How Stranger Things: The First Shadow Fleshes Out That Season 5 Flashback

This article contains spoilers for Stranger Things season 5 and Stranger Things: The First Shadow.

Early in “Sorcerer,” the fourth episode of Stranger Things‘ fifth season, viewers get a familiar sight: Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink), digitally de-aged to look like she did when she nearly died fighting Vecna at the end of season four. As part of a flashback explaining how her mind lives trapped in Vecna’s memories while her body remains comatose in a Hawkins hospital, Max takes us to another location, at once familiar and slightly off. Max walks out of a darkened high school gym into a busy hallway, where people she knows as adults are now high school students, including future Mrs. Byers, Joyce Maldonado (Birdy).

The scene lasts only a couple of seconds, and exists just to establish that Max is in the mind of Henry Creel, who will later become Vecna. But for those who saw the play Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the flashback is a chilling reminder of how Vecna came to be, and the tragedy of the boy called Henry.

Written by Kate Trefry and directed by Tony winner Stephen Daldry (based on a story by Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer and Jack Thorne), The First Shadow takes place in 1959, back when Joyce was just a high schooler hoping to get out of Hawkins, Jim Hopper’s only sleuthing involved animal killings (alongside Joyce’s future boyfriend Bob Newby), and Henry Creel was the new kid in school.

Even more than the occasional flashbacks in the series, The First Shadow shows how Henry was a normal kid who began to change after finding abandoned technology in a Nevada cave. Left there by Russian spies, who were stealing from the Nevada Project established by Dr. Brenner (portrayed by Matthew Modine on the show), the technology sends the young Henry to what the U.S. government called Dimension X, but what we know as the Upside Down.

Gifted with psychic powers, but disturbed by his interactions with the Mind Flayer in the Upside Down, Henry tries to live a normal life when he moves with his family to Hawkins. There, he manages to befriend Bob’s sister Patty, and even gets a part in the production of The Dark Side of the Moon that Joyce stages. But he’s constantly under attack by the Mind Flayer and pursued by Brenner, whose own father was changed after a visit to Dimension X in World War II.

By the end of the play, Henry has killed his mother and sister—murders blamed on his father Victor—and is taken to Brenner’s lab. From there, Brenner transfers Henry’s blood into young test subjects, most notably the girl known as Eleven.

But the real focus of The First Shadow is on the way Henry is treated. Despite the monster that he’ll become, Henry is not pure evil. He was a troubled kid who had some bad things happen to him, things made worse by the way people feared and judged him. Max’s trip through these memories only touches on the events that shaped Henry, but they may be enough to help her, an oft-misunderstood kid herself, escape his fate.

The same may not be true of Max’s friend Will, the boy at the center of the entire show. “Sorcerer” ends with Will standing up to Vecna and taking control of the demogorgons attacking Hawkins. Voiceover replaying Robin’s monologue about coming out frames Will’s control as a good thing, as if he’s finally becoming the person he’s supposed to be. But the actual imagery—Will’s eyes glazing over with white and the strange contortions he makes with his body—suggest something more sinister.

Is Will like Henry, a boy who went to the Upside Down at a young age and was changed for the worse? Or will Will’s friends be able to save him from becoming the next Vecna? We’ll have to wait for the last four episodes of Stranger Things to know for sure, but The First Shadow sure doesn’t fill us with hope.

Episodes one through four of Stranger Things season 5 are now streaming on Netflix.