Quick Links
Netflix hit Stranger Things has thrilled audiences since 2016 with its lovable characters, '80s references, and gruesome horrors from another dimension. While the residents of Hawkins, Indiana have battled monsters from this parallel world for three seasons, they still know surprisingly little about the Upside Down. Now, thanks to the release of the first volume of Season 4, we are finally getting a clearer picture of what the Upside Down is, how it started, and how it works. While there are still a lot of questions left to answer, Matt and Ross Duffer have filled in a lot of blanks with this latest batch of episodes. With this fourth season’s break-neck pace, some info can be easy to miss, so let’s break everything down from the beginning.
Our Intro to the Upside Down
Our first brush with the Upside Down comes in Season 1, November 1983, when Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is pushed by her “Papa,” Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine), to harness her psychic abilities. She is seemingly the only subject in Hawkins Lab, despite her codename indicating she is the 11th child to be inducted into Brenner’s program. While Eleven spies on Brenner’s Russian target from across the globe, she encounters another presence in her mindscape — a Demogorgon from the Upside Down. Eleven makes psychic contact with the Demogorgon, and in her terror, she accidentally rips open a hole in the fabric of reality. A gate forms in the depths of Hawkins Lab that connects our world to the Upside Down, which allows the Demogorgon to travel through. Eleven escapes the facility while the Demogorgon wreaks havoc and escapes into Hawkins as well.
The Demogorgon starts attacking the people of Hawkins, starting with Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), which sets into motion the central mystery of Season 1. Will is somehow teleported to the Upside Down by the Demogorgon, and he tries to survive in the cold and toxic wasteland, which appears as a dark reflection of Hawkins. Structures and objects in our world also appear in the Upside Down. He takes refuge in his house, where his mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) begins to notice signs of his presence from across the veil: blinking lights as he moves around in the other dimension, and his voice coming through the telephone. Will is able to affect electricity in the real world, and he communicates with his mom by intensifying the light bulbs — a discovery that leads to the iconic Christmas light alphabet. Joyce turns to the Hawkins sheriff, Hopper (David Harbour) to help her get through the gate and into the Upside Down to save her son.
Eleven is found by Will’s friends, Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo). She is unable to speak much, but is able to prove that Will is alive and trapped in the Upside Down. She uses her psychic connection with the Upside Down to channel Will’s voice through a walkie talkie. While the kids evade Brenner’s attempts to reclaim Eleven, Will’s brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) joins Barb’s friend and Mike’s sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer) in tracking down and killing the Demogorgon. With help from Nancy’s boyfriend, Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), they discover fire is the Demogorgon’s only weakness and nearly kill it before it portals away.
We learn the Demogorgon hunts by opening small portals and taking its prey to the Upside Down. Once there, they’re intubated with a vine that implants them with slugs, making them hosts for the Demogorgon’s reproduction cycle. The hosts can be kept alive for this process, or in the case of the Demogorgon’s second victim, Barb (Shannon Purser), they can be dead already. After Will is rescued and all seems well and good, Will burps up a slug in his bathroom sink, showing the cycle was successful.
As for the Demogorgon, Eleven uses her powers to banish it back to the Upside Down. This kind of temporary portal looks way different from a normal gate — a bright light erupts from the Demogorgon’s chest as it disintegrates. It seems that this kind of window to the Upside Down does not have the same qualities as a proper gate.
Enter the Mind Flayer
Hawkins enjoys a year of relative peace. In October 1984, Season 2, Joyce worries about Will’s mental health. Will has regular sessions with the new head of Hawkins Lab, Dr. Samuel Owens (Paul Reiser), to understand the Upside Down’s effects. He has been suffering waking nightmares that feel so real, it’s as if he’s teleported back to the Upside Down. In these visions, Will sees a massive creature made of dark, swirling tornados looming over him in the sky — an entity his friends dub The Mind Flayer. This evil overlord’s main goal is to eradicate humanity and merge our world with the Upside Down. During one of these visions, Will is attacked by The Mind Flayer and swallows a massive amount of the particles that make up its body. Will becomes infected and slowly loses himself as The Mind Flayer takes over.
Meanwhile, we learn more about the Demogorgon reproduction cycle when Dustin finds one of the slugs Will vomited, grown to the size of a pollywog. Not realizing this is an infant Demogorgon, he names the pollywog D’Artagnan and feeds it regularly, causing it to grow at an alarming rate. D’Artagnan evolves into a Demodog, who along with other Demodogs growing secretly in Hawkins, becomes a soldier for The Mind Flayer. The Demodogs are controlled by The Mind Flayer through a hive mind connection, the same connection he uses to control Will. This connection can only work while there is an open gate to the Upside Down in Hawkins. The original gate Eleven opened in Season 1 could not be destroyed by Owens, only mitigated with flamethrowers.
