biggest hints about their financial situation in season 1. Jonathan’s line in the car during the fight with Nancy after they got fired is revealing: "But you refused, and now I'm screwed." The fact that he thinks that he’s completely screwed by losing this job and the next line implies he’s even contributing to the mortgage shows the situation the Byers are in a bit.
      • There's an irony in that for almost all the times in the season that capitalism was said to be good, it was clear that for many people it wasn’t at all. The Sinclairs aren't suffering the effects of the mall. Erica can use capitalism as an excuse to get free ice cream. For the Byers, it's the opposite. Hawkins, much like many other towns in the 1970s and 1980s, is falling apart because of the mall. Protesters are demonstrating outside Larry Kline's windows at City Hall to vent their anger over their livelihoods being taken away from them (and his response to said protesters is to use letter of the law and his power over Hopper to use him as a personal lackey to shut down the protest, then throw the whole Fourth of July festivities to distract voters). Joyce barely has a job at the general store. She’s marking everything in the store for clearance. And she’s secretly getting the house fixed up to put on the market because she's getting ready to move, with Bob's death being just half of the reason for moving. Jonathan is trying to contribute to the household and is totally blinded by his family's financial situation to a point where he can’t properly assess Nancy’s situation and her dignity. We don't have anything for Will, but that’s probably because he’s not quite old enough yet to really feel the negative effects of his family’s financial situation (and Joyce and Jonathan would be working to make sure he doesn't).
      • I thought that irony was really more textual. Sure, Erica uses capitalism to get free ice-cream, but she's also an abrasive character who essentially needs to be bribed to help the protagonists. Murray explicitly describes the "greatness" of American capitalism in cynical terms to Alexei (all the fun sideshows being fixed to maximise profits). Sure, "communism" as a bogeyman (metaphorically via the Mind Flayer brainwashing, and non-metaphorically via the Russians) turns up, but "capitalism" really isn't shown as being all that great.

    Moving out of Hawkins, part II 
  • One thing I don't get about Joyce’s motivation for moving (her bad memories of Hawkins) is whether that's a good enough argument to move. For sure it's an argument for it, but Hopper presented a good counterargument (and though he’s not around still, there’s still a support system around them there, especially for her kids which she loves above all). Speaking of her loving her kids above all, surely Joyce knows they love their friends/girlfriend/boyfriend to bits, have walked through fire with them and are each other's support system. So would Joyce really just uproot them from that? There’s also some purely practical things that stuck out to me immediately: the timeskip for the epilogue makes it so they move when the school year is already well under way and Jonathan has started his senior year (makes me feel bad for Jonathan there in a number of ways). Also, how the hell did Joyce manage to sell her house and what did it fetch? Y'know, her rundown house on the outskirts of a now infamous town with an incredibly bad reputation? Even if the buyer bought it just for the land, the land doesn’t look special, so I don't know if she could get much for it.
    • Who knows. Maybe whoever bought the house was really desperate.
    • As discussed in Part I of this Headscratcher, bad memories probably weren't her only motivation for selling the house. At the time Joyce decided to sell, small mom-and-pop stores like the one she worked at were going under left and right, and Melvald's, the general store where she worked, is implied to be on its last legs (offering 70% off everything in the store, and so few customers that Joyce is able to just close up and leave in the middle of the day). With that plus the destruction of the mall, Hawkins is probably in rough shape economically, at least for working-class people like the Byers. Even if some of the small shops were revived when the competition from the mall disappeared, Joyce still may have lost her job or had to take a pay cut, which would be particularly financially devastating now that she has El to take care of in addition to Jonathan and Will. Moving to a new town with better job prospects might be the only way to keep their family afloat.
      • Dr. Owens tells El that he relocated them to Lenora. It makes sense that the move was partly, if not primarily, for El’s benefit, given that the Russians opening the gate was likely to lead to increased attention focused on Hawkins. The house in Lenora is bigger and nicer than the Byers house in Hawkins, so Owens probably helped, and possibly paid for it outright. It could be that Joyce would have been able to manage financially, once the mall shut down and Melvald’s was doing better, but she prioritised El’s safety, not to mention giving all three kids a fresh start.

     Religious parents 
  • If Suzie's parents are so religious that they won't allow her to talk to a non-Mormon on the phone, why the heck would they send her to science camp and allow her to operate a ham radio in her bedroom? Mormons are not known for being progressive about gender roles.
    • Maybe this particular family is just progressive about some things and restrictive about other things.
    • Mormons are not really anti-science as a rule, science is roughly as compatible with Mormonism as it is Christianity, which is to say there's strong differences of opinion on a few topics but most mainstream families wouldn't see science as a whole as dangerous, especially in the 1980s. And especially more technically-oriented areas of science like engineering as opposed to something like theoretical physics. These days, internet being what it is, some religious families are not thrilled with their children being computer saavy, but in Suzie's era, that "danger" would not have been a consideration, the idea that Suzie could hack or otherwise get into trouble with her computer was not something her parents would have thought about.
      • In fact, Mormonism was fairly progressive in technological terms around this point - Mormonism cares a lot about geneological records, and the Church of LDS developed a pretty extensive computer-based record system for managing them. So, Suzie's parents might well be interested in that aspect of "science camp", and the ham radio might be a spin-off of that.
    • Mormons also on the whole tend to be pro-extracurriculars and pro-academic achievement, the idea being to keep kids busy. The LDS church also strongly emphasizes college for women and even entering the workforce for women without children, though women are often subtly encouraged to also drop out once they've found their husband and/or put their degree (or even post-graduate degree) aside once they have children.
    • Suzie's parents want her to marry within the Mormon faith, but that doesn't mean that they are Luddites. It's a similar thing to, say, the old stereotype about traditional Orthodox Jewish parents wanting their daughter to marry "a nice Jewish doctor"; that doesn't mean they completely isolate themselves, they just don't believe in cohabitation and mingling outside of their faith. As for the ham radio, we are presuming here that Suzie's parents know about it, but it's not until Season 4 that they found out Dustin was agnostic.
    • Once we see Suzie's family, it seems as though her father is overrun by his kids and doesn't really have much control over them, and her mother is absent. So regardless of whether her father/parents approve of Suzie's actions, they might not have much bandwidth to invest in her, considering she seems to be one of the more behaved siblings in the household.

    Erica can just roam free? 
  • Okay, I understand that the other kids are all teenagers now, so their parents probably trust them to take care of themselves. But Erica is 10 years old, and she's away from her parents for almost two days, yet they're not worried at all? Yes, Erica told Dustin her parents think she'll be staying overnight at a friend's place, but wouldn't they have gone there the following day to pick her up and to go to the 4th of July celebration? Or at least called the friend's parents to check that she's okay?
    • This (or, at least, a similar example) has been discussed before. The show takes place in the 1980s, when parents were more willing to let their kids roam around unsupervised in their free time than they are today. Granted, this may be an exaggerated case, but at this point it's just a trope that the series uses, accept it as you will.
      • Going off of what my dad has told me about his childhood, this is actually not a completely unrealistic depiction.
    • And another weird real-life phenomena: there have actually been studies done that demonstrate how Black girls are often perceived as older and more mature than they are. So even though Erica is only ten, her parents might think of her as older, with how she's especially smart and outspoken.
      • True, but most of these studies are among white people and external entities like law enforcement, Black parents themselves tend to see their children as children.
      • And maybe the parents did worry and it was all explained offscreen, but we don't see it because it's not relevant to the plot.
      • It was pretty common at the time in a small town, and it's easy enough to take a bus to a mall and spend a day there, then go home.

