Mike - Vecna's 4th victim
I know that many people believe that Mike was a tool for Vecna to get Will and El back or that he waited for Mike to be gone to California. I have a pretty different perspective on this and I want to share my thoughts about this. I just gonna warn you that this post will be quite long but I would appreciate it if you take your time to read it.
For the tool-theory and waiting to be gone-theory I have two simple reasons why I don't think that they are correct.
When Vecna kills Chrissy Mike is still in Hawkins. He doesn't wait for Mike to be gone/sitting in the car/plane and traveling to California. Vecna kills her mere hours before Mike had no possibility to interfere with him. It's not only that Vecna kills Chrissy, no he kills her in close proximity to Max who could have been more suspicious about Eddie, Chrissy and the lights and could have called a CODE RED, which would have led to Mike not going to California. So if he wanted Mike to go to California (either for him to be gone or to get El/Will back) why would he jeopardize this mission by being too impatient?
If Vecna wanted Mike out of the way why didn't he just kill him? I mean we can all agree that pre S4 Mike already has a massive amount of trauma. So if he needs Mike out of the way he could have just cursed him too, couldn't he? There was nobody to stop him from doing it. El? Out of the picture. No powers and too far away. Mike? Wouldn't be able to help himself during a trance. The Party? If they don't know what is coming, how would they prevent it?
So I think Mike wasn't a tool for Vecna. He was a perfect fit for a far more important role.
He was the Chosen one, the fourth, the final sacrifice.
But before we are going to discuss Mike's role in Vecna's plan in detail, let's take a step back and take a look in the things that actually happened in S4.
Specifically everything that has to do with Patrick and his curse. Because there are so many things wrong with Patricks curse.
First of all Patrick doesn't fit the other victims. Timing wise as well as in his trauma and our connection to him and his connection to other characters on the show.
Timing
Patrick is the only victim that we see getting cursed. This happens on the March 23rd (sunday) at some point during the day (morning or noon I guess). (here the scene where he gets cursed)
This is in direct contrast to the timeline which is presented by Max. For further explanation this is also March 23rd but late in the evening.
So let me get this straight.
Chrissy's curse started a week ago (approximately week = seven days. I made this post where I found a specific date when Chrissy's symptoms started and they are not adding up. But I think it's because it's meant to be not the curse itself that's coursing these symptoms but something else which I will talk about in another post)
Fred's started six days ago
Max's five days ago
And Patrick just that morning (basically one day ago)?
In no way this is supposed to happen. What was the reason? Did Vecna forget to curse Patrick four days ago? Or couldn't he decide who to curse 4 days prior?
Well the most logical reason (imo) is that his actual target can't be targeted. And we do know one character who was in Hawkins and left during the season. And that's Mike. But this is not the only reason Patricks timing is off.
With Patrick being cursed there is a change in the way the curse works for Max and him in comparison to Fred and Chrissy. I won't go too much in to the details but here are some observations.
Chrissy and Fred both have 3 visions that are heavily paralleling each other.
Their 1. vision is related to the people around them. Chrissy thinks that Max is still in the room when the pounding on the bathroom stall starts. Then she hears her mothers voice and Vecna's feed come into vision. Her mothers voice get distorted soon after and Vecna's voice fades in.
Freds first vision is also directly connected to a conversations he is having with Officer Daniels. Daniels also fades in to Vecna. His face and his voice.
The second vision is the grandfather clock. But a very creepy version.
With Chrissy it's spiders with Fred it's people turning into Vecna calling him murderer.
The third vision is there death and relieving their nightmare.
Both die on the end of their 5th day of being cursed. Their visions start during the day and the day ends with their death.
In contrast to this Max curse is put off this timing. Max visions start on the end of her 5th day of being cursed and she has 3 visions with different themes than Fred and Chrissy.
Max's 1. vision is the grandfather clock. But it's only the creepy grandfather clock. No spiders and no link to Max's trauma.
Her 2nd vision is like Fred’s and Chrissy’s 1st vision a person who fades into Vecna.
her 3rd vision is supposed to be her death which she can escape from.
She has a 4th vision where she actually dies.
Patrick only has one vision we see and one that is implied but we don’t see at all. His first vision is the clock during Chrissy’s funeral.
the other would have been when he dies but we don’t see the vision.
Timing wise this implicates the scenario that Patricks’s cursing throws the timeline off schedule because we see a clear pattern before he was cursed which is thrown off the second Vecna targets him. So likely the original schedule would have targeted Max on the 23rd and the 4th victim on the 24th.
Lack of imagery and missing build up
His trauma, connection to other characters and the connection we build to him is also off. While most of it is due to the lack of imagery regarding him but also to the fact that we have a build up in this topics that Patrick is reversing.
I don’t really want to order the trauma of Vecna’s victims in terms of severity because I firmly believe that any trauma should be addressed and recognised and you shouldn’t compare trauma (unless you’re a therapist) because this kind of invalidates the people with “less severe” trauma. But when we talk about Patrick’s trauma we only have two clues about what it is because we don’t see visions that are related to his trauma. The first one is when he gets cursed (here). A man, likely his father, calls him a disgrace. Lucas also tells us that Patrick came to practice with a black eye once.
