The ‘Stranger Things’ Prequel Play Is The Roadmap to Season 5 – Inside ‘The First Shadow’s’ Biggest Reveals And Fan Theories
By Erin Whitten
It’s rare that a stage play completely can contextualize a television series, but Stranger Things: The First Shadow has done just that. This prequel to Stranger Things, which ran in the West End earlier this year, has added decades of crucial history, and tripled the size of the supernatural sandbox long before the Upside Down was ever seen. Set in 1959 it’s focused on younger versions of Joyce, Hopper, Bob, and more, but also several new characters. To understand the unexplained mysteries from the end of Season 4 and to predict what Season 5 will do, it’s necessary to first understand all the pieces Stranger Things: The First Shadow added.
Before we even get into the mind-melting implications of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, we have to talk about the moment that sent the entire fandom spiraling… Gabriella Nevaeh… Patty Newby herself hopping on TikTok to say, “omg I love this question – no spoilers, but our play is definitely a must-see if you want insight on Season Five of Stranger Things‼️” NOW as I was saying….
The government was involved long before Brenner.
The number one surprise from the stage play was the revelation that Brenner did not create the numbered children program. Dr. Brenner, played by Jonathan Whitesell in the stage production, was not its originator. The program is much older, with experiments stretching back to the early 1940s and the incident aboard the USS Eldridge. Brenner’s father was the sole survivor of the ship’s accidental transport to Dimension X, and his changed biology was the selling point that got the US government to fund new supernatural research efforts. In other words, Brenner is not so much the architect of these efforts as he is their heir who was cruel and ambitious enough to push it further than it had ever gone before.
This recontextualizes Hawkins Lab as one chapter in a much longer and wider-running operation and opens the doors for Season 5 and any potential spin-offs. If Brenner inherited the program, it means other scientists, agencies, or secret government branches may also still be at large. Stranger Things has always heavily implied a larger conspiracy at work, but this finally gives it a concrete basis. For the first time, the show also suggests Brenner may not have been the real person at the top of the chain in terms of Eleven, Henry, and the experiments that set all of Hawkins ablaze, he may just have been the most visible.
Dimension X as the true source of psychic power.
The play makes it explicit that Dimension X predates the Upside Down and is where the Mind Flayer is from. It is also where both Brenner’s father and Henry Creel briefly went, and where their DNA was altered. THIS IS HUGE!!!!!! For the entire series, psychic abilities were implied to be the product of mutations, experiments, and science fiction tropes like accelerated human evolution, but Dimension X as the point of origin rewrites everything. It suggests that these abilities are not a mutation, not the product of experiments gone awry, and not even the product of human evolution. It suggests that they are the biological residue left on humans after being exposed to a dimension ruled by an ancient, parasitic intelligence.
This is the biggest direct feeding into a major Season 5 theory: that the Upside Down is not the point of origin for anything. It’s more like a shell or a construct. It may have been a “preserved moment” shaped later by Henry, but it has its roots in whatever Dimension X first birthed from the dark recesses of the multiverse. If the Mind Flayer truly comes from this much older realm, that means Henry’s corruption was seeded long before Brenner ever put him in the sensory deprivation tank. Henry isn’t just dangerous because of his trauma and his cruelty: he is the first known human whose biology has been partially rewritten by another dimension.
This distinction is important because it dramatically shifts the narrative away from being the story about a superpowered psychic boy who got corrupted by his upbringing and became evil and moves it much closer to actual cosmic horror. Henry becomes a bridge — the first successful, living conduit for a being that has been trying to find a way to enter our world. And he may not be the last.
Patty Newby’s death as Henry’s tragic breaking point.
The First Shadow is heavily focused on Henry’s relationship with Patty Newby, Bob’s adopted sister. Patty is the first person who ever truly looks past Henry’s differences, and the only one who does not fear his powers or make them the center of their relationship. Patty is how we see that Henry could have been saved, and that deep down, he did at one time want a connection, he did want companionship, and he did want a normal life. Between the Mind Flayer’s growing influence, mounting pressure and fear from his family, and Brenner, Henry eventually reaches a breaking point that he can no longer control.
Patty’s death is heavily implied to be the result of a Mind Flayer-induced episode, but it is not murder in the traditional sense. It is instead the moment that Henry fully fractures, the emotional trauma that snaps the last threads of humanity he has left. It’s the final straw that allows the entity from Dimension X to take over Henry completely. Joyce, who is Patty’s best friend, is deeply traumatized by her death, and the wounds are visibly written into the person she becomes several decades later. The collapse of the Creel family, Joyce’s ongoing mental deterioration, Bob’s wounds, and Brenner’s subsequent obsession all have their origins in this moment. Patty, despite never having appeared on the show at all, becomes one of the most important characters in the Stranger Things mythos.