    She's a paranoid schizophrenic. How dare you save her life? 
  • I'm aware Tom was possessed by the Mind-Flayer, but this argument goes uncontested... Nancy thinks she did the right thing... until she is told that the old lady was a paranoid schizophrenic and that because of that, her family is considering suing. I'm... sorry? How does this revelation come close to justifying suing the paper over "calling the EMTs when she's ingested poison." And no, it can't be handwaved by going "the boss is evil and it's a lie" because Nancy buys it entirely (despite the entire point is her trying to be an investigator and look into exactly these kinds of cracks) and it goes entirely unaddressed. Is the family just upset that they still need to care for their crazy grandma?
    • I'm sorry, but you can't dismiss the handwave no matter what Nancy "buys." The only word we have is from Nancy's Flayed boss, who has a vested interested in keeping her from investigating further so as not to tip off the Mind Flayer's hand before it's ready. No one else comments on this scenario that we're privy to. Not the paramedics and hospital workers. Not the police. No one.
    • Which still doesn't track. The problem is that the nonsensical argument made by Tom goes completely unaddressed. You're right, it's entirely possible it's a lie. The Headscratcher comes in that Nancy (or the narrative at hand) never seems to realize that it's a completely nonsensical one. And since a later scene has a He's Back! scene with Nancy going full investigative journalist, the fact she fails to spot the thread is a glaring omission.
    • Why is it a glaring omission? They didn't know Tom was Flayed until after touching base with Mike, El, and the Party, and that is a part of why they return to the hospital with the full group in the first place: Because learning about Billy and the Flayed led Nancy and Jonathan to put two and two together about Tom's behavior, and now realize that they were being kept away for a reason. They returned to the hospital to find out what and why.
    • Three things:
      • Firstly, remember that Nancy and Jonathan broke into the woman's house. They also misrepresented themselves and weren't supposed to be there in the first place, as Tom — for all that he's possessed by the Mind Flayer, not entirely wrongly — points out. Consequently, they were illegally inside the house of someone who later had a medical episode. As far as Nancy and Jonathan are aware, why is the family supposed to just take their word that they actually helped the woman and that there was a mysterious plague rat involved? Why wouldn't they consider legal action under such dubious circumstances? Nancy probably just reacted with instinctive fear when that was brought up, because she was already in trouble.
      • Secondly, remember the situation that Nancy is currently in. She's being fired, she's being yelled at and humiliated and made to feel small, she's being told that she was apparently (inadvertently) screwing around with someone who has severe psychological issues, and for all that she's going "investigative reporter" this season she's still an inexperienced teenage girl in a situation where she lacks confidence and feels powerless. Furthermore, as noted above, in the other things he's accusing them of Tom actually has a point — they weren't authorised by anyone to be there, they misrepresented themselves, and they entered someone's home illegally. Mind Flayer or not, he's actually got her dead to rights on most of it. So it shouldn't be entirely surprising that she doesn't expertly pick up on the one part of Tom's narrative that happened to be bullshit and expertly demolished it with the cool, confident logic and rationality of Sherlock Holmes. She's a scared and humiliated teenage girl, not a master detective nor a human lie detector.
      • Note also that when Tom brings up the lawsuit, both Nancy and Jonathan react with incredulity, suggesting that they actually don't fully buy it. What does Tom do? Just shout them down some more. Because he has the power in that situation and they don't. Not just as their boss, but also because the Mind Flayer needs them out of the way.

    Who is the American at Kamchatka? 
  • In the epilogue after the credits of the last episode we see a scene from a prison Russian complex with a guard saying "No. Not the American". Who is that? Hopper?
    • It's intentionally meant to be vague to be open to fan speculation, as to whether it's Hopper or Brenner.
    • Latest teaser confirms: It's Hopper.

    Where did the Byers' dog go? 
  • Ok, so did I miss something or where did the Byers dog go? When did he decided to move out of Hawkins, like when did he have enough? Did he move on to a more stable household?
    • Watsonian explanation and explanation of Noah Schnapp: The dog died in between seasons 1 and 2. Doylist explanation: Chester was great, but not the actor dog who portrayed him. He never cooperated with the crew, and once made David Harbour so mad he walked off set and ranted about the dog at least once.
    • Bear in mind, they didn’t actually say in-universe what happened to Chester, whether he died or ran away; they just pretended that the dog never existed in the first place.

    Why didn't they send El to live with her aunt Becky after Hopper died? 
  • Wouldn't it have made more sense if they had El go back to live with her only family members after Hopper died, instead of moving with the Byers family? Why move her away from the only family she has left, let alone an aunt who would have made a decent legal guardian, and her poor handicapped mother, who was viciously separated from her?
    • For the same reason that El was supposed to keep a low profile after closing the Gate. Dr. Owens might have pulled some strings for her to stay with Hopper, but it's strongly implied to have been done under the table. El going home to her Aunt would be one of the most obvious places for anyone to look for her.
    • And from an outside perspective, Joyce and Hopper were close friends who were on the verge of becoming a couple (although not many of Joyce's friends or colleagues might have known the latter). It would seem logical for her to inherit his adopted daughter. And El doesn't seem like the type to drift towards family for the sake of blood relation. She values actual connections, and Joyce is someone who will understand her better.
    • Joyce, unlike Aunt Becky, is already privy to all the secrets involving El's powers, the Upside Down, the Hawkins Lab, etc. Also, Joyce loves El for saving Will's life twice, and we've already seen her acting as a supportive mother-figure to El, encouraging and comforting her during the events of Season 1, Episode 7 ("The Bath"); given what was at stake, it would have been easy for her to be impatient and demanding, but that's not Joyce's nature. Joyce might also have gotten to know El more between seasons 2 and 3, once Hopper didn't have to keep her existence secret from 'everyone' and El was hanging out with Will's friend group (primarily with Mike, of course, but Dustin was surprised when they left while the others climbed Weathertop to set up the Cerebro antenna, implying that Mike and El constantly ditching the rest of the Party to be alone together was a relatively recent development, not the way things had been all along since the Snow Ball).
      Since the Wheelers, unlike Joyce, are not fully read in to everything that's been going on in Hawkins since November '83, the obvious place for El to spend time with her friends, other than the cabin where she and Hopper live, would be the Byers house – there's no one there on a regular basis from whom she needs to keep secrets. Extrapolating, I could also see Hopper encouraging El to get to know Joyce so she would have an adult woman she could talk to about subjects that might be uncomfortable for a father and daughter to discuss, such as menstruation – El would almost certainly have gone through menarche at some point after Season 1 and before Season 3.

    Why didn’t the residents of Hawkins just leave with all of the crazy things occurring? 
  • For such big events and even deaths to be occurring in the town, not only would the town be making national news, but why wouldn't more people consider moving on out and doing the same thing as the Byers'?
    • A million factors.
      • 1. Lack of knowledge: Only the main characters know what has happened. Joyce is the only parent that know. For most, even parents like the Wheelers, everything's been explained away by coverups, and most of what has happened has been very uneventful.
      • 2. Perhaps the more important one: money. Most people aren't in any position to just up and move. For a real life example of a town with a similar situation to Hawkins, look at the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. That town has been slowly bleeding people since a coal seam fire started in an old strip mine under the town, the result of a combination of unregulated coal mining, unregulated gases escaping from mines, and unregulated landfill burns that set underground tunnels on fire that still burn today. It wasn't until the 1980s that the government started paying people to leave. This was around the time that the fire began to cause problems for people up on the surface: giant sinkholes swallowed residents, gasoline at the gas station began boiling, etc. In 1984, Congress allocated more than $42 million to relocate everyone. Most of the residents accepted buyout offers and dispersed far away from the area (data from the 1990 United States Census shows that the nearby towns continued to lose population at the same rate as previous decades, suggesting the Centralians did not locate there). Only a few families opted to stay despite urgings from Pennsylvania officials. In 1992, Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain on all properties in the borough, condemning all the buildings within. A subsequent legal effort by residents to have the decision reversed failed. In 2002, their zip code was revoked, and in 2009, Governor Ed Rendell began the formal eviction of Centralia residents. Only seven people remain there today.
    • Also, Hawkins actually seems like a pretty okay place most of the time. This isn't exactly like Sunnydale where people are being murdered by monsters on a weekly basis; we only see a handful of days spread over three years where, well, stranger things have been happening. And remember also that the government has been actively intervening to either make sure that the news doesn't get out or that, if it does, only a fairly watered down version of it actually reaches the public. Even when Nancy and Jonathan went on a crusade to expose the truth in Season 2, all they managed to inform people of was what appeared to be a freak accident at the local research facility. So yeah, there's been some pretty strange and unusual things happening recently, and some undeniably sad deaths, but as far as most people would be concerned it would just be a run of bad luck the town's had recently; who flees town because of that?
    • They seem to be getting restless as of Season 4, with a Satanic Panic starting up.

