In season 5 of Stranger Things, the party is laser focused on finding and defeating Vecna aka One aka Henry Creel (Jamie Campbell Bower). The Duffer Brothers spent season 4 slowly revealing the origins of the terrifying villain whose dark influence has been felt on Hawkins for decades, but there’s still more to his story. To see it all, you need to travel to New York or London.
Premiering in London in 2023 before opening on Broadway in 2025, Stranger Things: The First Shadow is a prequel that takes place in 1959 and focuses on a young Henry Creel (Louis McCartney), who has just moved to Hawkins with his family. The creators of the show didn’t want to make The First Shadow required viewing for fans of the Netflix series, but there are some scenes in season 5 that take on a lot more meaning if you’ve seen the play.
[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Stranger Things season 5 and Stranger Things: The First Shadow]
In “Sorcerer,” the fourth episode of Stranger Things season 5, both Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) and Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) are trapped in Henry’s memories. Max has been stuck reliving the massacre at the Hawkins National Lab and Vecna’s psychic assault on her. But one of the other key moments that Max visits while trying to escape happens in 1959 at Hawkins High School, where a young Joyce is promoting a one-night production of the musical Oklahoma! starring Henry Creel.
Henry Creel in The First Shadow (L), Vecna in Stranger Things season 4
Photo: Manuel Harlan
That Hawkins High production is key to the plot of Stranger Things: The First Shadow. Joyce is secretly putting on the tragic fantasy romance show Dark of the Moon, and Creel isn’t actually playing Curly but the witch boy John. In classic play within a play fashion, the plot of Dark of the Moon reflects the conflicts Henry is going through as he struggles with his newfound psychic powers while also trying to find acceptance in Hawkins, where he falls for his co-star Patty Newby.
The First Shadow paints Henry in a far kinder light than the Netflix series. He’s not a sociopath, but a boy tormented by the dark influence of the Mind Flayer, which gives him immense power and pushes him to hurt people around him. The show focuses on a battle for Henry’s soul waged between Patty, who wants Henry to use his powers to help people, and Dr. Martin Brenner aka Papa, who wants to use Henry in his military experiments.
But the biggest thing Max learns from traveling through Henry’s memories in “Sorcerer” is that there’s something he’s afraid of – a cave in the desert – which she uses as a refuge. That’s also a reference to The First Shadow. Henry wasn’t born psychic. He gained his powers at age 8 after he was exposed to the Mind Flayer’s influence when exploring a cave near his childhood home in Nevada.
Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
That cave housed technology from an experiment being conducted in Nevada that was meant to replicate The Philadelphia Experiment, a World War II test that sent a battleship to another dimension. When Holly explores Henry’s memories of his childhood home, she finds and uses the spyglass he was carrying on this fateful outing. Henry dropped it in the cave, which is how Brenner was able to find him and enlist him in his experiments.
Henry’s blood type and personality changed after this encounter, as he began wrestling with the Mind Flayer’s influence, eventually succumbing to its darkness and murdering his whole family. Another key change to the show’s mythology is that the designation of One isn’t just because Henry was Brenner’s first test subject. He’s actually the progenitor of the entire twisted experiment – all of the other children including Eleven got their powers after receiving transfusions of Henry’s blood.
The fact that Henry won’t go into the cave could just be because his childhood fear still has power over him. But it also hints at a more complicated relationship between him and the Mind Flayer.
Henry didn’t have his first encounter with the Mind Flayer when Eleven sent him to the Upside Down in 1979 – they were already well acquainted. And while Henry has drawn on the power of the hive mind to use Demogorgons as soldiers, his goals might not be perfectly aligned with the puppet master. Understanding that dynamic could be key to finally defeating both enemies and saving Hawkins and the world. Hopefully the show does a good job of explaining this instead of relying on viewers having traveled to New York and paid for pricey theater tickets to get the whole story.
The first four episodes of Stranger Things season 5 are available to stream on Netflix now, with three more episodes dropping on Christmas and the finale airing on New Year’s Eve.
