All posts by ReganX
I love both ships. Mileven is my favourite, but thankfully there's no need to choose between them.
Mileven, no question about it.
Owens was last seen alive, with minor injuries. Don't trust Google for this sort of thing.
Hopper and El would have stayed in Hawkins, and since Hopper is familiar with the supernatural/Upside Down, this would have influenced his investigation of Chrissy's death. The kids would have been able to come to him with their information about Eddie and what Max saw. He would have taken Jason into custody rather than let him lead a witch hunt.
Owens would have had to come to Hawkins to get El.
El would probably have less trouble at school if she had Mike and the rest of the Party to support her.
Joyce, Will and Jonathan may or may not have moved, but if they did move, it'd probably be to somewhere closer to Hawkins than California.
El
Max
Hopper
Will
Even without Chrissy in the mix, I can’t see Jason wanting to sleep with the married mother of a classmate.
I’d say the distance was a plot device to keep the California group and the Hawkins group separated. Had Joyce moved within the state, for example, they’d have been able to get back to Hawkins in time for the final battle.
In this scenario, without Owens advocating for California, Joyce could end up moving a relatively short distance away. Maybe a couple of hours drive rather than thousands of miles away.
If Mr. Clarke tells Dustin Planke's Constant, and the ripple effect of no delay means that Hopper lives, it could definitely have a major impact on Season Four.
The question of whether or not the Byers family would move could really go either way. I don't think that Joyce had only one motive for moving. She had multiple reasons, including financial, given that the mall meant a lot less business for Melvald's, but also after everything she and her sons had gone through over the past almost two years, I would say that she definitely wanted a fresh start. A Russian invasion and the opening of a Gate wouldn't make her feel safer in Hawkins, so she might have still have moved. However, if they did move, they probably wouldn't have gone as far away as California. That was Owens' doing, to protect El.
If Hopper lives, I'd say that El would have had an easier time of it adjusting to school. At Hawkins High, she would have had a support network of friends, plus her dad at home.
I don't think that it would have made a difference. Will was clearly being stalked by the Mind Flayer/the Upside Down, and if he had run, it would have followed him and possessed him. The Mind Flayer wasn't going to not possess Will just because he ran.
Mileven is my favourite ship for Stranger Things.
Jopper, Mileven and Lumax.
Nancy is a wild card. She could end up with Jonathan, Steve, or single. Single seems probable as an end point with her, given that she's probably going to be going to college and pursuing a career in journalism, with strong hints that she will get back together with Jonathan or Steve.
I don’t get why Mike is faulted for joining Hellfire. He didn’t stop liking D&D in Season 3, he prioritised spending time with El over spending time playing D&D. El moved away, and he joined a D&D club at school.
There would be quite a knock on effect.
Without communication from Will, chances are that Joyce believes that he’s dead when the fake body is found.
Joyce’s insistence that the body was not Will fed into Hopper’s suspicions but I think that he could still have ended up spotting holes in the story. As in canon, he’d find the State involvement suspicious. I also think that he would have come to question how intact and recognisable the “body” was, given that his own description of hitting the water being like hitting cement would indicate that, if Will truly had fallen from that height, his body should have been a shattered mess. I don’t think the fake body was so much as bruised. These suspicions would lead him to the lab, and El’s cell.
The question is whether he would bring his suspicions to Joyce or wait until he had something more concrete to go on.
He already knew about Terry Ives, so perhaps he would go to see her alone.
Somebody else.
I suspect that, when Kali was introduced, the plan was that any surviving test subjects would have different abilities, especially if they were considering a spin-off. However, by Season 4, it was more convenient to give all of the children the same basic set of powers. Or maybe they all had telekinesis in common, with a subset having additional tricks in their bag, like Ten’s remote viewing.
One possible explanation for Kali and El having long hair and wearing civilian-style clothes rather than hospital gowns pre-1979 is that Brenner may have wanted to show their abilities off to higher ups to secure funding or whatever, and wanted them to look like relatively normal, well cared-for little girls. Once he had the funding her wanted, and the freedom to carry out his “work” without any significant oversight, he didn’t worry about the kids looking presentable.
In terms of backstory, the vibe I get from the Season 4 flashbacks is that baby El was fairly new to the training program with the other children. She needs to ask if she’s in trouble for sleeping in, and to be told when classes start. She also doesn’t interact with any of the other children, even the ones close to her in age, whereas we see the other children playing in pairs or small groups.
One possibility is that El initially demonstrated more potential than the other children and that she was kept with Kali, who also demonstrated strong potential, albeit with different abilities. El’s progress may have plateaued, or she may even have regressed, leading Brenner to reconsider how to handle her. The timing is hard to pin down, because Kali talks about going to the rainbow room and finding El gone before she ran away, while El is seemingly aware that Kali is no longer there, given that she doesn’t ask what Henry is talking about when he talks about how the incident with Terry happened while Kali was still there.
I took it for granted that she hadn’t killed them. No way were they going to reveal that El went on a killing spree, killing a dozen or more children, at barely eight years old.
I would say that, without Erica, Dustin would have contacted the rest of the Party, or at least El.
He didn’t contact them during the translation or investigation because he was ticked off with them for ditching him when he was contacting Suzie, and didn’t want them sharing credit for being American heroes who thwarted a Russian invasion.
However, if they can’t get somebody through the air vents, Dustin knows of another way to get into that room: El. With her telekinesis, she can simply lift the door to give them access.
At this point, the rest of the Party know about Billy.
Perhaps somebody would think that it can’t be a coincidence that the Russians are up to something fishy in Hawkins at the same time the Mind-Flayer is back, especially as Will first felt the Mind-Flayer at the mall?
If the rest of the Party join up with Scoops Troop to gain access to the Russian base, and the characters see the gate being opened, El can destroy the machine with her powers.
The answer to question 5 is incorrect. Will was taken into the Upside Down on November 6, and rescued on November 12. That’s one week, not two.
However, they have never explained (a) where did El meet Will?
In one of the comics, they show Will in the Upside Down crossing paths with El, in a sense. She’s in the Rightside Up but they seem aware of one another. I’d buy it that Will’s face could stick in El’s mind given that it was, to the best of her knowledge at the time, the first time she ever saw another child.
I don’t know if it’s a case of Early Installment Weirdness, but El seems to be much more telepathic in the first half of Season One than she is shown to be later on. She knows Will’s location within the Upside Down and what he’s doing at any given time. Her nose isn’t even bleeding. She uses the radio to prove to Mike that Will is alive, not because she needs it to locate him. By the penultimate episode of the series, however, she needs the bathtub to find him. Four episodes earlier, she would have been able to tell them at the Byers house that Will was hiding in Castle Byers, then Jonathan and Nancy could have brought up the mini gates where the Demogorgon was, allowing them to potentially enter the Upside Down without going through the lab.
If Henry Creel had been native to Hawkins, I might think that there was something in the environment that led to slight psionic abilities among residents. For example, on a scale of 0 to 11, with 0 being no psionic abilities whatsoever and 11 being El, and Henry and the lab kids being in the 6 to 9 range, there could be some 1s and 2s, maybe an occasional 3, naturally occurring in Hawkins. However, he moved there as a preteen.
Will was being turned into an incubator for the Demotadpoles when Joyce and Hopper found him. Maybe, because of the library’s central location, the plan was to have the Demotadpoles born and released into Hawkins from there.