You know despite the attention he's had most of his life, I truly do think that that conversation with Dustin was the probably first time in his life Steve Harrington ever felt truly and utterly irreplaceable and precious to someone else. Imagine thinking that you're mostly just the guy who's there to take the hits (and yes your friends do love you but you think they'd learn to be ok without you eventually) to then be HIT with the reality that someone's world would simply crumble without you in it. Dustin and Steve you shine brighter than all the stars in the sky I am so serious
Holly's fears are meant to prime us for a Mike breakdown
So, when Holly broke down to Max about not feeling like Holly the Heroic and feeling helpless in the face of monsters, as I was watching I was thinking to myself this should be Mike. This is literally the breakdown I wanted for Mike in relation to his "Mike the Brave" persona and I was kind of crushed they gave it to Holly.
Except, I've been thinking about something:
Holly isn't just reminiscent of Mike: she is him.
I know Mike Wheeler is in there somewhere. And he's dealing with the same fears that we see from Holly in this scene with Max.
Both Holly and Mike keep their figurines with them at all time as a way to stay brave. This is a habit Holly picked up because of Mike and his attempted pep talk to her in The Crawl, the scene which is also the only time we get Mike admitting he's scared despite seeming emotionless in the face of so much terror throughout season 5.
But they're not just toys: they're something that can empower them to be brave, to be the best versions of themselves.
But Holly admits it doesn't work - that it doesn't stop the fear.
And Holly is her brother, according to the show. So we can assume the same is true of Mike. That he still feels "scared shitless" despite his usage of Mike the Brave as a mask and persona to stay level-headed, to keep being the Heart to the party despite his own fears.
But as Max tells Holly, it's not just a mask or a persona. Holly (and, by extension, Mike) may be faking it until she makes it, but it does make her brave, and heroic, like she wants to be.
All this to say, if Holly is meant to parallel Mike (and I think it's safe to say she is, considering the constant comparisons of the two Wheelers by Max, paired with Mike having been the one to introduce the idea of Holly the Heroic in direct connection with his own idea of Mike the Brave) then this confirms Mike also feels like he's faking, he also feels scared. And he also, in the end, must realize that he is the Mike the Brave he's always wanted to be.
We have yet to see such an unmasked, emotional moment from Mike. I have to believe there is more to Mike this season. But I also think, through Holly, the show is telling us that there will be more to Mike. And I can't wait to see it.
Mike Wheeler was just made unambiguously, or—in practical terms—canonically queer.
I just found a brilliant thread on Twitter by @stachaser about the Jack Kerouac poster visible in epilogue Mike’s college bedroom (written in Portuguese but I included the full translation under this embedded link).
Here’s the translation:
They can do whatever they want, but nothing will change the fact that Mike is implicitly queer.
He’s the only character—along with Robin and Will—who has queer references inside the series.
In fact, he has even more references than Robin and Will, who are canonically part of the community.
He knew community terms back in the 80s.
He defended a queer punk rock band [Butthole Surfers] that used queer references both in its name and in its lyrics.
He has a Jack Kerouac poster in his damn bedroom—a bisexual writer.
If he likes Jack Kerouac, then he likes Allen Ginsberg too, who was openly gay and Jack’s best friend.
He knows the Beat movement, which was against conservatism and conformity.
In his works, Jack talked about attraction and passion for other men—and not only that, but also about the religious guilt of feeling it, which could very well be a sign of Mike’s own internalized homophobia.
Mike, canonically, likes works, music, and literature that go against the norms and standards of society at the time.
He canonically likes songs that make fun of fragile masculinity.
The band he likes so much has an explicitly queer name, and its songs do too.
He appreciates Jack’s works, which talk about desire for other men.
None of that is there by accident. Those elements are carefully chosen to fit together and make sense with the character’s personality.
Mike is a writer who is against conformity, likes works that mock it, defends freedom, and rejects imposed standards.
I don’t know which old bald white guy prevented him from being officially gay in the show, but all the references to Mike’s sexuality are in the show itself—implicitly—even in his last scenes.
I don’t care if you disagree or come insult me. I’m not going to see it because my notifications are turned off. So you can cry and seethe in my comments or in the quotes—I don’t give a damn.
