I haven't written up my thoughts on the official trailer yet because I have a whole-ass theory brewing, but I do want to gush about Byler before the five-minute preview drops later today.
First of all -- oh my god. Look at Will levitating at Vecna's command while wearing a grey shirt with Phineas Gage stripes on it. I'm levitating too.
And yes, the Nosferatu (2024) parallels -- obviously unintended, since Nosferatu released around the time they were wrapping filming on ST5 -- but real enough nonetheless. You write a horror story about a walking metaphor for the dark side of human nature returning to possess a sweet but weird kid with sexual repression issues, you're gonna end up with Nosferatu.
(I can't believe this dropped just as I was putting the finishing touches on my Nosferatu x Stranger Things fancomic. Life is good!)
But I also can't believe they showed this to us, because I'm pretty sure this is the cliffhanger moment at the end of Volume 1. And now they're about to show us the first five minutes of S5 too, which is very probably going confirm that Will got kidnapped and slugged by Vecna, rather than by a wild Demogorgon?
(Not that we haven't been taking this as a given for the last three years lol. But it still needs canonical confirmation.)
That suggests they want us to be swimming in dramatic irony throughout the first half of the season: the party -- under Mike's leadership -- is going to fuck up and get Will snatched by Vecna again and we are going to be anxiously wringing our hands about it the whole time, knowing how it ends.
Honestly, Mike doesn't come across well in general in the trailer. He's frustrated at being cooped up and unable to do anything about it; he has naive ideas about how effectively he can save the day.
(To be clear, I'm not saying he is naive or ineffective -- just that this is how the trailer is presenting him.)
(Incidentally, I'm loving that we now have enough crumbs of context to confirm that Mike very probably was talking about a village with three waterfalls in the rooftop heart-to-heart with El lol. 💀)
What all this adds up to, I think, is to make the audience increasingly frustrated that Byler's early-S5 efforts are hurting Will, irrelevant to El, not doing Mike any favours, and ultimately playing into Vecna's hands.
I wonder why they might want us to be in that frame of mind before Volume 2 sees Will and Mike recreating Milevn's S4 arc -- getting forcibly separated and having to work on themselves as individuals before reuniting for the finale? 🤭
