It’s over. We greeted the dawn of 2026 between tears of emotion, while the credits of Stranger Things rolled for the last time, in the form of a comic adventure for the role-playing game created, presumably, by the narrator Mike, and we said goodbye to our friends from ’80s Hawkins with almost all the answers we had been looking for for almost ten years. Almost all of them, because there are at least five issues that aren’t exactly explained in the epic finale of this series that made Netflix’s fortune. We mark them here, with the hope that in the days, months and years to come the Duffers or someone else will give us the information we are looking for.
- Who opened the lock on the shed where Will was hiding in season 1?
- What happened to Dr. Sam Owens?
- What happened to Terry Ives, the mother of 11?
- Who gave orders to Kay? Reagan?
- Why don’t Joyce and Hopper ever talk about when they were friends with Henry?
1) Who opened the lock on the shed where Will was hiding in the first season?
This is the most… inexplicable lack of explanation, in fact. Because Matt and Ross Duffer had explicitly ensured that we would have an answer to this question that the most attentive fans have been asking themselves for years and years. Will was kidnapped by a Demogorgon, we also saw him again at the beginning of the fifth season, but Demogorgons do not have telekinetic powers, so it is not known who moved, without touching it, the locking mechanism that Will had activated from inside the shed. It wasn’t Vecna, because he sent a Demogorgon, but then who was? There was even the hypothesis that the ending would show us that it was 11, knowingly or not, who got him into trouble, perhaps looking for a refuge to hide. But even now, the question remains unanswered.
2) What happened to Dr. Sam Owens?
Dr. Owens had appeared in the second season, at the beginning he simply seemed like the “new Brenner”, but then not only did we discover that Brenner had miraculously survived the attack of the Demogorgon in the first season, but we gradually began to trust Owens, whose sincere and affectionate interest we got to know about 11 and the Hawkins boys.
In the fourth season he was precisely the positive and human counterpart of the ruthless revived Brenner, then the two teamed up to help 11 regain his powers through a full immersion (literally) training in the secret laboratory in Nevada.
When 11 decided to return to Hawkins, Brenner prevented Owens from helping her, breaking their alliance, then the situation worsened when Colonel Sullivan attacked the laboratory to take 11. Brenner died once and for all in the attack, but Owens was completely lost. Should we imagine him dead? Killed “off screen”? We expected a better end for the only good scientist in the series.
3) What happened to Terry Ives, the mother of 11?
The mother of 11 has also all but disappeared from the series without a trace since season two. 11 has mentioned her a couple of times since then, the last time in the fifth season when Kali revealed to her that they were conducting new experiments on blood transfusion “with powers” to pregnant women, but it is not known what happened to Terry, and with her her sister Becky, from the moment 11 left after hearing Aunt Becky talking to the Hawkins police.
We discovered Henry’s blood transfusions which transmitted his powers to 11, and thus those who hypothesized that Henry could even be the father of 11, whose identity remains shrouded in mystery, were proven wrong. But otherwise, Terry’s fate is unknown, as are the reasons why 11 never tried to contact her or Becky again, either by telephone or telepathically. Jane wasn’t exactly a good daughter to poor Terry.
4) Who gave orders to Kay? Reagan?
An unsolved mystery also concerns the ferocious Doctor Kay, a dark character introduced in the fifth season and entrusted to Linda “Sarah Connor of Terminator” Hamilton.
Who were your superiors that you briefly mentioned at one point? With all that deployment of military forces stationed in the Upside Down while the official version remained that of more or less natural disasters until the end, it can be assumed that the orders came from very high up. Perhaps directly from the president of the USA at the time, Ronald Reagan (“the actor?” as Doc Emmett Brown would say)?
We don’t know, we have to make do with the fact that there was someone, probably in the Deep State, capable of moving vehicles and men (and pregnant women) in total freedom, with the sole aim of defeating a decadent and close to dissolving Soviet Union.
There were those who had hypothesized that Kay, thanks to her interpreter’s experience on the subject, could be an 11 (“Kappa is the eleventh letter of the alphabet” was the main proof) coming from the future to solve everything: it didn’t stand up, as a theory, but at least it was an explanation, which the series instead didn’t give.
5) Why do Joyce and Hopper never talk about when they were friends with Henry?
In fact, there were many fan theories that, while fascinating, were too imaginative and bizarre to be correct.
In partial defense of those who formulated them (including us), however, it can rightly be said that the Duffers had strewn the entire territory of Hawkins and Dimension X and the Upside Down Bridge with traps and false clues. They even set up a whole theater show for us, to fool us. They told us that The First Shadow was “canon”, that is, what the show that was staged in New York and London was about had also happened in the world of the series.
Despite some discrepancies regarding Henry’s age (a few years older in the play than what is seen in the TV series, particularly in the fourth season, but in Stranger Things the age is variable), this was confirmed indirectly with the correspondence of the memory of the cave, also told at the theatre, and directly with the memory, seen twice, of the theater show directed by the young Joyce and which was staged on 6 November 1959.
Maybe we took it personally, because we had noticed that date and were sure that it couldn’t be a coincidence, but from this point of view, the ending of Stranger Things leaves a significant plot hole.
Because we really don’t understand why the series totally ignores the past acquaintance between Henry and the parents of our young heroes, from Joyce to Hopper, from the Wheelers to all the others.
Why do Joyce and Hopper never talk about when they were in high school, about that play, or even when Henry warned Joyce that she would have to fight to protect her loved ones, as seen in The First Shadow?
“You stay away from my son,” Joyce told Vecna at the beginning of season five, when they had a face-to-face meeting. And that’s it. No “We were friends once”, no “do you remember our show?”, Joyce never calls him Henry even when she talks about him in the third person. The good Will, when he sees the meeting between the little innocent Henry and the scientist with the briefcase in the cave, shows signs of empathy in a second and tries to leverage his good heart, even if he fails. His old school friends, however, nothing, as if they didn’t know him.
We certainly can’t say that this lack ruined the ending of Stranger Things, but it’s certainly the one that leaves the most bitter taste in our mouths.