Nothing is going to change the fact that Mike is, yes, implicitly queer.
Mike was never made official as a straight character, so considering him straight is also a headcanon.
He never rejected Will—he never even knew about Will’s feelings.
The Byler ending was left totally open to the audience’s interpretation, as was Mike’s sexuality.
And it’s not just his personal tastes that are queer-coded—his clothes in S4 were, too, yes, deliberately thought through. All the characters’ outfits have details with meanings.
And if you’ve never studied the Beat Generation or don’t know Allen and Jack, I recommend looking them up and reading their works!
There’s also the movie Kill Your Darlings, which talks about the start of Allen’s career, his friendships, his SEXUALITY, and the beginning of the Beat Generation.
You can’t talk about Jack without talking about Allen, and you can’t avoid talking about the Beat Generation.
They were its pillars, and that movement opened the way for freedom of sexual expression.
Allen defended that openly.
They were important figures who challenged the norms.
Mike having him in his room means more than many people think.
i get why this couldn't have worked because erica was already "in the know" about vecna/henry/the upside down stuff, but i'm telling you, it would have been so much more impactful if erica had been the one to get kidnapped by henry in season 5 instead of holly.
for one thing, erica's canon age in s5 is closer to the age will was in s1 (as opposed to holly, who is. 8? i think?? but also whose age is an ambiguous plot-expedient handwave) so having her be taken would be more consistent with canon, but that's just a footnote. erica as the first of henry's victims would give her a main character arc, which would mean having a Black girl driving the primary plot of the season, which would be awesome. and it would give us a chance to get to know erica not just as comic relief or party support, but as a complex human being who has undergone a lot of the same shit the other kids in this show have and whose trauma has gone completely unaddressed.
but also: erica has a lot of different connections within the group. she's a sister, a friend, a protegé. and having her be taken would raise the emotional stakes for so many characters.
think about it: dustin in season 5 is deep in a pit of grief and self-loathing, because he watched one of his heroes die—sacrifice himself—to protect him. imagine how dustin would feel if a kid he dragged into this mess suddenly got taken by henry. falling further into that well of self-loathing. or, maybe, truly understanding for the first time the degree of protectiveness eddie felt over him that motivated him to sacrifice his life to protect some kid—because now dustin would do anything to protect some kid, too.
think about how steve would react to another one of his protegés becoming henry's victim, and how once again, he couldn't stop it. he couldn't save her. he's supposed to be their babysitter, and erica is just a kid, like dustin is a kid but erica is a kid and he's the reason she's involved in this shitshow in the first place, and now she's missing and he should have done more, and he'll do anything to make it right. imagine an emotional arc for steve that doesn't revolve around nancy.
think about robin, too, feeling some of that guilt, because she and erica got pulled into this world at the same time but she's supposed to be older and wiser and helping steve keep these kids safe. and instead erica was taken by the big bad while robin was doing her silly little radio broadcasts. imagine an emotional arc for robin that doesn't revolve around her being a lesbian.
think about the possibility of the sinclair parents being attacked instead of the wheelers. i know the wheeler family has been the symbol of Comformity and Normalcy throughout the show, but it's not like the sinclairs aren't that. and we barely know them at all—they're the party member parents with the least screentime by a wide margin. we could have charles and sue sinclair defending their daughter from an unfathomable monster. we could get Literally Any More Information about them as people. their marriage. their past. their parenting style. truly anything at all.
and god, think about lucas. lucas, whose relationship with his sister is the only sibling dynamic in the show that has been mostly played for laughs. we'd get to see the emotional side of lucas and erica, and the very real love and care they have for each other. lucas failed to save someone he loved before; he would not accept failing again. he would do everything in his power to get her back. we would still get the gut punch of one of the main characters having to grapple with a missing sibling and the other party members offering sympathy and support, but this time it wouldn't just be about getting her back because she's their friend's sister. erica is close with dustin, and she's played d&d with mike. there are real bonds there.
and on top of all that, we would get erica finding max in henry's memory mindscape, and we'd get to see what their relationship is like, because it's crazy that max literally dated erica's brother for like six months and we've barely seen them interact.
this is super not to hate on the holly plotline. i love holly and i love all the wheeler family feels! but just. man. imagine what we could've had. the sinclair feels. the erica & lucas feels. the scoops troop trauma. i'm just saying.
