Stranger Things Season 4 Part 1 was one of Netflix’s biggest releases this year. The show is back with a bang and is edgier and scarier than ever, and the stakes are much higher. For the last three seasons, we have had so many questions about the Upside Down and how it originated.
In fact, we’ve also had questions as to who really opened the first-ever gate to the alternate dimension. While we might not have all the answers at the moment, we surely have a few.
One of the critical aspects of this season was Eleven’s childhood trauma, the origin of her powers, and how she regains them. However, this entire story was connected to that of Vecna’s origin story, and that’s essentially what the ending depicts.
So, in this article, I’ll be explaining the ending of Stranger Things Season 4 Part 1, while also speculating on what Part 2 holds for us. Let’s dive in.
Stranger Things Season 4 Part 1 shows how Vecna is Victor Creel’s son Henry Creel. After killing his family, he was sent to the hospital, where he met Martin Brenner, aka Papa. Brenner is fascinated by Henry’s powers and makes him his first subject, 001.
In order to understand the ending, we’ll have to segment everything that happened around it into three parts—Vecna, Victor Creel, and Eleven’s origin. Here’s how it goes.
Vecna—The Villain of Stranger Things Season 4
In the latest season, the villain is Vecna. A creature seems to be targeting teenagers and kids with some form of trauma, taking over their minds and bodies and killing them.
It’s almost like the more kids he kills, the more powerful he gets, as he is seen to be using their bodies to charge himself. However, we don’t know why he’s targeting children, what his real identity is, and what he wants to achieve.
Victor Creel’s Backstory and His Family’s Death
When Chrissy from Hawkins’ school is found dead in Eddie’s trailer, Nancy tries to talk to his uncle, who found her body. He tells how everyone is going to target ‘Eddie the Freak.’ But only he knows that Eddie isn’t responsible for this murder. So instead, he points the finger at Victor Creel.
This little clue takes Nancy down a rabbit hole, where she finds out that a long time ago, in the 1950s, Victor Creel had killed his entire family, was deemed mentally ill, and then permanently locked in the Pennhurst Asylum.
But Victor Creel is still very much alive, and so Nancy and Robin reach the asylum to know the actual truth. He talks about how he had shifted to a new house in Hawkins after World War II. However, after a month’s peace, weird incidents started happening in the house.
His daughter, wife, and even he started seeing visions about their worst fears coming true. But, on the other hand, he knew that his son was ‘sensitive’ and was not doing well. In the end, due to the dark spirit that had overcome the house, his entire family dies, and he is admitted into the asylum.
Eleven Faces Childhood Trauma and Regains Her Powers
Sam Owens, the scientist who had earlier helped Eleven and her friends, meets Eleven. He tells him about the threat that Hawkins is facing. Now, Eleven is made to choose between regaining her powers to save her friends or going back to them without powers and keeping them in danger.
She obviously chooses the former. With this, she returns to the facility from where she had escaped years ago. She even sees Martin Brenner aka Papa, who, along with Sam Owens, tries to help her regain her powers.
For this, she has to remember how she had escaped from the facility and what had exactly happened. This is because that night, when she escaped, her powers had unleashed. So, both the scientists try to help her remember those incidents by recreating them to help her get her powers back.
Now, here’s where all the dots are connected between Victor Creel, Henry Creel, Martin Brenner’s program origins, and the story of Vecna. Here’s how:
When El is made to repeatedly go through those recreated simulations, we see an elderly boy help her and act as a friend to her throughout her time at the facility. However, as she recalls, it was all merely a big facade.
The elderly boy had an inhibitor chip within him, and he pretended to be a friend to El to get her to remove his chip. He also lied about wanting to help her escape from the facility. In reality, he wanted something else entirely.
He wanted El to join his side as he destroyed the world because, according to him, the world was unfit for humans and their systems. Instead, it was a place for more evolved beings such as himself.
The Orderly then goes on to kill all the other children in the facility except El. He tries to reason with her, but she is not one to listen and finally sees his true colors. In those moments, we see the two fight each other, and Eleven becomes so powerful that she flings him away into the Upside Down.
In the process, his entire body burns and he turns into Vecna. Reliving this entire memory is what gets Eleven agitated. However, when she becomes conscious and tries to leave the facility once again, the guards try to stop her. This time again, her sheer desperation causes her to regain her powers and fling all those guards away.
Now, we know a part of Vecna’s identity. However, we still don’t know how he became an Orderly, where he came from, and more.
The answer is rather simple and revealed by Vecna himself in the present time as he tries to take over Nancy’s body. Vecna talks about Victor Creel and the Creel house. He tells how he was Henry Creel, and right from a young age, different from the others.
His mom had tried to get him to see a doctor, but he didn’t want any of that. He thought humans were unfit for the planet and wanted to kill everyone to build a better one. In fact, he also wanted to be free of his family and avoid the doctor at all costs.
So, he decided to show them visions of everything they feared most, eventually killing his mother and sister. However, he becomes unconscious in the process due to the sheer power it takes.
When he regained consciousness, he found himself in the hospital with the doctor his mother wanted him to see. Unfortunately, this doctor is none other than Dr. Martin Brenner, who, instead of treating him, makes Eddie an experimental test subject.
Brenner, aka Papa, wanted to control him but couldn’t. So, he created more powerful kids with his DNA and tried to train them. This was the beginning of Brenner’s program. So, essentially, the Stranger Things Season 4 Part 1 ending showcases how Vecna, Henry Creel, and 001 are the same person.
About Stranger Things
Stranger Things is an American sci-fi horror TV series created by The Duffer Brothers for Netflix.
Set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, the show follows the story of a young girl called Eleven, who has superpowers and her adventures with her group of friends. These dangerous adventurers include surviving in and saving a town that has an evil parallel universe attached to it called the Upside Down.
It stars Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, Sadie Sink, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, and Maya Hawke. The show has been renewed for a fifth and final season.
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