Unknown to them, the gate spread out from the lab in the past year, growing massively in size and forming tunnels that sprawl throughout Hawkins’ underground. Hopper finds out the hard way that these tunnels are just as toxic as other parts of the Upside Down, and they’re filled with more vines that Owens demonstrates are also connected to The Mind Flayer. To test Will, Owens torches a vine and Will experiences extreme pain through his possession, proving The Mind Flayer is connected to everything that comes out of the Upside Down.
Eleven uses her powers to close the gate once and for all, before The Mind Flayer can move through it and attack Hawkins. Once the gate is closed, The Mind Flayer’s connection to the Demodogs is severed, and they all die. Will’s friends and family drive The Mind Flayer out by subjecting him to extreme heat. The piece of The Mind Flayer possessing Will escapes and flies to the abandoned Brimborn Steel Works. It lies dormant there after Eleven closes the gate, and with his first plot to conquer our world with an army of Demogorgons foiled, he plans his revenge.
Starcourt Mall and the Russians
In July 1985, Season 3, the remnant of The Mind Flayer suddenly stirs after eight months, responding to the opening of another gate under the Starcourt Mall. In an attempt to harness the power of the Upside Down, the Russian military infiltrates Hawkins and uses the mall as a cover for a massive underground facility. Drawing from the town’s power grid, they use a giant machine called a “Key” to punch a hole through the fabric of reality and recreate the gate. According to one of the Russian scientists, Alexei (Alec Utgoff), they need to use this machine specifically in Hawkins because the fabric of reality is already weakened by the previous gate.
Though the Russians know nothing of The Mind Flayer, this is the moment he’s been waiting for. Thanks to this new gate, his hive mind is reconnected to the remnant expelled from Will, and he is able to infect new, living hosts. First, rats in the Steel Mill, which he contorts and uses their flesh to create a mass of necrotic tissue. Then, he manipulates this corpse pudding as a proxy body to capture and infect Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery). The Mind Flayer possesses him in the same way as Will in Season 2, and he compels Billy to bring him more hosts to build an army of Hawkins citizens under his control: The Flayed. With their sole goal being to bring Eleven to The Mind Flayer, it’s clear that she is his biggest threat. When The Flayed fail to capture Eleven, The Mind Flayer has all except Billy combusted and integrated into his proxy body, forming a massive Spider Monster to chase Eleven.
When the Spider Monster attacks Eleven and her friends, it manages to wound her leg and infect her with a slug. Though her friends get the slug out of her leg, it somehow causes Eleven to lose her psychic abilities. Underground, Joyce and Hopper destroy the Russian Key and close the gate, causing the Spider Monster to die just like the Demodogs in Season 2 — but not before killing Billy. Though the Mind Flayer’s connection to our world is once again severed, he claims a form of victory by neutralizing Eleven, who is humanity’s greatest defense.
A New Threat
In the spring of 1986, Season 4, Hawkins is threatened again. Eleven is convinced by Owens to subject herself to another laboratory experiment to regain her powers and save her friends.
The threat this time is a villain from the Upside Down that the kids name after another Dungeons & Dragons creature: Vecna. Young people across Hawkins are psychically assaulted by Vecna, being forced to relive moments of trauma and pain until his influence over them is strong enough to crush their bones and suck their eyes out of their skulls. Vecna kills three teens in Hawkins: one in the trailer home of newcomer Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn), one in the middle of a wooded road, and one over the waters of Lover’s Lake.
Max (Sadie Sink) is also targeted by Vecna, due to her grief over the death of her brother, Billy, in Season 3. She’s able to overcome Vecna’s influence with warm memories of her friends, and the magic of Kate Bush. What this teaches us is that, from the Upside Down, Vecna seeks feelings of trauma and guilt, and can be overpowered with positive emotions and the healing power of music.
At each of Vecna’s killing sites, the Hawkins kids discover a gate to the Upside Down. They theorize that Vecna is a high-ranking general in the Mind Flayer’s army who is tasked with creating new gates to Hawkins now that Eleven is no longer a threat. Vecna’s ability to create portals through psychic contact with his victims has surprising origins, with huge ramifications for Eleven. We learn that Vecna is One (Jamie Campbell Bower), the first child of Brenner’s program. He developed psychic abilities as a child, and Brenner used him as the blueprint for his program. When One massacres the rest of the children in Hawkins Lab, Eleven banishes him to the Upside Down in the same way she banishes the Demogorgon from season one. One is sent hurtling through the Mind Flayer’s lightning and is horribly disfigured, transforming into Vecna. He becomes the Mind Flayer’s own psychic soldier, his own Eleven. Since Eleven’s powers are derived from One’s, that means Vecna has the same ability to open gates to the Upside Down through psychic contact across dimensions.