Derailing the discussion: moving worlds, Madwise parallels, and psychic torture
There’s this big debriefing scene in Stranger Things 5.7.
It starts off fine… but pretty quickly goes completely off the rails.
I want to look at how and why their conversation about Vecna’s plans falls apart, what this has to do with the Max-and-Will connection...
... and what we can learn from this about Vecna’s real plans.
Move worlds
The debrief scene in 5.7 starts coherently, with Dustin explaining what he found out about the true nature of the Upside Down. He explains that Hawkins is at one end of the wormhole, and that there's another world at the other end, which he calls “the Abyss”.
They discuss why Vecna would take the kids there, and Max recalls what Holly told her about Vecna’s plans:
Holly: “I know why Henry kidnapped us. He’s going to somehow use us to draw another world to ours, to Earth. […] Henry says it’s to save Earth, but I think it’s really to destroy it. Whatever he’s planning, he’s going to do it tomorrow.”
Note that already Holly has injected the idea of another world coming to destroy (Planet) Earth—all Vecna actually said was that he discovered “another world [...] far from Earth” and that he wants to “draw this new world to ours”.
Holly joined the dots and formed her own interpretation of what Vecna said... she was the first, but not the last to do so.
Based on that intel from Holly, plus what Dustin just told everyone about Hawkins and the Abyss, Max introduces the idea of physically “moving worlds” into the discussion.
From there, the conversation derails into a game of telephone: basically ending up in wild conjecture.
Hopper: “‘Amplify his abilities’. To do what?”
Max: “Move worlds. Holly, she said Henry told the kids that they would help him draw the worlds together. And I didn’t understand what that meant at the time, but…”
Mike: “He wants to move the Abyss, crash it into Hawkins.”
Will: “No, not crash. Merge. Henry wasn’t licking his wounds in the Abyss. He was making rifts, weakening the Abyss, just like he weakened Hawkins. So when the Abyss and Hawkins collide…”
Dustin: “They become one.”
El: “He’s remaking the world.”
… okay, so.
Based on what Max said about moving worlds—which is not what Vecna said, and barely even what Holly said—Mike infers that Vecna wants to physically crash the Abyss into Hawkins.
Will chimes in with the word “merge”—which we can assume is correct based on Henry’s hand movements when describing his plans to the kids in 5.5…
… but which Will should not know about.
Henry!Vecna: “I have travelled far and long beyond our dimension. In my travels, I discovered another world. A world far from Earth. This world is much like ours, only… good. Free of monsters and darkness. It is the light.
"Which brings me to the true reason why you have been chosen. You are not like other children. Like Meg, you’re special. You have dormant power in here. [Touches own temple] And I believe if we work together, we can awaken those powers, channel our energy and draw this new world to ours. And as the light reaches the darkness, the light will expel the darkness, your loved ones will be saved, and you… you will be heroes.”
He raises his left hand when he says “the light”, and his right when he says “the darkness”—then he laces his fingers together.
That does imply that the two worlds will merge, as Will inexplicably stated.
Vecna’s left hand is the one the Mind Flayer first infected. It’s the one he uses to kill. We can infer from this detail that what Vecna calls the light and the darkness are inverted: and that when they merge, the darkness will extinguish the light.
So after Will brings up the idea of a merger—which he shouldn’t know about at all—he then goes on a wild tangent, and introduces the idea of Vecna making rifts to weaken the Abyss.
… boy, where the hell did that come from?
To weaken Hawkins with rifts, Vecna needed to ritualistically murder four people. Was he ritualistically murdering Demogorgons in the Abyss for 18 months?
Nobody questions this mad logical leap, or how the hell Will could possibly know any of that, or even where he got that idea.
The conversation continues to devolve rapidly for two more lines: Dustin chimes in with the logical conclusion of what Will was saying (that Hawkins and the Abyss become one) and El hammers in the final nail by interpreting that Vecna is physically remaking the world.
