Mothergate: Alice Creel is B*lly Hargrove’s Mother
Forewarning that I hate Billy, but Murray Bauman said to follow the rabbit hole no matter where it leads, and who am I to doubt him? 🕳🐇
Let’s just get the big thing out of the way first:
Alice Creel died! …Right?
But that leaves a lot unexplained, including when Nancy asks Victor, “Who played the music?” Victor never gives us a straight answer. Which I think gives us a lot of room to speculate that Alice was fighting Henry and changing the music. Let’s also note that Alice’s phrase was, “It’s like a dream,” and the song that saves Victor is “Dream a Little Dream.” This seems like a subtle clue from the writers.
I think that Alice “betrayed” Henry, like El, and refused to join him in his quest for power which included killing their parents. This is the memory that makes him “angry and a little sad.” He uses it to harness his power. If this is the case, Alice’s eyes were bleeding, not because she was dead, but because she exhausted herself fighting Henry. We also see El’s eyes in the same state when she fights Henry. To me, it seems she somehow managed to fake her death:
There’s also some strange inconsistencies reported about her death:
There’s no way Alice was meant to be older than our main characters, and at least 3 years older than Henry. They show her running around on a playground, and overall acting and dressing like a little kid. And not in a struggling to mature way—just genuinely a child. What that means about her fake death, I’m not exactly sure, but something’s definitely off. (Sidenote, but it’s also weird that there’s issues with both Will and Alice’s 15th birthday, right?)
Anyway, let’s take a look at the description of Billy’s Mother:
In terms of the other main theory that Karen is Henry’s sister, Billy’s mother’s physical description more closely resembles Alice. Alice has blue eyes and blonde hair. Karen’s hair is a mousy brown in the first season and her eyes are brown. Alice wears a hat with a blue ribbon when we first meet her.
The red flowers are such an interesting touch considering the Creel’s iconic door:
Another subtle clue might be that one of the only things we know about her is that she has a friend named Wendy. Wendy—another classic fairytale name. What a strange thing for them to tell us, when we don’t even know her name.
The biggest, and my favorite clue happens throughout all of Season Four:
This is so on the nose it hurts. (I hope you read that in Will’s voice. You were meant to.) Billy was literally a Surfer Boy in California, and we see this first hand in the memory of his mother. Why call back to this for no reason?
In Season Four, Max is being tormented by visions of Billy shown to her by Vecna, the Cali Crew is in a Surfer Boy Van, and Nancy is piecing together a puzzle about a “grandpa murderer” and a red rose door that she’s seen before. It all adds up as the perfect reference to this specific scene.
Besides the references to the actual scene itself, there’s a big clue that we see in Season Two when Max is introduced, and again this Season with Eddie—the Micheal Myers’ mask. In the Halloween Movies, Micheal Myers is suffering from “the Curse of Thorn” (another reference to roses). In order to break the curse, he must kill everyone in his bloodline, and the one he really struggles to kill is his sister. (Parallels Henry trying to kill his whole family, but failing because of his sister.)
Lots of references to 20 in Season Four and, in H20, Micheal Myers has a sister that fakes her death and relocates to California! Go figure!
That also addresses the biggest issue with the Karen as Alice theory. It would make no sense for Karen Wheeler to stay in Hawkins, because she’d be at risk of Brenner taking her too if she was Alice Creel. How the Hargrove/Mayfield family ended up back in Hawkins sans Billy’s runaway mother is anyone’s guess, but there’s too many coincidences…and it could explain why Billy and Max were such strong targets.
And let’s not forget that the episode where we first see the memory of Billy’s mother is called “E Pluribus Unum" or “Out of many, one.” A direct nod to Henry’s secret identity in the title of the very episode that we meet a random woman who’s sheer memory is enough to bring down the Mind Flayer? That’s Alice Creel, babygirl.
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