This implicates that Patrick is also a victim of domestic abuse (like Chrissy) What I find interesting is that this creates a circle of trauma themes.
(I want to emphasize that between Fred and Max there is a build up because Fred has survivors guilt and Max has survivors guilt but also wanted the person that died to die before he died. This is obviously meant for us to notice because it’s an addition to the same theme)
Ignoring the potential build up in the trauma and going into Patrick’s relationships we see that he doesn’t make sense as 4th victim narratively speaking. We have a clear build up in the victims relationships with other characters:
Chrissy has no known relationship to our main characters
Fred is Nancy’s colleague and apprentice (Fred asking Nancy how she did this with Jonathan). They are close enough (Nancy trusts him enough) to take him to the Trailer Park.
Max is a main character of the show. She has many close relationships to other main characters
And then Patrick comes around and he is just Lucas’ team mate who he can’t even trust because they are hunting for his friends.
The connections to other characters get closer and closer until Max only to go rapidly down with Patrick. Narratively this doesn’t make sense because Patrick is supposed to be the 4th victim. He should have close ties to our favorite characters and they should care deeply about him because of the needed rise in tension. They get around it with Max escaping the death vision and being the actual 4th victim but for the original plan this would have been very weird.
This also ties to the connection we as an audience have to the victims.
Chrissy is a new character. We only see her in one episode and we barely know anything about her. Most of what we know is that she is a cheerleader and she has trauma. Although many people sympathize with her we can’t really get connected to her.
Fred is basically the same. But we get more information about him. We know he is a journalist. We also know that he does know about Jonathan and Nancy and their struggles in their relationship (which he kind of wants to take a chance in because he flirts with Nancy). We have two episodes with him.
We have known Max since season 2. We had a lot of time to get to know her and create a bond with her.
And yet again Patrick doesn’t make sense. Why do we get a new character which we don’t like because he is part of the antagonists, after a (beloved) main character? There was a subtle build up and then we flunk down in the negatives with our perspective on the character.
I wanna add that in an recent reblog of a post i discussed Mike's parallels to the other victims. You can find the post here.
But how does Mike fit in?
Most people on here are well aware of all the hints that connect Mike with Vecna. Therefore many people believe he is a target in S5. I believe so too. I still don’t think that so much has changed during S4 that made him more targetable than he already was. Yes his trauma increased through the shootout, the death of unknown hero agent man, lying to El and losing Eddie and Max, but his trauma was there before. And it was severe enough to make him struggle. It’s pointed out in the canon extending book “Lucas on the line” and it is also shown in his behavior in S4 (getting up too late, used clothes, dirty room/basement, he doesn’t eat on camera, and more). So Mike would be a perfect target for Vecna only considering his trauma. But there is way more stuff that make Mike a perfect last puzzle piece in this situation. First of all he is one of the few characters that are in Hawkins when the curses begin and have more/deeper connections than Max. Yes Max has a lot of deep connections (the Party and El specifically) but Mike has those connections too and he has deeper connections to the teens (Nancy and Jonathan especially), Will, Joyce and Hopper. So in a certain way he is more connected to the rest of the cast and would be perfect to be the final step of the build up we see with character relationships. He has also been part of the show since S1 and was one of THE main characters in S1 and S2. He has a very important role in figuring out important plot points and so for us he is obviously a very important character. And so while I don’t play favorites he is slightly more important for the audience (subjectively speaking). Timing wise (as I said before) he is the only character we know to travel out of Hawkins during the cursing. Him being cursed on March 20th (thursday) wouldn’t compromise the given timeline. It would also explain this scene where Mike clearly looks like he has a awful headache.
And this scene where Max has a nosebleed and the camera’s focus shifts to him
(some people believe that’s the moment he cursed Max. I doubt that. When Max explains the symptoms she said nosebleedS, plural [Insert Eddie’s comment on Nancy’s guns here].I believe that’s thursday morning and Mike was just cursed and had a nosebleed like Patrick and he looked like he looked because he found it suspicious that he had a nosebleed and now Max has a nosebleed.) Clearly two times where he was visibly shown in the context of the curses symptoms. Also his bedroom scene, when he reads Els' letter could connect to the symptoms (this is more of a reach than the other two).
Sleeping in underwear => He woke up an a cold sweat
The binder with Will’s drawings is in his room => having nightmares and needing comfort
(re-)reading the letter => having nightmares and needing reassurance that everything is okay
he is later than he usually is => trouble sleeping
Also I think @aemiron-main pointed that out: Mikes Reaction to Karen telling him that he need to be home by nine because it's an early flight suggests that he barely sleeps because he seems to not care of the early flight.
