The wait is over for the longer-than-ever finale double feature after Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 1 ended on a dramatic cliffhanger. However, the plot is seen to drastically change in this scene, setting the stage for the crowd-pleaser series’ most spectacular and explosive ending.
So, a big spoiler warning to anyone who has not seen the second season 4 volume. Do not accuse us of failing to warn you later! You should be prepared for this now that you know everything we want you to know!
What Do We Know So Far?
After the Starcourt Mall events, the youngsters in Season Four Volume One go their separate ways. After losing her abilities in the battle against the Mind Flayer, Eleven is shown moving to California with Joyce, Will, and Jonathan. When Mike pays Eleven a visit during the holidays, he finds out that she has been lying to him the entire time and is a victim of bullying every day at school.
Speaking of Max, her mental health has been affected by the passing of her step-brother Billy, and she is reportedly having trouble accepting her loss. Max, who is battling depression, becomes the powerful Vecna’s target while narrowly avoiding his mind control and mindscape. With Hopper alive and locked up in a Russian prison camp, Joyce and Murray set out on a journey to free him post former receiving an encrypted message about him being alive.
Meanwhile, Eleven is taken to Project Nina, one that happens to be a highly classified government facility in Nevada developed by doctors Brenner and Owens to help her regain her powers. She is made to revisit her childhood memories, amongst which happens to be a particular memory of the massacre at Hawkins Lab.
With Eleven probing deeper into the memories that she had subdued in her subconscious, she starts recalling her encounters with the Orderly, who in reality was the test subject number One aka Henry Creel aka Vecna – the biggest revelation of the first volume. Also, while all of this is happening, Nancy is seen getting stuck in the Upside Down with Vecna giving her a personal tour into his childhood story as Henry Creel.
Vecna – The Mastermind
Well, the first episode of volume two, Chapter Eight: Papa, begins with Vecna showing Nancy things that are yet to happen. It is fair to say that he shows her the most awful things – a dark cloud spreading all over Hawkins, the downtown on fire, dead soldiers lying across, a giant creature with a gaping mouth, and add to that an army of monsters all approaching towards Hawkins, into their very neighbourhood. He even showed her four gates spreading across Hawkins and while all the gates did look like the one inside Eddie’s trailer, they just did not stop growing.
Vecna wasn’t giving Nancy a peek into the Upside Down; he was showing her the real Hawkins this time. Now to be honest, the super-powerful , sick, evil, male, child-murdering version of Eleven but with really bad skin has been pretty much telling us his plan the whole time. Hell, he has even left the four chimes of the old grandfather clock as clues, which all thanks to Lucas is finally deduced as four kills, four gates and eventually the end of the world.
And, with Chrissy Cunngham, Fred Benson and Patrick McKinney’s deaths, he is just one kill away! With each victim Vecna takes, he is actually chiselling away at the barrier that exists between the two worlds. It is important to remember that when Vecna kills, he doesn’t just kill, he consumes. He takes everything from his victims, everything they are and everything they ever will be.
We’d love to elucidate on our point further by talking about the final face-off that takes place between Eleven and Vecna in the concluding chapter of Season 4. It is here that Vecna tells Eleven that she is responsible for making him the monster in the first place. With Eleven sending him to the Upside Down, he at first thought that she had sent him to his death, to Purgatory to be more precise.
But Vecna believed that he was somewhere new and so he became an explorer of a realm that was unspoiled by mankind. He saw many things, entities to be more specific and then one fine day, he found the most extraordinary thing of all; something that would change everything – the Mind Flayer. This brings us to Dustin’s statement in the first volume, where he had described Vecna as the five-star general of the Mind Flayer.
Well, if we look at things now, it’s the Mind Flayer doing Vecna’s bidding and not the other way round. When he arrived in the Upside Down, he used his powers to control the powerful, malevolent entity and become the predator that he was always born to be. All he needed was someone to just open the door and Eleven did that for him without even realizing it.
Plus, when she did realize, she chose to resist so that led to Vecna seeking a means to open his own doors while seeking Eleven’s very powers. Vecna will stop at nothing to see Hawkins burn and fall along with the rest of the world that he calls senseless and broken. He wants to be there to pick up the pieces and then remake it into his version of something beautiful. Well, just the thought of it is giving us chills and to top it, this according to Vecna is only the beginning, the beginning of the end.
Fate Of Max Mayfield
With the group deciding to take down Vecna once and for all, they come up with four significant phases. It goes without saying Max is seen playing the most crucial part of their plan. All this while, we have seen her keeping Kate Bush alive for us fans playing her favourite song, Running Up That Hill on loop. With Max still marked and cursed, she decides to ditch Kate Bush and have Vecna’s attention drawn on her.
This is just an attempt to lure Vecna and buy some time for the rest of the group to take down his defenceless physical body that’s there in the attic of the Creel house. But to underestimate Vecna and act rashly surely has its consequences. Thinking she knows she is against, run to the light, find a happy memory and hide there in the light – that was Max’s initial plan. But with that not working, she decides to have Vecna read her worst thoughts.
Mind you she played her part pretty well and almost had us convinced that she did want Billy to die, that she prayed something horrible would happen to him for making her life a living hell and that the day he actually died, she just stood there not because she was scared or weak, but because she didn’t know if Billy deserved to be saved.
But come on, it is Vecna that we are talking here, one that is capable of turning people inside out with just a snap of his fingers. Obviously, he had to appear as Lucas to Max which clearly pointed at things taking a different direction. Not only does Vecna consume Max but he also has her elevated just like his former kills, have limbs snapped and even had her heart stopped for over a minute. So, it is fair to say that she died clinically but then was resurrected by Eleven – all of this taking place inside Max’s very mind. Season 4 Volume 2 ends with Max in a pretty bad shape, blind and brain-dead with a high possibility that she might not ever wake up.
Fans can only pray that she is brought back properly in season 5.
The Significance Of The Broken Clock
It is just a theory and nothing has been confirmed yet but there is a high possibility that the creepy old grandfather clock is a potential doorway to the Upside Down. Well to begin with, the clock is introduced in the fourth season and there are various scenes depicting it to be cracked and at times fully broken. This can only point out towards its greater usage – the sole fact that it can be some kind of an amplifying device for Vecna’s capability of open a portal. After all, portals did open up at the places where he has killed his victims. But, then again it is a theory, one that hasn’t been confirmed yet.
How Are The Russians Getting Their Hands On Demogorgons?
To be honest, the exact reasons aren’t known but we can let you in on the information that we know. In 1985, it is shown that a political prisoner is fed to a Demogorgon in the Russian prison camp by two Red Army soldiers. Skip to 1986, a group of men including Hopper is offered as a sacrifice to the Demogorgon. The beast brutally kills all of the prisoners except for Hopper and Enzo.
Now there is a chance that the creature was captured through means that aren’t disclosed from Hawkins and then brought all the way to Kamchatka to do the Russian’s biddings. Or, how about a portal that’s there in Russia or let’s say the Demogorgons are nothing but results of the dark experiments conducted by the Russians in their labs? Like it or not, fans did get a glimpse of many demodogs being held at the prison camp.
So, what do you think of the whole thing? Do not hesitate from leaving your thoughts about it in the comments section. Till then, stay tuned with us for more interesting stuff!