But why does Vecna kill to make portals? When Eleven opens her portal in season one, she does it through simple psychic contact with the Demogorgon. That Demogorgon can open its own portals without killing anyone. Then there’s the Russian machine under Starcourt Mall that uses a big laser to open a gate. The opening of a gate has never demanded a human sacrifice before. The reason for why Vecna’s victims die in the process could simply be because he chooses to kill them. When Nancy and Robin (Maya Hawke) investigate Vecna’s signature killings they learn about his first victims. In 1959, before Brenner’s program, Vecna was named Henry Creel. As a boy, he develops a supremacy complex and fashions himself as an apex predator, killing his mother and sister in exactly the same way as his victims in Hawkins. So Vecna could just be killing because he’s a maniac, and the bone-crunching is just his calling card.
However, we know from the Russian Key that an incredible amount of energy is required to open a gate. We also know that Eleven first accessed the Upside Down with negative, “sad but angry” emotions, and again with the terror of her first Demogorgon encounter. We know that Vecna initially targets his victims by exploiting their traumatic memories, and we know that Max escaped Vecna’s curse with strong, positive feelings of love and friendship. When Vecna makes his kills, he’s connected to vines that we already know are connected via hive mind with the Mind Flayer. The Upside Down is intrinsically tied to negative psychic energy, and Vecna is using his victims’ terror in their final moments to create an energy strong enough to tear open a gate.
As for what the ultimate purpose of the new gates is, that remains a mystery until the second part of Season 4 drops in July. Perhaps the Mind Flayer’s new strategy involves flying “Demobats” that Vecna uses to defend his portals in the Upside Down. Are they part of the Demogorgon life cycle, or something else entirely? Steve, Nancy, Robin, and Eddie come up against those vicious bloodsuckers when they fall through the portal in Lover’s Lake. They don’t seem to be affected by the Upside Down’s toxic environment, but that’s not the most shocking discovery they make during their adventure beyond the gate.
Knowing that objects from the real world appear in the Upside Down, Nancy takes the group back to her house to arm themselves. However, her guns aren’t in her bedroom, because as she realizes, this version of her bedroom is from November 6, 1983 — the night that Eleven opened the first portal and Will went missing. Though this question of why the Upside Down is stuck in time has yet to be resolved, the implications are astounding. Was the Upside Down just a swirling mass of smoke and lightning before Eleven opened the first portal? Did Eleven actually create the Upside Down as we know it? Even so, if this eternal version of Hawkins 1983 sprang from her mind alone, would Eleven really know the contents of Nancy’s diary in such detail? It seems more like our characters have a much more personal connection to the Upside Down than we thought.
This connection is explored further when season four treats us to a closer look at how Will manipulated lights from the Upside Down in season one. While the teens are at the Upside Down version of the Wheeler house, Dustin notices the lights flickering in the real world as they move around. They can hear Dustin yelling for them, and notice a golden cloud of sparkles around the lights in the house. Electricity, or energy, from the real world leaves an imprint in the Upside Down. By touching this imprint, the teens can make the lights grow brighter. Brilliantly, Dustin grabs a Lite-Brite and fills the board with pegs. When he plugs it in, the Lite-Brite creates a new imprint in the Upside Down that the teens can interact with after Dustin turns it off. By dragging their finger through the imprint cloud, the real-world Lite-Brite illuminates with their handwriting. If electricity is a form of energy that leaves imprints in the Upside Down… what other forms of energy may leave imprints as well? After all, our bodies and minds are constantly buzzing with bioelectricity. Could forces from the Upside Down use our imprints to affect us in the real world in the same way Nancy affects the Lite-Brite?
Weird stuff happening with lights has been a Stranger Things staple from the beginning, but it’s becoming clear that this phenomenon tells us more about the Upside Down than we originally suspected. Any time someone moves around in the Upside Down, their movements can be tracked in the real world by glowing light bulbs. This is even seen by the group in the Creel House as Vecna climbs to his lair in the attic. When he focuses his power to curse another victim, he creates an emotional psychic link across dimensions. All of their flashlights grow brighter until they explode, because they are reacting to this activity. From Eleven’s first gate to Max’s triumph over Vecna, the link between the Upside Down and human, psychic, emotional, whatever-you-want-to-call-it energy is becoming more and more obvious.
The Upside Down is us. It takes the perpetual forms of our memories and reacts to our inner energies. It is possibly a mindscape of its own, ruled by a primordial evil that exists within all of us. The link between the Upside Down and the human psyche is only becoming stronger as we learn more. The two worlds affect each other in both directions. As Stranger Things moves into its final season, prepare for some shocking revelations about the true nature of the Upside Down, and what it may mean for our beloved Hawkins gang.