Was Vecna ever truly in control?
Season 4 very much paints Vecna as the true puppet master pulling the strings, and the mastermind to all the show’s terrors of the show’s monsters. Stranger Things: The First Shadow has major caveats to that assumption. The shadow entity of the title, an intelligence that rose in a dimension called Dimension X, exerts influence on Henry long before he ever discovers the Upside Down, and it’s given physical, visual form in the stage play as the Mind Flayer. The Mind Flayer is the entity making physical appearances in visions and episodes where Henry loses time and agency and control. Henry’s early crimes are presented as moments of possession and not of volition.
This lines up almost perfectly with a hot take on Season 5 theories floating in the fanbase – that Vecna is not the general; he is the puppet. Vecna was Henry, but Henry was the vessel. The Mind Flayer is the ancient intelligence, the puppet master with the long game, and the one who has been searching for a way to enter our world. Henry’s intelligence, his will, and his trauma made him a perfect candidate, but he is still a vessel first and a Henry second. The first Shadow play explains why Vecna chose the form he did in Season 4, but it also teases that this was a purely aesthetic choice layered over something far older and far more alien.
Expect Season 5 to draw an even clearer line between Henry’s volition and the entity that has been riding inside him since childhood, and to then make separating the two the major arc. If the puppet master is the entity from Dimension X, separation may be the only way to defeat it, not through force, but by detaching the strings.
Could Max have traveled to Dimension X?
One of the many new ways of looking at Season 4 now that the play has reshaped the world is through Max’s near-death experience, the first time she was officially pronounced dead in the show. There are several clues in the Running Up That Hill sequence that are much more notable now that the show’s mythology has been expanded. For one, Vecna reacts to Max’s presence with alarm and confusion, asking what she is doing there, a moment that stands out on its own even before Season 4 was re-conceptualized by Stranger Things: The First Shadow. The entire landscape of the setting where Vecna encounters Max also lacks the telltale floating particulate that characterizes the Upside Down. It feels less like the Upside Down and more like something abstract, more ancient, more primordial. Fans have theorized that Max may have slipped into Dimension X without knowing it, via her psychological tethering to Vecna.
Henry and Brenner’s father both returned from that other realm with changed DNA and new latent powers. If this is the case for Max as well, her story becomes very different. Her resurrection in the finale was medically unexplainable. Her brain activity and cognitive profile are anomalous, and her ultimate fate was purposefully left on-the-table. Now that Dimension X has been established as the birthplace of psychic mutations, Max could come back in Season 5 as a changed person, in a biological or neurological sense, not unlike Henry, but on a smaller and more volatile scale. Whether that comes as full powers, enhanced sensitivity to the Mind Flayer, or a metaphysical connection with Vecna himself remains to be seen and the potential groundwork is now unmistakably there.
Will and the return of the original connection.
Max is not the only character now a strong contender to be given unexpected abilities, however. Will is still very much at the center, and Season 4 makes it crystal clear that he still senses Vecna, and the stage play very much confirms that that connection may not be to the Upside Down, but to Dimension X instead. If the entity’s consciousness has been looking for compatible vessels across time and space, Will’s sensitivity to it may be a sign of a latent imprint left on him by his time in the other world.
Will is also clearly being set up as a major player in Season 5. The first Shadow play adds to that by giving context to a moment that may be critical: Will could not just be sensing Vecna, he could be sensing the entity that used to hollow out Henry. The final battle against Vecna may depend on Will’s capacity to perceive the entity that Henry was never able to resist.
Using Hawkins history to defeat Vecna.
Season 4’s strongest arc after Joyce is Hopper and Joyce trying to uncover the animal killings from the early 1980s in Hawkins and mistakenly suspecting Victor Creel as the killer. The First Shadow play reveals that they in fact crossed paths with Henry himself as a teenager. Season 5 could use this as the emotional realization of the monster that they are chasing against is the monster that they know and have known for years. It’s a monster that they suspected but never really wanted to believe was responsible for the original killings. The monster that they’ve been chasing is not just a horror: it was once a lonely kid they saw at the mall once who had his life ripped apart by forces far larger than him.
This can set the stage for a confrontation that is just as psychological as it is physical. If Vecna is part victim, part vessel, the only way to actually defeat him may be to separate him from the entity behind him. Patty, Joyce’s past, and Henry’s own lost humanity may all become tools in an effort to break the ties between Vecna and the ancient entity controlling him.
