The first volume of the final season of Stranger Things ended with Will Byers’ transformation from kidnapped child to Neo, but there was something else going on in the background that had people talking, especially theatregoers. Those who scored tickets to Stranger Things: The First Shadow in the West End in 2023 or on Broadway last spring have a better idea of where this final arc is headed than those who didn’t.
With “Sorcerer,” the last episode to air before the next batch drops on Christmas Day, the Duffer brothers have made it clearer that not only is The First Shadow canon with their Netflix production, but that its plot is essential to truly understanding how the show ends. Why Henry is afraid of Max’s cave, why Oklahoma! is important, the connection Creel has to so many of the adults of Hawkins, and the violent past that brought him to “Papa” in the first place — many of these seeds were planted onstage and they’re ready to be harvested in this final season of TV.
Major spoilers for both The First Shadow and Stranger Things follow.
Hawkins! Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain
Most of the connections between play and series are drawn as Max tells the kidnapped Holly Wheeler about her journey through Henry/Vecna’s memories. In those sequences, we see Max back in the halls of Hawkins High School, where she holds a flyer for a production of Oklahoma! The play centers a fateful production of that famed musical, directed by one Joyce Maldonado (who would marry into the surname Byers). And she’s not the only familiar name on the flyer. Those with a Netflix pause game can also spot future Eleven surrogate-father James Hopper Jr., Karen Childress (maiden name of Holly, Mike, and Nancy’s mom), Patty Newby (her brother Bob was featured in Season Two), Alan Munson (father of poor, doomed Eddie), Ted Wheeler, and one Henry Creel. So not only did most of the adults know each other at Hawkins High School, they starred in a play with the big bad of the show.
When Henry Met Papa
What can we learn from the stage version of Henry? The First Shadow reveals that the Creel family moved to Hawkins in 1959, where a tormented Henry, who already had dark abilities, fell in love with the young Patty Newby. While her brother Bob and Jim investigated animal deaths caused by Henry, his parents sent their troubled kid to one Dr. Martin Brenner, who always makes things so much worse. It’s revealed in the play that Brenner’s father was the captain of the USS Eldridge, an actual ship in 1943 around which urban legends swirled about an attempt at cloaking that would become known as the Philadelphia Experiment (which was also mentioned in Loki, by the way, along with an Eighties cult classic with Michael Paré). The play imagines that said experiments led the ship to a very tentacle-y place called Dimension X. Brenner has been trying to get back there ever since.
Caves and Spyglasses: The Meaning Behind Max’s Cave
You know that cave where Max can find safety from Henry? It’s from the play, and it probably terrifies Mr. Creel because it’s basically where he became the villain of this D&D campaign. Act II of The First Shadow details how Henry found the cave as a child when his family lived in Nevada, and he happened upon a spyglass there — an image that returns in the TV series. In the cave, he discovered technology stolen from Brenner’s lab and used it to transport himself to Dimension X, where he was basically infected by the creatures of the Upside Down.
A Play Within a Play Within A Show
The play further reveals that Joyce wasn’t actually putting on the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that made Lorenz Hart so mad, but a more obscure drama called Dark of the Moon. Even that play-within-a-play seems to resonate through both Duffer productions, as it’s about a “witch boy” who falls for a girl, mirroring Henry’s love for Patty. At the production of the play-within-the-play, Henry is overtaken by the evil forces from Dimension X, nearly killing Patty. Following the carnage — we didn’t even mention that Henry killed his mom and sister, and his father ends up taking the fall for those murders — future Vecna is taken back to the Hawkins Lab, where he eventually meets a girl with a cool nickname: “Eleven.”
What do all of these connections mean? The play casts Henry Creel, a.k.a. Vecna, in a slightly different light from the fourth season of the series, framing him more as a victim of the experiments around the Mind Flayer and Dimension X much earlier than the show suggested. It wasn’t Brenner or even Eleven who “created” Vecna; he was already on that path from his time in the real cave that Max now occupies in his mind. Maybe the way to stop him is to go back to the very beginning. Or to Broadway.