    Needles 
  • Is there supposed to be some sort of connection between the fact that Max used the same needle used on Will to stop Billy from beating the crap out of Steve in season 2, and the fact that Billy was the host in Season 3?
    • There was a lot of talk on social media about the needle sharing between season 2 and 3. In fact, it's one of the main reasons so many people on social media correctly predicted that Billy would become the Mind Flayer's next host. Now as for whether or not the needle sharing was responsible for this in-universe, well...it does seem like the needle probably was originally going to be a piece of the explanation for how Billy got possessed when it was originally supposed to happen at the end of season 2. And maybe the writers were initially planning to carry that explanation over into season 3, but by the time shooting started on season 3, that thread was abandoned and instead replaced with the explanation "Everything organic that was possessed by the Mind Flayer died, but the unbound fragment of the monster itself just fell dormant until the gate was reopened." After all, if Billy was actually possessed when Eleven closed the gate, he would've dropped dead too.
      That said, the needle still could've played a part. It's possible that after being exposed to Will's blood, Billy wasn't quite yet possessed, it did make the Mind Flayer aware of him, in much the same way that Will had already caught its attention before he got possessed in season 2 episode 3. But that's not something season 3 ever mentions.

    The Soviets and the Mind Flayer 
  • Did the Soviets (remember, the USSR consisted of more than just Russians) know about the Mind Flayer? They definitely know there's wildlife in the Upside Down like the Demogorgon which they can weaponize, so is it possible that they knew that something was controlling the Demogorgons and trust it to kill the meddling kids as a diversion while they escaped?

    Clearing up 
In two aspects:
  • How did the Soviets flee so quickly? It's likely that the bodyguards in the mall didn't escape, but how about the command staff (aka the colonel in charge)? They couldn't necessarily escape through the portal as Hopper and Joyce were busy deactivating the Key. Or were there other exits in case they needed to make a quick getaway?
    • My guess? Underground tunnels, considering that they design stuff like that underground.
  • Secondly, with the rapid response from emergency services, there's no way none of them didn't see the corpse of the Mind Flayer's avatar, even if it (likely) was dissolving. Given the size and the time it took for smaller pieces to dissolve, the firefighters and soldiers directly outside the mall should have seen something of the corpse.
    • They probably thought it was something else. If you saw the rotting corpse of a mind flayer, presumably still dissolving, you'd probably assume it was some funky chemical shit or some sort of weird terrorist attack rather than an Eldritch Abomination that came to flay your mind.
    • Since the soldiers seemed to be under Owens' command, they're probably either somewhat in the know about the Upside Down or well-trained enough not to question what they're seeing. As for the firefighters, given that the fire was used to cover up the events of the season including the deaths of several dozen people, it was probably big enough that the firefighters didn't go inside the mall and thus didn't see the remains of the Meat Flayer.

    The Soviet leadership 
  • Season 3 takes place in 1985, a year after the more liberal Mikhail Gorbachev took power and relaxed the anti-Western stance of the Soviet Union. Surely he and his supporters would have voiced some misgivings regarding the experiments with the Upside Down and the Demogorgon? If not for moral reasons, that project should be draining the Soviet economy and the Soviet Ministry of Defence of millions of rubles and thus for whatever reasons be unfeasible as an option to win the Cold War. A faction of the army could be working behind the government's back or the project could be a secret holdover from Brezhnev's or Andropov's tenure but I digress.
    • Thinking about this had me think back to an episode in SWAT Kats, where Ulysses Feral left someone else temporarily in charge of his position (he was some sort of army commander, in case you must know). That person had bad intentions. So what I propose is this: the reason why the project isn't shut down is because someone else underneath Mikhail is witholding information of and giving approval of said project. Alternatively, uh, Commie Nazis Ghostapo stuff?
    • Gorbachev was interested in easing tensions with the West, but it didn't happen overnight, and 1985 was still relatively early in his administration. He wouldn't be able to just wave a wand and cancel this kind of stuff immediately; he would still have to fully convince the hardliners in his government to get on board (or not launch a coup if they felt he went too far), still had to determine whether Reagan, Thatcher and the others were similarly interested in dialing things down, and in the meantime the knowledge of the Upside-Down (essentially a form of cross-dimensional travel) was a potential advantage that the Americans had over the Soviets. And the Cold War was all about balance; if one side got an advantage, the other side had to quickly make up the difference or risk falling too far behind. By, say, 1987 Gorbachev would likely be a lot more confident in shutting down the Upside-Down project, but in 1985 it was likely still going as a "just in case" measure.
    • The prologue scene of Season 3 (where the Soviets try to open a Gate to the Upside-Down) takes place in June 1984, and Gorbachev didn't in fact officially become General Secretary until March 1985; the General Secretary at the time was actually Konstantin Chernenko, who became General Secretary in February 1984 following the death of Andropov (though in practice Gorbachev was filling in for Chernenko for a large part of that year, as Chernenko basically spent most of his tenure slowly dying from emphysema, heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver, so it's a reasonable mistake to make). Gorbachev didn't have the formal authority to make such changes prior to then, but since Chernenko wasn't really well enough to make any meaningful decisions himself the Politburo were pretty much just keeping the Andropov-era status quo going until he either recovered enough to take charge or (as everyone more reasonably expected) died, whichever came first. Since Series 3 takes place in June 1985, that's only about three months at most for Gorbachev to have settled in the job, so — assuming the above point isn't a factor in his decision making — he probably just hasn't gotten around to cancelling it, and in any case everything's pretty much already been set up in Hawkins. This also explains why the General in charge is quick to pull You Have Failed Me on the chief scientist and only gives Alexei a year to produce some tangible results; he obviously doesn't know exactly when Chernenko is going to leave his position vacant, but he almost certainly senses the way the political winds are blowing and knows that he's going to need something good to give the new boss very soon if the project isn't going to be binned.

    The Russian broadcast 
  • There are several things about the Russian broadcast that don't make sense:
    • Steve figures out that the Russian broadcast came from the mall because the song from an Indiana Flyer ride can be heard in the background. However, we later see the broadcast being transmitted from the Soviet base, which is several stories underground and separated from the mall by a miles-long tunnel. So what was the music doing on the recording?
    • When the Scoops Troop gets to the Soviet base, the same message is being transmitted again. The message is just instructions for a supply drop that's already happened, so why are they still sending it? Or if it's a regularly scheduled supply drop, why do they need a coded radio broadcast at all?
    • Who was the message for? It correlates to the time and method of delivery for the green goo, but who would need to know that? The people accepting the delivery are already at the base and could have just been told in person, "Hey, the next shipment will be in the boxes for Imperial Panda and Kaufman Shoes delivered at 8:43."

Season 4

     Guidance counselor's files 
  • Why didn't the guidance counselor think anything was up when three students all came to her reporting of nausea, headaches, nightmares etc.? Why didn't she notice that their symptoms lined up and matched each other? And why didn't she grow more suspicious and tell the police when two of those students ended up dead? Those files could point to something else going on and exonerate Eddie.
    • To be fair, those are pretty vague symptoms to be hearing about. The guidance counselor would have no reason to know about the Upside Down, and probably wouldn’t think it was a suicide cult or something. Which seems more likely: two kids with similar vague symptoms were murdered by some guy or interdimensional spider wizard murders people through trauma?
      • Original troper here! Not even saying she would have to buy into the satanist cult theory or believe in Vecna but no alarm bells were raised in any regard?
      • Well, the patients in question have all experienced trauma, so nightmares are to be expected. Additionally, nausea and headaches could be explained by a flu strain going around.
      • Quite beyond a possible flu bug going around, headaches and nausea are both very common symptoms of anxiety. Frankly, half of the counselor's case load probably included at least occasional complaints of headaches, nausea, and/or nightmares. Apparently with the Vecna victims, those particular symptoms only came on a few days before their attacks/deaths anyway - probably not enough time for her to put a pattern together.
    • The counselor almost certainly did notice that students seeing her were murdered and perhaps she notified police offscreen. Who knows if she could go into details of symptoms under patient confidentiality laws, but even if she could, the unusual grouping of symptoms in a therapeutic setting (nosebleeds, hallucinations and constant severe headaches) actually suggests drug use. This information really wouldn't help the police. That symptom grouping also suggests an environmental toxin, and considering Hawkin's history, you can bet she notified the health authority even if no murders had occurred.