The conversation continues on from there about the timing of this event, and how to get into the Abyss. The rifts—which Will shouldn’t know about—form the foundation of Operation Beanstalk, as Steve notes they can climb up the radio tower until it “pokes through one of the rifts”.
Also note that it’s not until they arrive at the Upside Down WSQK in 5.8 that the Abyss is first called a “planet”, by Lucas. Up until that point it’s exclusively called either a “dimension” or a “world”.
Holly, Max, and Mike’s uncareful planetary phrasing kicked off this spiral into assuming Vecna’s plan was to weaken, crash, and merge some physical world/planet that is the Abyss into the physical world of Hawkins/Planet Earth—
—but it was Will who grabbed this miscommunication and ran with it.
The debrief scene devolves into a chain of everyone rephrasing the contributions of the person before them, grasping at others’ interpretations of the evidence, and making unfounded leaps of pseudo-logic.
(Which, frankly, sounds very familiar, having observed our fandom post-5.8.)
So the obvious question is:
In the debrief scene… is Will trustworthy?
Just before the derailing of this scene, Will made a comment that sounds a hell of a lot more like something Vecna would think and say than something Will Byers would think and say; not least because the first time we heard it, it was Vecna saying it to Will.
Vecna: “Can you see them, William? Can you see the children? Do you know why? Why I chose them to reshape the world? It’s because they are weak. Weak in body and mind. Easily broken. Easily reshaped. Controlled. The perfect vessels.”
Will: “For the same reason he took me. The minds of children are weaker, right? More easily molded and controlled. So he channelled his thoughts and powers through me to amplify his abilities and he’s gonna do the same with those kids.”
But Will doesn’t attribute this mentality to Vecna—he says it as if he believes it to be true.
As if he expects the others to agree with him, even!
And… nobody refutes Will’s statement about kids being weak-minded. Mike even nods along when Will says “right?”, then looks a little pensive or confused when Will continues to talk about molding or controlling kids’ minds.
Mike’s is the only reaction to this bizarre statement that we see.
That is… pretty weird, considering Will is talking to a group half-comprised of people who were or are children with incredibly strong minds and wills.
What gives?
Hide in the light
In the previous episode, 5.6, we saw Will returned to the site of a traumatic event from his first kidnapping—the prologue in 5.1, the effects of which on Will we still do not fully understand—before he is psychologically and psychically tortured by Vecna.
Possibly tortured for information, but possibly tortured for another purpose—since the information about where Max is seems… incredibly obvious.
But it’s certainly implied that what Vecna wanted from Will was Max’s location. Will taunts Vecna about Max escaping, then Vecna says there are ways to smoke a fox from its den, then tells Will he is going to help him.
That particular scene breaks there, with the camera ducking away to the left as Vecna assaults Will. Before El finds Will, though, there’s another brief scene that begins with an exact reversal of how the previous one ended, with the camera peeking back out to the right from where it seemed to hide before. We see flashes of what looks like Will’s Demo-vision, and flashes of Will’s memory of Max’s hospital room, and Will says Max’s name.
Then, after El has found Will, we see what appears to be a flashback of what happened when Vecna tortured Will: flashes of Will’s memory of Max’s hospital room, Vecna saying “Found you”, and then, in the next scene, the Demodogs go after Max in the hospital.
El: “Vecna’s going to kill Max. We have to get to the hospital right now.”
(But El, Hopper, and Mike going to the hospital achieved absolutely nothing. By the time they got there, Max was not only saved, but finally awake. So what was the point of this?)
In 5.7, Will tells Joyce about what happened when Vecna tortured him:
Will: “When Vecna attacks, he weakens you by turning your own mind against you, by bringing out everything inside you that hurts. So I fought back by focusing on happy memories, memories from when I was a kid, and when I wasn’t scared, and when I felt most happy. That’s how I took control in the MAC-Z, and how I killed those Demos. And I thought the same would work on Vecna too. But he found a way past.”
… so what if Vecna’s, “Found you” in 5.6 wasn’t about finding Max in the hospital in Will's memories—but about finding Will, even though he tried to hide in his happy memories?
