Stranger Things: Did [SPOILER] Create The Mind Flayer? (2024)

The following contains spoilers for Stranger Things Season 4, Volume 1.The fourth season of Stranger Things is full of some massive reveals for the audience regarding the Upside Down and just how Hawkins is connected to this other dimension. While each season has featured a new layer to the connection and new monsters for the teens at the center of the story to face, Season 4 does it in a way that creates just as many questions as answers.

Many of those are brought up as a result of the reveal that Henry Creel is the first child that Dr. Brenner decides to experiment with, hoping to harness his psychic abilities. Not only is Henry Number One, however, as demonstrated by a memory that Eleven very slowly uncovers over the course of the season, but he’s also the big villain of the season - Vecna. These two reveals happen simultaneously for viewers in the last episode of Season 4, Volume 1. Just how it’s revealed, however, will have viewers wondering if Vecna created the previous villains of the series, like the Demogorgon and the Mind Flayer.

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Throughout the fourth season, Eleven struggles to uncover her full memories of a traumatic event from her past. The audience sees her in 1979, bullied by other kids in Brenner’s program, and bonding with who she thinks is one of the orderlies taking care of them. As she finally uncovers the full memory, she discovers that the orderly is Number One, and the strength that she’s cultivated since he began supporting her ends up being used against him after he slaughters all of the other children.

One offers Eleven the chance to come with him, to share their power, and to rule the world, but she refuses, and they have a sort of psychic battle. Eleven manages to win as she harnesses anger from her most painful memories, but she doesn’t win by killing him. Instead, she literally pushes him into another plane of existence with her mind. The audience sees him fall through reality as she does, and right into the Upside Down.

That makes it clear that, despite his power, Vecna doesn’t create the Upside Down. This shadow world already exists. One simply finds himself there four years before the start of the series with seemingly no way out thanks to Eleven. Brenner’s repeated experimentation with Eleven’s abilities, pushing her to probe into the darkness where the Demogorgon is, causes cracks between realities and opens the gate that allows Vecna a chance to gain a foothold of power all over again. The Demogorgon, Demodogs, and the Mind Flayer all end up in Hawkins as a result.

Though Eleven is able to reach out to the consciousness of the Demogorgon, its abilities are physical, not psychic. While the Demogorgon feels Eleven in its mind, its goal appears to simply be hunting and feeding on people. The Mind Flayer actually infiltrates the minds of its victims instead.

More than that, the Mind Flayer is able to control its targets, as it did with Billy and Heather in Season 3, and it tried to do with Will in Season 2. The design of the Mind Flayer in Season 3, with its tentacled limbs, and its physical method of fighting including lifting people up into the air, certainly makes it look like it might be one and the same as Vecna. That’s not the case though since the audience knows the Mind Flayer was destroyed in Season 3.

Their psychic abilities are also slightly different. While the Mind Flayer fully controls its victims, Vecna doesn’t. Vecna instead uses his psychic abilities to observe his victims and get inside their heads, giving them hallucinations of their own dark secrets and traumas to haunt them, breaking down their mental walls until they are terrified and vulnerable, and he can destroy them completely.

What is interesting, however, about the similarities in psychic reach of the Mind Flayer and Vecna is that it implies the potential for a psychic connection between the two. If Vecna can mentally reach out through the gate to residents of Hawkins, surely he can to creatures from the Upside Down as well? In fact, that’s exactly a point made when Steve, Eddie, Robin, and Nancy are in the Upside Down.

It’s noted that they shouldn’t step on the hostile vines they find all over Hawkins because all of the creatures are connected. When one Demobat is injured by Steve, a flock of them follow. There is something of a hive mind or psychic connection between those animals, which does seem to lend credence to the idea that even if Vecna didn’t create the Upside Down, he could have created all the creatures that have plagued Hawkins so far, including the Mind Flayer.

A remark that One makes to Eleven when she’s terrified by him killing all the other children in Brenner’s experiment is that they’re all still with him, a part of him even. Since One is Vecna, who seems to gain power with each life he takes, and is able to open a gate with each life he takes as well, it’s possible that his statement to Eleven is more literal than the audience realizes. It’s entirely possible that by killing the other children, One harnesses their power, and that power is part of what allows him to become Vecna in the first place.

With the increased psychic power of 15 other children (discounting Eleven and Eight of the 18 numbered children since Eight is Kali, who escaped), there’s no telling what One could do while trapped in the Upside Down for four years. Experimenting with his power, and becoming connected to that shadow world through his tentacled form, means he could have created the different monsters as manifestations of his power. When he falls through reality to the Upside Down, the audience sees landscapes, but not animals. It seems increasingly likely that Vecna created the monsters of the Upside Down as nightmare fuel for his plan to bring fear to his victims.

If he did create the creatures as a way to grow his own power, Vecna’s connection to all of the monsters in the Upside Down could hint at a way to make sure it falls. If Vecna is destroyed, so too is the psychic connection between the creatures. Cutting off that supply of energy from Vecna could destroy them all.

Stranger Things is currently available to stream on Netflix.

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