     001’s Powers and Family 
  • Where did 001 get his powers from? Season 1 says that Eleven gets hers from MK-Ultra experiments and that explanation works for the other children. 001, however, would have been born in 1947, which was before the program began. How did he end up with psychic powers? In fact, why psychic powers in the first place? Additionally, how was 001 allowed to stay with his family when it’s said that he knew of Brenner before he murdered his family. Wouldn’t Brenner have taken him away? It’s not like the Creels were special compared to the other families.
    • This is likely to get an explanation in the second half of Season 4. But if I had to bet, the Mind Flayer probably is behind that, manipulating 001 from the shadows, without 001 being aware.
    • If psychic powers can be produced artificially, it's entirely possible that they can also manifest naturally. Based on the 001's dialogue thus far, it seems that Brenner became fascinated by those powers when he discovered him, and the whole MKUltra experiment was for trying to replicate those powers. Also, Brenner wasn't the head of a powerful government organization back then, so he couldn't have done as he pleased. It was most likely only the demonstration of 001's powers that gave him that position and authority.
    • Additionally, compare El’s and Henry’s respective family situations. El was the newborn child of an unwed mother on drugs (when unwed motherhood was still stigmatized, let alone the drugs), whose abduction could be — and was — covered up by claiming stillbirth. Henry, however, was the 10-12-year-old child of a relatively well-off ideal 50s all-American family, whose father was a decorated World War II veteran. Prior to the destruction of said family, making him disappear would have been far too problematic.
      • Brenner was taking him away from his family. Henry says specfically that his mother contacted Brenner so that he could be locked up - it just didn't happen before he killed her and his sister.
    • Wasn't he born with them? And Brenner's further experiments were from taking Henry's powers and passing them to the other kids through drugs or something. This is why Kali has the "make people see" power and Eleven has the "move things with your mind" power.
  • This troper believes Hopper's Vietnam draft story wasn't just a Tear Jerker, it was also a parallel. Victor Creel was also a soldier, and while Agent Orange didn't exist in his time, other chemical weapons definitely did. Maybe exposure to those chemicals could lead to that kind of mutation in offsprings?

     The Upside Down in 1979 
  • Eleven opens a portal to the Upside Down in 1979 to send One there. However, this very season established that the Upside Down is frozen at the date Eleven made contact with the Demogorgon and Will was taken. What was the Upside Down in 1979, considering it still seems to have that red thunder aesthetic we see now? What did Vecna do for all these years, since he could’ve started opening portals at any time apparently?
    • This is likely to get an explanation in the second half of season 4. Speculatively, the Upside-Down was unlike our world and was just something else for a long time. Vecna may not have been able to open portals until Eleven weakened the barrier (again) in 1983. Alexei explained the 1983 breach was "healing" until the Soviets forced it open again. It stands to reason that opening gates is easier if it has already been done recently and nearby, and very difficult if it hasn't. By the time Vecna pulled himself together it may have been too late for him to do anything and he had to wait until 1983 for Eleven to do it again.

     How did Brenner survive in season 1? 
  • The Demogorgon prison fight scene was very cool looking, but it also made me realize something: How in the fuck did Brenner survive getting attacked by the Demogorgon in season one? We just saw this thing ragdoll like 6 hardened Soviet prisoners with weapons, but a 50 year old stick armed doctor was too much for this killing machine to handle?
    • The Soviet prisoners during the prison fight scene had no guns though and instead had melee weapons that were virtually useless against the Demogorgon. If you rewatched that scene in season 1, Brenner wasn't alone when attacked. He had bodyguards and soldiers with guns around him. While he likely got a cut or two when the creature pounced onto him, its also very likely that the creature would shift its attention after being hit in the back with bullets from Brenner's entourage, giving Brenner the chance to escape while the creature was busy with his guards.
    • As we don't get confirmation yet, it's possible that the entire sequences with Owens and Brenner after Eleven is sedated are just in her mind - so maybe he didn't survive and that's just El's hallucinations. He notably doesn't look any different in the three year Time Skip and still resembles his 1979 self as well. There's an out of universe possibility in that Millie Bobby Brown didn't shave her head for these scenes, and just had a wig fitted. She could simply have not wanted to cut it again, but it raises the possibility that her long hair will be needed again to distinguish what's real and what isn't.
    • Based on the later reveal that Vecna is the Mind Flayer, it can be surmised that he was controlling the S1 Demogorgon, and based on his displeasure at learning the Brenner died, it can be deduced that Vecna deliberately made the Demogorgon leave him.
    • It could just be that the Demogorgon knocked him down (and gave him the scars seen on his face in Season 4) but then jumped right on over him to attack the agents who were shooting at it – bullets don't seem to do it much harm, but they probably do piss it off. It might also have been hunting Eleven, either to kill her or to drag her into the Upside Down and deliver her to Vecna. The fact that she did find herself in the Upside Down after killing it supports the latter possibility.

     How did Joyce's Christmas light method work given what we learned about the Upside Down? 
  • If the Upside Down is Hawkins on the night of Will's disappearance, with further changes after that time not effecting that, how did Joyce's thing with the Christmas lights work?
    • Same as the LiteBrite trick they used. While objects on the Upside-Down don’t move with their real world counterparts, people in the Upside-Down can see some ghost of them in their real world location and active them by touching that space.
      • The way the LiteBrite works is odd; the pixels in a LiteBrite aren't themselves light sources, after all, just transparent plastic pegs stuck through a black sheet of paper into a space with a single lightbulb. The way the teens stuck in the Upside Down are able to communicate through it makes it seem like they're miniature bulbs or LE Ds, which wouldn't have been feasible for a children's toy given the prices of such technology in the '80s.
      • Absolutely: but the headscratcher aspect is how did Will know that there were letters painted on the wall by the lights he can see the ghostly aura of? (I think we're supposed to assume that there's some missing time where Joyce speaks out-loud to Will and explains that she's written letters on the wall - he's a smart kid and can count letters on his side... but it's definitely a fuzzier thing than it was back in Season 1 before we established that you can't *see* our side from the Upside-Down at all)
      • Joyce knows Will can hear her talk, so she probably did say what she was doing, and painting the letters on the wall was just not needed at all, except for the convenience of Joyce not having to count them. We've also seen that some times people in the Upside Down can see the people in the real world (this was shown in season 1, though not in season 4), so he could have seen her painting the letters.

     Memories of Eight and One 
  • Back in season 2 Eight taught Eleven how to use her anger to empower her psionics, and in season 4 it turns out that One had taught Eleven a very similar lesson in the flashbacks, using sadness and anger to the same effect. Given that Eight's advice was so similar to One's, why didn't it remind Eleven of One? The best answer I can come up with is that One's betrayal was so devastating to Eleven that she had no choice but to erase him completely from her memory, such that not even Eight's similarities to One could bring those memories back.
    • Yep. El basically repressed that whole traumatic incident, which is actually Truth in Television. It's even possible that Eight's advice sowed the seeds for El remembering it eventually.

     When Do Lightbulbs break? 
  • The lightbulb in the Creel mansion attic is still working, and can conveniently glow to show the Hawkins team that Vecna does his "cursing" from that location. However, given that it shatters (along with the flashlights) at the moment of his kill... why is it still working? Vecna has made two kills already at this point...
    • It's possible that Vecna's power, which spills over into our world, increases with each kill, and happened to become just strong enough to break the lightbulb coincidentally with the group finding that location.