Just like Vecna found Max in 4.9, even though she tried to hide in her happy memories.
In 4.8, Max tells Lucas:
Max: “He uses my memories against me. But… only my darkest memories. Same with Chrissy and Fred, right? It’s like he only sees the darkness in us. So, I’ll just run in the opposite direction. Run to the light. And maybe he won’t be able to find me there. […] I just need to… push him away. Find a happy memory and hide there. Hide in the light.”
That aligns almost exactly with what Will said to Joyce in 5.7.
Will did the same thing as Max: he tried to hide from Vecna in the light—but we already know that doesn’t work.
Like Max in S4, he was found.
Vecna (4.9): “You are brave, Maxine. Much braver than your brother. But in the end… you are weak and fragile just like him. Like all the rest of them. And you will break.”
(I saw someone note that when Will’s memories are recapped in 5.7, they’re truncated: we don’t see any of the three memories we saw of Mike and Joyce in 5.4, and we don’t see Will drawing his rainbow ship or Castle Byers. The only memories we see in the recap are Will with Jonathan while they build Castle Byers, and little Will in the woods in his wizard costume.
These omissions could suggest that Will no longer has access to those particular missing memories… though it could just be that those happened to be the only ones the editors chose for a recap... odd choices, though.)
After Max failed to hide from Vecna in the light, in happy memories, she ended up (literally dying and then) becoming trapped in Camazotz, Henry’s prison…
… in Vecna’s mind.
So what happened to Will? As far as we know, Vecna just left him there for El to rescue. He left him alive again, just like he did in the MAC-Z in 5.4.
But if all Vecna wanted from Will—his spy—was Max’s location, why leave Will alive once he has that location?
After the torture scene, Vecna also left Will with this echoing thought:
Vecna: “You are going to be my spy one last time.”
Will thinks about this moment twice more after the fact: once right before he wakes up in El’s lap, and the other while he’s ruminating in Hopper’s cabin… meaning we the audience are reminded of this line twice, which seems like overkill for something that we already know the purpose and outcome of…
… if the purpose was for Vecna to find and kill Max.
And note I said “reminded of this line,” because one of them isn’t a perfect repetition:
Vecna, over a black screen: “You are going to spy for me one last time.”
Yes, Will is probably thinking back to the last time he was Vecna’s spy, considering the conversation he subsequently has with his mother. But while taunting him, Vecna explicitly told Will:
Vecna: “You were my vessel. My spy. My builder.”
Yet the line we hear repeated is, “You are going to [be my spy/spy for me] one last time”.
It’s not the references to the past we hear repeated, it’s the line about the future.
As if it is yet to come.
Furthermore, while Vecna is taunting Will (but before the psychic torture begins), he claims that his own powers are much stronger then ever before. Then we see clips of Vecna’s real body in the Spider Flayer, under the beating heart—
—and also this shot of the rifts spreading across the underside of the Abyss…
… which happens to be the exact same shot as the one we see when Will mentions these rifts during the debrief in 5.7.
Did Vecna plant that idea about the rifts weakening the Abyss in Will’s mind?
In that scene of the “debrief” that went totally off the rails—thanks mostly to Will’s wild conjecture—is Will Vecna’s spy, his mole?
Is he intentionally feeding the group misinformation in order to send them on a wild goose chase?
It wouldn’t be the first time—as we were reminded in the barn scene in 5.4. The lines Will says about the chamber from his vision almost exactly match what he said about the hub/chamber in the tunnels in 2.6: The Spy—when he was definitely possessed and definitely a spy, and led the soldiers into a death trap.
(I talked about this more in On unreliable narration: possession, the fourth wall, and you 🫵)
Note also that Dustin’s comment at the debrief is interestingly phrased:
Dustin: “They become one.”
In the barn in 5.4:
Will: “His real name is Henry.”
Robin: “AKA Vecna.”
Erica: “AKA One.”
Derek: “That’s too many names.”
Why is it interesting that Dustin says the two worlds will become [one of Vecna’s many names]?
Because of what else Vecna has told us about his plans.
A new world
In the 5.6 torture scene, Vecna tells Will:
Vecna: “Now, at last, it is time. Time for my vessels to lead us to a new world. A better world.”
