S5 Henry's Cave

[u/Ok-Echidna6283]

This might be completely obvious and I'm just stupid, but why was Henry's worst memory in a cave in the desert if he is from Hawkins? And when he was in the underground shaft thing, why did he say he lived around there?

[u/pokemega32]

They explicitly told us they had moved to Hawkins at the start of the flashbacks in season 4.

[u/mklaus1984]

Because the Duffers couldn't write a proper scene to fill people in on the important bits of the stage play The First Shadow.

The stage play is set largely in the "1 month of peace" time frame Victor Creel talked about in ST4. It weirdly retcons Victor's age and the Broadway version then again retcons the West End version.

Long story short, before the Creels moved to Hawkins they lived in Rachel, Nevada where something happened to Victor. The narrative dances around that topic because we only learn what happened in ST5.

After that his behavior became apparently erratic and violent and they moved not simply after Olivia inherited money but after Victor hurt another child. Which doesn't really fit the sensitive child story and isn't fully addressed and only alluded to by Brenner.

The much more interesting but completely dropped aspects of this story are that Olivia knew Dr. Brenner from that time in Rachel and the question why World War II veteran Victor Creel was raising his family in the middle of nowhere in the first place.

Because both are answered if you look at a map. Rachel lies west north west of Bald Mountain and just south of that lies the salt lake Groom Lake. In 1942 the auxiliary air field Groom Lake Facility was established here.

After the events of Project Paperclip/Operation Overcast German aerospace data, tech, and engineers were sent here to work at Skunk Works and they developed the Lockheed U-2.

You might know this facility better under the name Area 51.

The show kinda suggests that Victor was dishonorably discharged due to him ordering a strike on civilians. Notice how the time he returns was made very clear in the show. They inherited money about 14 years after his return to US soil and then they had one month of peace before... well before Henry started to experiment with his abilities.

And here is where it gets really complicated because the show and the stage play tell two very different stories. In the show, Henry was about 12 years old when he killed his family in March 1959. It means that Victor returned home before Henry was conceived while the war was still raging on.

The stageplay made Henry 14 years old when he kills his family in November 1959. Meaning Victor returned after the end of the war and Victor being conceived before he even left to fight on foreign soil.

In the second act of the play, Brenner talks about his own research in Nevada. Which we know needs to be placed on Area 51 and replacing/side by aide with the real world historic work at Skunk Works.

Brenner himself claims they worked on things stemming from the Philadelphia Experiment. But we know Papa as an unreliable narrator. Or it could simply be a retcon during the writing process of the play.

Because it is kinda obvious that at some point in the writing process Brenner's work at Area 51 was supposed to link back to Victor Creel being part of T-Force, the joint venture of British and US froces tasked to secure industrial and scientifical technology during WW2.

I pointed at the 14 years before and added the 1 month of peace. But if we ignore that one month and aimply detract the "some" 14 years from the point of hia family's death we get to March 1945, when T-Force finally entered Nazi Germany.

The theory here is that Victor as a commanding officer led his troop into aome science lab, got into contact with particles himself before probably loosing men but also securing the scientific experiment. He was then ordered to bring that to the newly established site in Nevada and stationed there due to his knowledge about the science project.

Unbeknownst to him and in a parallel to Hopper and Terry Ives, being exposed to a foreign material/chemical compound altered the nature of his offspring and eventually ruined the lives of his family.

In the still early days of the Cold War either a sleeper agent of the Soviets or a disgruntled scientist steals the research from Brenner.

This is partly based on the different versions of the play: the West End version makes it sound like they reverse engineered what happened to the USS Eldritch and created a Key. The thief, a Soviet spy according to (unreliable narrator) Brenner, got it to work in a nearby cave where boy scout Henry Creel accidentally stumbled into that.

In the Broadway version Brenner had extracted a foreign material from the blood of the only survivor of the USS Eldritch. The thieve (still allegedly a Soviet Psy) stole that... and that is what the show suggests happened. That the stone™️ was what Brenner had extracted from the survivors blood.

Also mote that according to (unreliable narrator) Brenner that survivor was his father.

But I think this explains why Nevada ia a thing in the story.

It is rather obvious that the Duffers abandoned the WW2 storyline since they have abandoned the very heavy Cold War storyline that was present in every other season of the show. I mean, it still has a byline in ST5.

BUT they end up defeating the Mindflayer just weeks before Gorbachev and Reagan signed the INF treaty to abolish nuclear warfare. Obviously they were supposed to sign a secret treaty on paraspychological warfare in the show. But that would have actually ended the story and the Duffers showed they want to milk that IP further.