     Suzie's computer 
  • Suzie's computer is identifiably an Amiga 1000, with the Amiga CGA monitor that you could get with it. But this was colour monitor, not a monochrome one, and Workbench was always a non-monochrome GUI by default... so why are all her hacking scenes in monochrome-green?
  • (There's a bunch of actual anachronisms in the hacking sequence itself, but this is a Headscratcher because it would have actually needed effort from the production team to make less like real life.)
     Vecna within the Hive Mind 
  • So, One was a powerful psychic who absorbed power from the people and animals he killed, and claimed that everyone he killed was "right [there] in [his] head. And he gets thrown into a desolate landscape with nothing but red lightning. Flash forward a few years, and that entire dimension is controlled by a hive mind of vicious predators with Horror Hunger and a Might Makes Right mentality about everything. The Mind Flayer is clearly not human, we've seen time and again that it has the social skills of a bag of flour and Cannot Tell a Lie, and has shown us that Evil Is Petty. Vecna doesn't understand friendship or compassion but he had a certain sociopathic charm as One and has been manipulating his victims by going through their complex emotions, and he seems to be much more capable of playing the long game. Who is really in charge there? Is it possible that One's Straw Nihilist beliefs corrupted the entire hive mind into what it is now? Because One's idea of "balance" certainly favors predators, which seem to be the only animalistic lifeforms in the Upside Down. Not to mention the whole Take Over the World angle.
    • Notice that when at rest he has those...giant veins? branches? wires?—attached to his body. I think that among the many horror-film references in this season, it was alluding to the Hellraiser films (the sequence showing One entering the realm and becoming Vecna is very similar to the scene that opens the second Hellraiser showing the origin of Pinhead), where the Cenobites are being controlled by a godlike presence overseeing the realm they're in.
    • As of the end of the final episode of Season 4, this is still confusing from the opposite direction - the Mind Flayer is almost entirely a creation of One, and presumably under his complete control, but it still shows none of the social skills of One. Is the Mind Flayer still more of a flunky than a true puppet he's directly controlling?
      • Vecna having control over the hivemind doesn't mean he automatically can control multiple bodies at once like it does. He's still human, even if he doesn't look the part, there's only so many things he can process at once. Keeping the hivemind independent but under control allows him to direct it towards his goals, while it still works like a hivemind.
    Why wouldn't you believe Joyce? 
  • This shows up in every season after 1, but it really comes to a head in season 4. Every single season Joyce is the first adult to catch on to the weird shit happening, and she's always dismissed as being crazy. It makes sense in season 1, because they don't know about the Upside-Down. Season 2 makes a little less sense because as far as they know it won't happen again. Season 3 makes very little sense because why wouldn't you at least check that out. Murray and that package in season 4 aren't nearly as bad as most examples, but after a certain point you have to just assume that if Joyce Byers says some weird shit is happening, she's right, right?
    • One Troper commented elsewhere that Joyce might have started getting jumpy about anything "weird" in between seasons as well, creating a "crying wolf" situation when she was actually right. However, even without that it's easy enough to explain with a certain amount of sexism and ableism: It's always men who question Joyce's theories, and Joyce apparently had a history of anxiety even before the series. In Season 1, people assumed she was hysterical in the wake of Will's disappearance, and in Season 2 they assumed it was trauma from the previous year making her over-vigilant. In Season 3, from Hopper's perspective she had just blown off a date with him to hang out with another guy and was telling a bad cover story (it sucks that he thought this, but it's plausible), and in Season 4... Murray actually did believe her pretty quickly, but had been close to Hopper himself and perhaps was trying not to get his own hopes up without substantial evidence that Hopper could actually be alive.
    How much does Brenner know, and what does he want? 
  • Does he already (as of the end of Season 4 vol. 1) know that Vecna exists and is the current Big Bad?
  • If so, does he know that Vecna is also Henry/One?
  • If he doesn't know about Vecna etc., why is he helping Owens et al.? Does he just think he can get Eleven back?
  • If he does know, is this whole thing a long game to get One back? If so, for what purpose?
    • He knows that Henry/One is behind everything that happened in Hawkins and he's in the Upside-Down controling the demogorgons and the Mind Flayer. What he doesn't know is that the Hawkins' Party labeled Henry as Vecna.
    Why the Minority Report references? 
Minority Report came out in 2002, and this show is a tribute to SF and horror of the 1980s. However:
  • The NINA pod that Eleven floats in is similar to the tank the precogs use in Minority Report.
    • Eleven has a similar haircut to Agatha.
    • She wears a similar suit when in the tank.
    • Both tanks have TV monitors overhead, through whose images the person floating in the tank sees images that feed their psychic abilities.
  • When Brenner calls for the shock collar to be put on Two, there's a low angle shot of Two, terrified, framed through the collar held in the orderly's hand. It's identical to a shot in Minority Report, where Anderton calls for the "halo" device to be put on a murder suspect.
  • For that matter, in both stories the psychic heroine is the daughter of a drug-damaged mother, stolen and brought up in a lab.
  • None of this has anything to do with the 1980s, so what gives?
    • I didn’t notice the Minority Report references (though I’ve only seen the movie once, decades ago), but it wouldn’t be the only movie reference from later than when the show is set: for example, it has the visit with the alleged serial killer in his cell, clearly inspired by the scene introducing Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, a film that came out in 1991, five years after this season’s time frame.
  • Before there were films, there were often words on a printed page. Shocking, I know, but Minority Report was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick , published in 1956. And while the film Silence of the Lambs came out in 1991, the novel it was based on came out in 1988. AND our first filmed look at Hannibal Lecter was in the film Manhunter, which came out in 1986 and was an adaptation of the novel Red Dragon which was published in 1981. So much more Eighties than you think, if you know your references.
    • Also, a quick Wiki search for flotation tanks in film and popular culture brings up the film Altered States released in 1980. The plot is related to psychiatric research, sensory deprivation, and hallucinogenics. Sound familiar?
    • Those are fair points, though I should point out that the movie Minority Report is very different in a lot of its details from the short story it was adapted from, and the above-cited Easter Eggs from Stranger Things would mostly be references to the film, not the story. As for Silence of the Lambs, while the film is pretty faithful to the novel, I'd still argue that much of the asylum scene from Stranger Things (particularly in visual terms) is drawn more from the film.
    • There is absolutely no rule that says you can't reference or Shout-Out to works that were created later than the In-Universe date of your work. Sure, on a meta level Stranger Things leans heavily into 80s nostalgia, but it's not contractually obligated to never touch anything else.
      • There's been a couple of examples of that with the music in the show. Peter Gabriel's rendering of David Bowie's "Heroes" didn't come out until 2010 on the album "Scratch My Back." Moby's "When It's Cold I'd Like to Die" was released in 1995 on the album "Everything is Wrong." Both songs are used twice in the series' run (so far). So, if those are okay, why would referencing Minority Report considered unusual?
    • Honestly Minority Report is not such a well-known movie to begin with, there are plenty of other similarly or better known works that are older, thinking in MR is kind of random as is assuming is a reference, it could be any other case of Symbolic Serene Submersion.
    How much of Eleven's NINA experience is her memory, and how much is programmed by Brenner? 
  • Some parts of Eleven's NINA experience seem to be her reliving old memories (e.g., when the mysterious orderly coaches her on manipulating the pachinko game). Others seem to be a sort of pre-programmed VR construct (e.g., when she first goes under and keeps trying to escape the Rainbow Room, and the orderly keeps creepily saying, "Well, look who decided to join us"). Does the VR construct contain some sort of AI replica of One? If so, how much sentience/autonomy does it have? If the answer is "high autonomy," does that mean that there's actually a second, virtual Vecna in this program? If the answer is "low/no autonomy," where's the line between construct!Vecna and memory!Vecna? If it's all Eleven's memories, and there is no construct!Vecna, why is the experience so coherent and linear?