And last but not least the line Vecna uses for Max (You’ll be the chosen one, the fourth the final sacrifice) fits way better to Mike. Why? Well the main reason I only got on the Mike getting vecnaed’ train was while I was rewatching the show I saw this scene where El screams for Mike while she has a vision:
This scene reminded me of this scene where Will does the same:
And it made me think about how Vecna knows that both of his former targets heavily depend on Mike. He is the first they think about when needing help. He’s the first they find comfort in when upset. So Mike is obviously on Vecna’s radar. There is more…. These two scenes where Max and Mike help El and try to protect her and Billy sees it.
They stand out because it would make so much sense for Mike to be targeted too. Max does become a target because of her trauma but also because of her connection to El. So Mike would be a perfect target too. Him being the final sacrifice would be the peak of devastation for both Will and El and would make perfect sense for Vecna to do so. Also it would contrast Mike’s arc because he is usually the one interfering with Vecna’s plans in overtaking the real world. Mike being the last kill to open the gates to the UD would be very “poetic” from Vecna’s POV. Furthermore the line “You would be the chosen one” would be far more fitting for Mike. Mike is a fan of fantasy stories. The Chosen One Trope is a typical fantasy trope that has been used for ages. Mike can relate far more to this trope than Max (Max is a comic fan where this trope is used too, but Mike is pictured way more with classic fantasy where this trope is used very often).
But why did Vecna wait for Mike to go on vacation?
This is the only thing that really makes me struggle. Because I don’t have a good answer to this. The only possible explanation I see (without doubting the rest of this theory) is that Vecna didn’t look for his plans, his supposedly happy memories/thoughts and only took in the bad ones. Max tells us that she thinks Vecna only looks for the bad memories.
So if Max is right then Vecna didn’t look for the light in Mike’s mind and only for the darkness. (Therefore didn't see his hope of reconnecting to Will in Califronia) I also want to point out that Mike is not the only target Vecna needed. He needed four victims. So this is not solely about him. And you need to know that Vecna feeds off his victims fears, anxiety and guilt. So it makes sense for him to unleash his curse when all his victims are especially tense/anxious
Chrissy’s mother forced a beauty idea on her daughter that resulted in her being connected to bulimic tropes (Throwing up, rotten food). She is also a cheerleader in the 80s and she “needed to be pretty” because the championship games were coming up. So Chrissy would be more anxious than usually
Fred is less obvious than Chrissy. The only clues I got why he would be more anxious than usual are that Officer Daniels (Vecna Vision) tells us that the accident happened last year and he knows about Jonathan and Nancy’s relationship problems. The first could mean that the car crash happened somewhere in 1985 or it could actually mean that the anniversary is coming up which (knowing from S2) would affect Fred through the anniversary effect. The latter could make him anxious because he might see a chance with his crush (we see him multiple times openly flirting with Nancy)
Max would be more anxious because Billy’s birthday is coming up (March 29 - also anniversary effect)
Mike would be more anxious because he is traveling to California and he doesn’t know how Will feels about him and maybe he is a little jealous because of El’s letter and Will painting something for a girl
Additionaly the week before spring break could be full of tests which could make all victims more anxious.
Another good question regards the timing. Vecna did look for a replacement for Mike on March 23rd but Mike left early on March 22nd. So why did he wait an additional day for Mike? This is obviously a question I asked myself a lot. Why did Vecna wait for Mike to be gone for a whole day before looking for a replacement (Patrick)? Well this one is very hard to answer. But there is one scene in particular that makes me believe that Vecna starts his rampage usually early in the morning. You can take a look here in this post. I included the scenes right before and right after the scene on purpose because it gives us a better perspective on the timeline. So right before Vecna gets hooked up to the vines, El went to her bedroom crying. We know that this happened on the night of March 22nd. Then it cuts to the UD where Vecna gets hooked up but nothing happens afterwards. Instead we see how the sun rises/travels in the sky. Then it cuts to Lucas and the beginning of the hunt for Eddie. So what is the purpose of this whole scene? Vecna wanted to start the final stage of his curse (visions) for Max early on the 23rd. This is probably what he was doing with Chrissy and Fred the days before. He recognized that he couldn’t find Mike anywhere and then started to search for a replacement until he found Patrick. Very important for this theory, Vecna finds Patrick way later. There are almost 20 Minutes between this scene and the scene where Patrick gets cursed. Even more important: We see every group on screen before we get back to Vecna. There is literally a cut to every small group. First Lucas and the Jocks, then Max, Dustin, Robin and Steve with Eddie, then Nancy, the Cali Gang, Joyce and Murray, Hopper back to the Hawkins gang at the Trailer Park. I think Vecna didn’t recognize Mike’s absence because he was solely focused on Fred on the 22nd and started with Fred visions early in the morning before Mike got to the airport. So when he wanted to get started with Max the next day he realized that he couldn’t reach Mike anymore and decided to go for a replacement. That’s when the timings of the victims don’t add up anymore.
Besides everything I showed you here there is another theory that is connected to this. #possessiongate from @dinitride-art
This shows how my theory is supported visually in the show. It also explains why Mike isn't shown as cursed after the breakfast on the 23rd because his curse was shifted to Patrick.
