After years of theories, debates, and half-answers, Stranger Issues Season 5 Quantity 2 lastly explains the Upside Down and what it’s really been this complete time. What as soon as regarded like a shadow model of Hawkins seems to be one thing much more harmful, unstable, and vital to how the story ends.
When Stranger Issues first launched the Upside Down, it felt like a parallel dimension. A twisted mirror world that existed alongside our personal. Season 5 Quantity 2 makes it clear that assumption was incorrect.
The Upside Down isn’t a separate world in any respect… it’s a wormhole. Dustin lastly places a reputation to it by calling it an interdimensional bridge, a risky passage connecting Hawkins to a far older and extra hostile realm often known as the Abyss.
The Upside Down doesn’t exist by itself. It solely exists as a result of the bridge exists. On the heart of that bridge is unique matter, unstable by nature, barely holding the construction collectively.
What characters thought had been bodily areas contained in the Upside Down had been really moments of journey by way of the wormhole itself. Holly’s terrifying fall by way of the Upside Down sky isn’t her shifting by way of a panorama. She’s slipping by way of the bridge whereas it destabilizes round her.
Season 5 confirms that the Abyss predates every thing. Lengthy earlier than Hawkins had gates or rifts, the Abyss already existed and was already crawling with hostile life. When Eleven banished Henry Creel in the course of the 1979 Hawkins Lab incident, she despatched him into that historical realm. That’s the place he encountered the Thoughts Flayer and the place his transformation into Vecna really started.
The Upside Down didn’t come into existence till November 6, 1983. When Eleven made psychic contact with the Demogorgon, she unknowingly created the bridge between Hawkins and the Abyss.
That second shaped the Upside Down as a warped reflection of the actual world. A passage, a transit area formed by Hawkins as a result of that’s what the bridge was anchored to.
This revelation additionally clears up one of many present’s longest-running mysteries. Not one of the monsters originated within the Upside Down. Vecna, the Thoughts Flayer, and each creature tied to the hive thoughts got here from the Abyss. The Upside Down was merely the hall they used to maneuver between realms earlier than tearing open gates into the actual world.
The Duffer Brothers confirmed to Selection, “It wasn’t referred to as the Abyss at that time; it was referred to as Dimension X, which is a Ninja Turtle reference.” Additionally they strengthened that Eleven was the catalyst behind all of it, the one who unknowingly constructed the bridge that allowed every thing to cross over.
By reframing the Upside Down as a fragile wormhole as a substitute of a world, Stranger Issues Season 5 Quantity 2 sharpens the stakes heading into the endgame.