    • This is the 80s; there is no AI of that sophistication available. The machine uses recordings of actual events to cue Eleven to remember them from her perspective. Eleven is kept, drugged and sensory-deprived, in a trance state designed to enable her to relive those memories in her own mind. If she "rejects" the cues (as she does at the start) and tries to deviate from the record, they're simply played again and again until Eleven accepts them and follows along with the memory. The experience is coherent and linear because the machine tracks Eleven's progress through the memory (this is the most sophisticated part of it) and keeps giving her the cues at the appropriate moments. There is no construct!Vecna, it's all just the video records and Eleven's memories. The whole thing is a high-tech, machine-assisted hypnotic trance to recover repressed memories.
    How are none of the kids in jail by the end? 
  • Even ignoring what Erica did to the police car, they evaded police custody, stole an RV and Lucas and Erica should be suspects in Jason's disappearance since Andy knows about it.
    • Well, Jason didn’t disappear; he was killed in the "earthquake", leaving behind a clearly-identifiable body. Although Eddie hot wired the RV, eyewitnesses may not be able to determine who else was involved, assuming they could even identify Eddienote . Recall that Lucas, Dustin, Max, and Erica were not discovered anywhere near Eddie, and the only link between them and Eddie is that two of them were in a high school club with him. (Keep in mind that Powell is clearly not buying the whole Satanic angle.) With the remaining crimes, the Hawkins PD may be too busy with the aftermath of the "earthquake" to arrest the kids for what amounts to some juvenile hijinks. Not to mention whoever got Hopper and Joyce back to Hawkins (implied to be Owens’ colleagues) might have had enough pull to made the kids’ legal troubles go away.
      • And the authorities don't find it odd that Jason's body has several bruises from his fight with Lucas and the latter is right there in the house with another nearly dead person?
      • Well, two possibilities: 1) Everything gets attributed to the earthquake. Remember, no one else saw the fight, and it’s a small town in the ‘80s that just went through the worst disaster in its history. They don’t have the resources to conduct an in-depth, thorough investigation, and the authorities that have those resources have every interest in covering up the truth. 2) Jason, in direct defiance to the chief’s orders, formed a posse, and he and his confederate assaulted Lucas and Erica — the latter being eleven years old. The gun at the scene belonged to Jason and was discharged. Thus, it’s self-defense, with Max’s injuries blamed on the earthquake or Jason.
      • As far as them being in the house, Lucas, Erica, and Max could have been hiding from Jason’s posse, or even if they had no business being there, again, it’s the kind of juvenile hijinks that would get overlooked in light of the supposed earthquake.
    • Also, keep in mind that the series runs on ‘80s movie logic, where kids are able to get away with way more than they would in Real Life, unless the plot dictates otherwise. It’s the same reason Billy is able to get away with so much in Season 2.
    • Also those final episodes have an Extremely Short Timespan, taking place over one night. By the time the kids are found, Hawkins has been rocked by a devastating earthquake that kills twenty-two people. It's a small town, and they have their hands full with emergency aid for most of the population, trying to make sure any missing people are accounted for and all sorts of more important things than a group of children dodging the police.
    Is this season the first time the Upside Down is revealed to be literally upside down? 
  • As I recall, in the first season the kids started calling it the Upside Down because that was a name their science teacher gave to a hypothetical alternate dimension, and at that point it was just a label, similar to the way the kids apply D&D terms like demogorgon and Vecna to inhabitants of the Upside Down, even though those are not the beings' actual names. There was no evidence or reason to think the realm was literally upside down relative to our world. Prior to Season 4, the only possible exception I can remember was the end of Season 2, when the camera pans downward from the dance hall and flips around to show us that the Upside Down is still present—but that could be interpreted simply as a cinematic flourish, not to be taken literally. Yet in Season 4, the way the kids enter the Upside Down from the ceiling of a room pretty much confirms that the realm literally is upside down. Doesn't this contradict the many times people have been seen entering the realm without things suddenly becoming inverted?
    • It may simply be Rule of Cool for cinematography’s sake, but another explanation is that the portals have an “upside down” effect because of how they were opened (Vecna channeling his power from the Upside Down) or where they were opened (the roof of a trailer, the bottom of a lake, etc). Previous gates were upright on walls. Clearly, the Upside Down does not exist anywhere in relation to our world, since it can’t be both above our world and below it. All of this stuff is just the makers of the show having fun with portals.
    • That could be, though notice that virtually all those "literal upside-down" moments you mention are from this season, which makes it feel like the writers are trying to retcon the idea that upside-down-ness is a real property of the realm, which makes the coinage by the science teacher from Season 1 (who had no idea about the actual realm and was only talking in the broadest generalities about the concept of other worlds) seem like a Contrived Coincidence. It's as if the writers decided that the creatures really were officially called demogorgons and there were scenes featuring the government scientists using the term.
    • When Eleven tries to explain the concept of the Upside-Down and the monster inside to the kids all the way back in season one, the first thing she does is flipping their game board upside-down, so the idea of it being literal was already established. But more importantly, consider the orientation of the portal, and how it works. If you go into a ceiling portal head-first, your head must be the first thing to leave the portal on the other side, and this will flip you upside-down. A wall portal will likewise make you flip what cardinal direction you're entering from (if you enter a portal by walking northward, you'll end up facing south at the exit point).
    Nancy and Ted 
  • When Vecna took over Nancy's mind, he scared her by showing her how he could murder Karen, Holly, and Mike and Nancy was visibly upset when she recounted this to the Party yet she made no mention of Ted. Could Ted's absence be meaningful in anyway? What does this say about her relationship with her father?
    • Ted is stupid, lazy, and emotionally distant. It's not surprising his relationship with Nancy or Mike is practically nonexistent.
    • Ted also isn't too popular with fans, so possibly just Pandering to the Base.
     Eddie did not wear body armour? 
  • The War Zone clearly had body armour, masks and other protective gear for sale. Against a literal army of bat creatures, why didn't the gang buy more of it? Why didn't Eddie actually wear more gear to protect himself? Unless he was feeling suicidal?
    • I personally think this plotline was one of the weakest elements to an otherwise good season. They seemed to be really forcing the idea of Eddie as the coward eager to prove his worth, but for no good purpose, and it was a way of disposing of a relatively unnecessary (albeit likable) character, just so they could have a major non-villain character death this season at little cost to the overall story. (I wouldn't be surprised if the actor requested to be killed off so he didn't have to commit to being one of the show's regulars going forward.) They never really established him as a suicidal type: despite his clearly being traumatized by having witnessed Chrissy's death, he never seems to fall into the level of despair and PTSD seen in Chrissy and the other kids who become Vecna's targets. And I never felt the sense of urgency in his inferiority complex that he'd be motivated to go out like that.
    • The War Zone scene in general doesn't make a lot of sense. Nancy is the only one of the heroes to have a gun in the finale (and only one) despite guns being the thing they specifically went there to buy. We even see Steve carrying a second gun as they leave the store so we know they got at least two, but apparently they decided to leave it behind. I think the writers just wanted to have their big "suiting up" moment, but then also needed the characters to be appropriately vulnerable in the climactic battle and so promptly ignored anything that might give the heroes an edge.
    • The simplest answer is probably money. Eddie is a teen drug dealer living in a trailer park with two pretty expensive hobbies. Nancy doesn't seem to have a job this season, and the rest are kids. So their budget was what Steve and Robin as video store employees could get, and whatever pocket change the rest had on them, and they had a lot of basics to buy.
    • They also left the store in a hurry when the witch-hunting jocks caught on to them being there. They probably didn't have the time to properly get all they wanted to.
    • Eddie was indeed wearing a flak jacket along with Steve. He just didn't zip it up all the way.