… That does not sound like a plan to merge worlds to me.
It sounds like a plan to travel somewhere.
But let’s backtrack to the other time in S5 when Vecna talked more comprehensively about his plans: also to Will, at the MAC-Z.
In 5.4, Vecna comes through the MAC-Z gate in person to murder all the soldiers protecting the kids, pick up his lightly toasted Demogorgons, command them again to capture the kids, and to fuck with Will—
—but ultimately, he leaves Will alive (to discover his own power over the hive mind).
Why did Vecna leave Will alive?
Lucas (5.2): “Vecna doesn’t leave things unfinished. He doesn’t hold back.”
The obvious conclusion is that Vecna has a purpose for Will…
… and it’s not helping him find Max. The only reason Vecna was able to torture Will in 5.6 was because Will attacked Vecna first. Vecna took advantage of that, and commented on Will having “much power within him”—but Will actually fighting back like he did in 5.5 took Vecna by surprise.
He can’t have left Will alive so that he could later torture Max’s location out of him.
(And I remind you that we still don’t know for sure what “beautiful things” Vecna said he and Will would do together in the 5.1 prologue—was he just talking about building the tunnels that... ultimately achieved very little in both S2 and S5?)
So... what does Vecna do and say to Will about his plans in 5.4?
First he levitates Will to him, exactly like he levitated El to him in 4.9, before telling her he wanted her to watch him kill Max.
This is what he says to Will in 5.4:
Vecna: “Can you see them, William? Can you see the children? Do you know why? Why I chose them to reshape the world? It’s because they are weak. Weak in body and mind. Easily broken. Easily reshaped. Controlled. The perfect vessels.
“And you… Will. You were the first. And you broke so easily. You showed me what was possible. What I could achieve. Some minds, it turns out, simply do not belong in this world. They belong in mine.” [Touches own temple]
Firstly, note that what Vecna is doing is stoking Will’s feelings of guilt: “I have taken these innocent children because of you.”
And it works—at the start of 5.5 we see Will stewing in the memory of Vecna saying this to him, and then (after hugging his mom and Mike) his immediate reaction to his own powers is:
Will: “The kids. Vecna… he’s got the kids. […] The others, they didn’t make it out of Hawkins. I could have helped them fight if I had just acted sooner. But I was too late. And now he’s got all of them. All 12. We failed. I failed.”
And after Vecna tortures Will in 5.6, what is Will’s reaction in 5.7?
Will: “That’s why, out of everyone in Hawkins, he chose me. Because he knew I was weak and he knew he could control me. […] I was his vessel. A vessel to channel his powers, to spy, and… and to build. The tunnels. […] So many died because of me. And if I could do all of that, what could he do with 12 more like me? […] You’re wrong. You’re wrong, Mom. It’s my fault.”
Guilt: for being too weak to resist Vecna’s control, for getting people killed, for getting the kids kidnapped—and pre-emptive guilt for whatever Vecna does with the kidnapped kids.
In S4, Max says Vecna’s victims were seeing visions of bad things from their pasts (4.4), and we know that both Fred and Max, at least, were targeted at least in part because of their feelings of guilt—Fred for the car accident, and Max over Billy (for wishing he would “disappear”, for not doing anything to save him from the Meat Flayer, for being relieved that he died).
Secondly, when Vecna targets Will after the MAC-Z fight, he tells Will that he doesn’t belong in this world—he belongs in Vecna’s world.
… in Vecna’s mind.
And we already know that all of Vecna’s victims end up in his mind, making him more powerful. This is true of the kids in S5—who all end up trapped in Camazotz, Henry’s mind prison—and of all the people he killed in S4, and even further back.
As he said to El in 4.7:
Henry: “With each life I took, I grew stronger. More powerful. They were becoming a part of me. […] They’re not gone, Eleven. They’re still with me. In here.” [Touches own temple]
Given all that, I don’t know about you, but it sure sounds to me like Vecna’s plan is about mental worlds, not physical worlds.
If he’s “merging” anything, he’s bringing people into his mind—not crashing the Abyss into Hawkins.