     Vecna’s Physical Body 
  • I could have missed this, but: why does Vecna physically appear in he Murder House? It was shown earlier that El basically turned his body to dust and Henry himself transformed into being in Upside Down. Later on we see no sign of Vecna while heroes visit Murder House in Hawkins. It was also emphasized that Vecna needs portals to manipulate minds. So how and when he ended up in Hawkins in the first place?
    • You did miss it. Vecna was directly hit by some of the lightning within the Upside Down, but he is shown to still be mostly physically intact. He was badly burned by the lightning, but he wasn't vaporized (as we see in the flashback of him creating the Mind Flayer).

     Vecna's Targets 
  • Maybe I missed something, but exactly why did Vecna take so long to toy with his victims before killing them? Why specifically torment traumatized teenagers when all he needs to do to kill them is trap them in their minds and shove his claws into their brains? Why give them the time to realize something is wrong with them? If he needed four kills to open four gates to the Upside Down, why not just kill the first four people he could get his hands on? Nobody could really stop him from killing even if there were witnesses, so why waste all that time? Especially after Max escaped him that first time, why keep a hold on her instead of moving on to someone else? And, if Vecna was watching the Party since the very beginning, he must have known they would figure out something Upside Down-related was happening. Why give them the chance to investigate and try to stop him? If he had just killed four random people right away, he would've succeeded in his plan a lot faster at no risk to himself.
    • The script hints at several possibilities. Vecna sees himself as a predator whose place in the world is to prey on "the weak," so perhaps this is a test to see how weak they actually are. It's also possible that he can only establish a Psychic Link strong enough to kill them long-distance like that if he's softened up their minds to the point of despair. Remember also how Hopper said that the demogorgon is fed live prey because predators have to hunt or they'll lose interest in eating. I don't think that's actually true irl, but we are probably meant to apply the same principle to Vecna's behavior. Finally, there is some indication that Vecna wants Eleven to realize what he's up to, so in that case he actually wants her friends to grasp what's happening so she'll come after him just like she did.
    • Vecna's power is said to be exploiting their negative memories somehow. It's likely that a more stable person wouldn't be so vulnerable, and would have more control over their "mind world" to block out his attack.
    • The whole Vecna thing is a metaphor for teen suicide. Vecna is basically the intrusive thoughts that affect traumatized people and a literal manifestation of depression. Chrissy is implied to have had an eating disorder, a controlling mother and neglectful father, Patrick had abusive parents, Fred carried guilt for getting someone else killed in a car accident and Max of course had an abusive stepfather and stepbrother, but then had to watch that brother die right as he showed redeeming qualities. Having experienced those things will not automatically make someone suicidal or even depressed, but it does open them up to being vulnerable to it, especially if they're not able to deal with it in a healthy way. Vecna specifically targeted people who'd experienced trauma but couldn't process it - Chrissy had to present this image as a perfect beautiful cheerleader and Jason was in complete disbelief that she may have been buying drugs because she was that careful with her facade. Patrick likely would be in a similar situation, where he had to lie about where he got a black eye from, as a star basketball player couldn't be expected to let someone else beat him up. Both Fred and Max carry survivor's guilt, with Fred believing himself to be a murderer because of his accident. Max meanwhile is conflicted in both mourning Billy and partly being relieved he's dead, and that isolates her from her friends because she's unable to admit the truth to them. Plus all his victims are teenagers. Vecna can't just take anyone instantly; he needs to slowly wear them down and be that voice in their head to make them susceptible. Drawing it out is also part of the torture process - if on top of their trauma they're also experiencing weird visions, it scares them even more and possibly makes them easier to kill because at that point they just want it to be over.

     Cost of Living in Hawkins 
  • If Joyce is able to afford a home and keep her family on "the broke side of comfortable" in the early seasons on her retail salary, why do we see Susan Hargrove working two jobs and only able to afford a run-down trailer for them to live in? Come to that, if Eddie's uncle works a night shift at a plant with premium wages, surely he'd be able to at least afford a home on par with the Byers as well. If Joyce can afford her house on her salary, how are smaller families working longer hours and/or better-paying jobs living in worse housing?
    • We don't know what those jobs are. Joyce has been working at the same place for years and is probably making above min wage and seems to pick up extra shifts and holiday shifts as much as possible. She is probably is working more than 40 hours a week, even though she only has one job. At the beginning of the show, it's also implied that Jonathan is contributing to the family as a secondary earner, he picks up an extra shift because "we could use the cash." So all in all, Joyce+Jonathan combined are likely working more hours than Susan.
      • We know Joyce has a mortgage because Jonathan mentions it, but don't know what kind of mortgage rate she has, maybe she has a more favorable rate due to timing.
      • We also don't know if Lonnie is paying child support or alimony, and how much money that adds to Joyce's budget.
    • On the other hand, Susan might be picking up the kind of limited shift work available to someone who doesn't have very strong connections to the area. We know very little about Susan's life but it's implied that she was financially dependent on Billy's father during the marriage, and it's possible that she's not really used to penny-pinching, so while Joyce has learned to stretch a dollar over the years, Susan struggles more. She might also have very little credit or just financial literacy in general.
      • It's also established that Susan is drinking/smoking to excess and spending a lot of time passed out, which means that some of their household budget is going to alcohol/cigarettes (which can get pricey) and also that she's probably not much of a reliable worker either.
    • On top of the above, this is the late 80s. There's a good chance that Reagan's union-busting policies have really started to spread, and it's easier to break up strikes in small towns. The plant might not be paying as well as it would have several years ago.
    • We also don't know the personal finances of these characters. There are people working in supposedly high-paying jobs who end up on the streets in chronic debt because they are careless with money, and people who work in supposedly low-paying jobs who live quite comfortably because they live within their means.

     Why did the remaining Hargroves stay in Hawkins? 
  • I can't recall if it's a book or show reference, but it's suggested the Hargroves moved to Hawkins because Neil wanted to (possibly to get Max and her mom further away from Max's father). Once Billy died and Neil abandoned them, why did Max and Susan stay in Hawkins? Sure, Max has her friends, but overall there seemed to be very few ties to the town for either of them. Why not return to California where they might have friends or family willing to help them out?
    • Max’s mom may not be able to afford the cost of moving, especially if she doesn’t have a guaranteed position waiting for her in California. Just because she has friends and family back in California doesn’t mean they’re able or willing to put her up if she moves.
    • Moving is not as easy and straightforward as it sounds (see above about Joyce selling the house and how long that realistically would take). Max's mother is obviously not in a good place after her husband leaves her and the death of her stepson - she's drinking just to get through the day and still has a teenage daughter to raise. She may have just decided to stay in Hawkins because it's easiest and she can't bring herself to do anything else just yet because the grief is just that paralyzing.

     Vecna cheating his own rules 
  • Did Vecna outright just break his usual killing method just to kill Patrick as he so happens to be around Eddie (so Jason can blame him even more)? It's like he changed his method solely to advance the plot. He torments him for two days only (we see him pick Patrick in episode 3) and then just kills without even putting him in a trance (and somehow pulling him underwater) right as he gets to Eddie.
    • It could very well be possible that targeting Patrick was intentional. By targeting Patrick and probably being aware that Jason is spreading fear in town (which is probably what Vecna wants, as he wants people distracted from his plan. By killing Patrick in proximity to Eddie and with Jason as a witness, it aids in causing fear and confusion so that the town wouldn't be able to catch on to his plan). Jason was just an unwitted pawn in Vecna's plan. Think of it similar to Stephen King's It and the character of Henry Bowers, and Pennywise used him to target the Losers Club in the present day when they posed as a threat to him and his plans. It's kind of a similar scenario of the supernatural big-bad taking advantage of the chaos caused by a human they're manipulating. And, it essentially a two birds/one stone scenario, as it also sets up one of the points for the massive portal to open. But this is just a possibility I'm presenting.
      • I realize It has been a strong influence on the show from the start, and the comparison between Jason and Henry Bowers is interesting—though there are differences. Bowers was an outright sociopath, whereas Jason is more of a Well-Intentioned Extremist. Also, Vecna never gets into Jason's head. And I'm not sure I buy the idea that Vecna predicted the exact confluence of events where Jason ends up witnessing Patrick's death in Eddie's presence following a chase in the water, leading him to incorrectly believe Eddie is using occult powers against them. It seemed a bit too fortuitous and random for it to have all been planned by Vecna.
    • Vecna's rules aren't really rules as such. He simply enjoys screwing with people, that's why he bothers with the week-long curse. Patrick was simply useful in order to frame Eddie (who Vecna surely knew was hanging with Eleven's friends) for another murder. Then again, there is also the possibility that Vecna had chosen and 'cursed' Patrick previously - after all, both Fred and Max showed symptoms of the curse before Chrissy died; so it may be likely that Vecna chose them all from the get-go - and it was just a coincidence that Patrick was near Eddie when Vecna took him. What we saw may not have been Vecna cursing Patrick, but rather just entering his mind to screw with him or read his thoughts to get information on the manhunt.
    • Vecna, let us not forget, is an absolute asshole. He cheats on his own "rules" because he doesn't play fair in the first place and because he would rather 'win' and cause others to suffer than adhere to an arbitrary rulebook that he is the one creating in the first place.

     The rollerskate ring bullying 
  • So in a matter of minutes, Angela got everyone in the entire ring, including adults to participate in that disgusting display of bullying over something they wouldn't have any reason to care about? What do they care about her being snitched on? They really helped humiliate a minor just because one girl told her "hey she snitched on me so let's all humiliate her in front of the entire ring?"
    • The Doylian explanation is that the series runs on 80s movie logic, where such a scene wouldn’t be out of place. In particular, this scene was a homage to Carrie.
    • Angela is implied to be a Rich Bitch and well known locally, so she obviously has a lot of pull. She's also quite a pretty girl, so she could have turned on the charm and flirted with people to get them to go along with her. And even as late as the 2000s, bullying was still seen as harmless 'kids will be kids' stuff. The audience knows it's horrible because we see it from El's perspective. From the POV of the other kids, they see it as a joke.

     The police doing nothing to stop Jason 
  • The police just sit there and let Jason rally a lynch mob and then have the nerve to complain about it in the car. Why do they just sit there and do nothing? They have the authority to stop him.
    • They're a small town police force whose main priority is catching a murder suspect and trying to figure out what happened to the two victims. Jason is a middle class local football star undoubtedly with a powerful family who would give the police a lot of grief if they threw him in jail for no good reason - and this would divert their attention from the main priority of finding the killer. And let's face it - the Hawkins police just aren't that competent.
    • Except for Jim, who is the only competent officer the police force has. And he wasn't there due to being in prison.
    • They were badly outnumbered. As far as we ever see there are only about six or seven cops in the Hawkins PD, and that was including Jim.

     Fred's gate 
  • Why is there no mention of a gate at the place where Fred died? Chrissy and Patrick's death sites are significant places for the characters to enter the Upside-Down, but either there's no gate there, or nobody thought about going there. If there is a gate there at on at a side of road, it's odd that none of the cops or general public noticed. And I get that it's exposed, but it's easier to get to than Watergate, and wouldn't everyone be watching Eddie's trailer for him to return? (they didn't, but it's a valid concern, especially after they stole that RV and its owners would be watching for the thieves)
    • There is a gate where Fred died, and we see it widening at the start of the apocalypse. Fred was pretty unknown (Eddie saw Chrissy and Patrick die, Jason was there for Patrick, Fred was pretty unknown compared to the "popular kids" and Nancy had a lot on her plate, so it's understandable that she forgot.) and no one would have gone out of their way to find the exact location. Watergate was found before they released Vecna caused deaths made a gate, and they didn't really realize what it was until they had used it - plus they mostly avoided it after that. Sure it might have been hard to move away, but Eddie's Uncle's trailer would have been a "safe zone" where they could brace themselves for the Upside Down, would have provided visual protection, and the most likely person to bust in would have thrilled to see his nephew safe, so it has the most use.

     Water in the Upside-Down 
  • Previous seasons showed empty swimming pools in the Upside-Down, implying that the water wasn't replicated. Why didn't any water flow through the gate at the bottom of Lover's Lake?
    • Because gravity on the other side of the gate is reversed, so while the gravity in our world would pull the water down, the gravity on the other side of the gate would be pushing back against it. That's why, once they're through the gate, the kids have to climb out of the pool. The only reason this doesn't happen with the gate in Eddie's trailer is that it's on the ceiling instead of the floor.

     Why hasn't Hawkins been evacuated as a Superfund site? 
The government's own cover story of the problems of Hawkins lab being a toxic dump threatening the town should almost be enough. Obviously evacuating a town that size would be pricey even for the Feds, but the Feds know the true story is far worse. The events of season 3 amount to what could well be called a massive Soviet invasion (the secret base). And the mall was destroyed in a supernatural event. Of course the Feds wouldn't want to admit to any of this, but the site is so sensitive, you'd think they would sprinkle uranium dust around the town (or whatever) as cover to condemn the whole town.

     Is Eddie really a coward? 
Is Eddie really a coward? He calls himself a coward because he keeps running and hiding, but this is some really terrifying stuff! He sees Crissy's body mutilate itself, bones the wrong way, jaw cracked, eyes torn out, floating like she's in the Exorcist, is that not a valid reason to run? The other two people who witnessed something like this happening were Lucas and Jason, and that clearly scarred both of them – even being a tipping point for Jason's madness. Who else does Eddie run from? A bunch of jocks with baseball bats trying to beat him up, and almost half of an entire town trying to start a Witch Hunt. Later Eddie clearly thinks about some clearly risky ideas being bad, but instead of stopping them like a true coward would he goes through with them. He calls himself a coward, but is that really just what he thinks he is?
  • No doubt. This is an old trope, though: the Cowardly Lion, or the character who thinks of themselves as a coward, but who is a lot braver than they give themselves credit, and who ultimately rises to the occasion.
  • Dustin called it: Eddie was a hero. He didn't suddenly become one at the very end, he always had it in him to stand and fight if people he cared about were put in danger. He simply didn't recognize it in himself, and the first time he was put in a situation that called for heroism, it was Vecna's attack on Chrissy; Eddie was utterly helpless, not because he was afraid or didn't care but simply because he had no idea how to protect her and no time to figure it out before she died. What happened to her was so incomprehensible that he had to be wondering if it was somehow his fault – if maybe his music or D&D or drugs something about him had summoned whatever force killed her. The grief, survivor's guilt, and certainty that he would blamed – after all, she died in his trailer while he was the only other person present, what else could anyone think? – almost broke him.

     Colonel Sullivan's authority and mission 
Lt. Col Sullivan is openly deploying uniformed soldiers on US soil without any regard for civilian casualties or even trying to keep his mission under the radar. Who has signed off on this? Whilst there may be a brief attempt to keep it secret, he has gone way too far for it to be clandestine for long. What kind of military or political administration can order this without falling?
  • It's worse than that – Sullivan has his men killing other American soldiers (the MPs), plainclothes agents of some unspecified federal law enforcement or intelligence agency, and civilian scientists who also work for the federal government. It seems his plan has to be to kill everyone so there's nobody who can credibly contradict his claim that Project Nina was a rogue operation and everyone involved was either a traitor or duped by traitors into serving their cause. The Sullivan storyline really isn't much more plausible than the Russian covert operation running a massive underground research complex hundreds of meters below a shopping mall in the American heartland, all constructed in less than a year.

     Toxic atmosphere retcon 
In Season 1, the Hawkins National Lab indicated that the Upside Down's atmosphere was toxic to humans. So how were Nancy, Eddie, Steve, Dustin and Robin able to breathe in it without suffering any ill effects?
  • This is somewhat mentioned in a folder in the season one section: "Nancy's Immunity to Radiation Poisoning." My summary is either the scientists at Hawkins were taking any and all precautions posible, as they didn't/don't have any information on the Upside Down or that the teens weren't in the Upside Down long enough for anything to seriously affect them. It could also be low levels of toxins that wouldn't show immediately or visibly.
  • Will survived for days in the Upside-Down, and while he was near death by the end of it, it stands to reason that a shorter exposure of a few hours would have a proportionately smaller effect.

     Vecna surviving in the Upside Down 
How was Vecna able to survive after being banished to the Upside Down? He'd presumably still need to eat and drink, and the dimension wasn't covered in his Meat Moss yet. Did the supernatural lightning just fry his body's basic needs?
  • He was undead, just like his D&D namesake; the ambient energy of the Upside Down sustained him without the need for other sustenance, as the Negative Energy Plane does for undead beings in the game.

    Other 
  • In Season 4, Eddie says that Dustin was wearing a Weird Al Yankovic t-shirt...On a rewatch of Season 3, episode 2, the science teacher was listening to "My Bologna" when Joyce went to talk to him. Did he introduce Dustin to Weird Al's music, or vice versa?
    • It's possible that Dustin may have discovered him on his own through the Doctor Demento show, like how many people were introduced to Weird Al, and if I had to guess the song that probably introduced him to Weird Al, it was his song "Yoda" (the cover of the song Lola), which he may have liked due to the fact he's a Star Wars fan.
  • When you boil down Vecna's endless Motive Rant, it basically comes down to narcissism: everyone else is stupid and basic, leading a stupid basic life, but he's too good for that and no one appreciates him. And sure, lots of adolescents feel that way, but it's a pretty thin rationale for murdering your mother and sister and then letting your father take the rap.
    • Considering Vecna's intense narcissism, that may be the point - He didn’t need a reason, he wanted an excuse.
    • Also, Vecna is a psychopath who felt the world is sick and that his family was a part of the "insanity." How do you expect for psychopaths like him to make motives that make sense?

Top