Film Theory: Will Eleven DIE? (Stranger Things Season 5 Predictions)

so i originally wanted to do an episode going through stranger things and calculating what level all the characters would be if they were a party in dungeons and dragons considering all the monsters they've beaten all the adventures they've gone on all the soviets they've outsmarted they've got to be getting up there in the levels right like level 15 at least so i busted out some old rule books for the ancient first edition advanced dnd that was around back when the show takes place and did some calculations and then i learned that basically no one has gotten anywhere apparently leveling up in classic dnd was just really hecking hard the only character that's done enough to level up throughout the entire show is hopper it turns out that beating up all those guards and soviets killing a horde of demogorgons and looting a whole freaking snowmobile added up just over one level's worth of xp just one level don't worry hop vector's only considered to be a demigod of greater power i have no doubt that a level 2 fighter can beat him [Music] hello internet welcome to film theory the show that's always running up that hill called the youtube algorithm today we're journeying into the upside down with all our favorite kids from hawkins indiana though can we even call them kids at this point how much time there is between seasons of this thing dustin over here is looking like he's ready to put a down payment on his first mortgage honestly though it's not just the kids who've grown up either it's wild to think just how much the stranger things franchise has grown since it first premiered i mean this thing started as a mid-budget homage to classic 80s movies and now it's got a budget that's larger than not only those cinematic classics but also modern day blockbusters seriously netflix spent 270 million dollars on stranger things season four compare that to the biggest movie of 2022 so far top gun maverick that thing had a budget of only 170 million how do you even afford that don't worry netflix has got themselves a plan you know they could have taken my advice from a previous episode but nah they've got a better idea they're betting the farm on a stranger things pop-up shop in paris so what sort of things do you think you can buy from stranger things the store wow look at all that specialty merch like trucker hats gotta be honest with you netflix something tells me that you might need to do a bit more than sell a few t-shirts to break even on this one now in case you've somehow missed one of the biggest streaming shows ever stranger things is the story of four nerdy friends five nerdy friends six seven eight netflix slow down it's no wonder the budget for this thing is so huge you're adding like three new ongoing main characters every season anyway every season the small football teams worth the nerds are tasked with trying to save themselves their hometown and the world from the upside down a dark mirror dimension full of spooky scary monsters but despite having more than enough warm bodies to throw at the nearest threat every season ultimately boils down to one character eleven a young girl with incredible psychic powers and terrible arts and crafts powers and for my visual aid i made a dirayama of our cabin oh yeah and sometimes some of them go to russia and stay there for way too long seriously you hadn't out written into the story why did you double down guys sorry just had to get that off my chest if you know you know anyway the newest season introduced us to basically the final boss of the whole show the bone-breakingly powerful vecna another powerful psychic coming from the same training program as 11. this guy is scary and he immediately makes a huge first impression but even more incredible is the fact that he's been teased in the series since episode one of season one notice the key turning right here yeah the big bad of season one is the demogorgon and that's not a psychic monster that right there has to be vectors doing also you got this clock noise that's heard before will enters the upside down how cool is that in the opening minutes we're teased about this guy who only appears a couple seasons later tldr here the show's been building to his reveal for a long time they even show that vecton has been the one actively controlling all the other monsters from the previous seasons in short this dude is a big deal which means that no matter how long you stand there with your arm outstretched 11 it ain't gonna work and we see this in the season's final episode despite being lit on fire shot point blank with a shotgun having parts of his hive mind severed and falling several stories out a window vecna escapes and he'll be back for the final season will makes that abundantly clear i can feel him and he's hurt he's hurting but he's still alive so what else can our lovable team of geeks do how do you kill this seemingly unkillable foe well i think that we actually have a blueprint for exactly how to beat this guy thanks to a little game called dungeons and dragons this tabletop rpg is obviously core to the lore of stranger things oh jesus we're so screwed if it's the demogorgon it's not the demogorgon an army of tropical that's charged into the chamber chocolates told you but i'm not sure many people realize just how influential it's been so today we're gonna look at the pieces stranger things is set up throughout the series and examine the lore of the franchise through the lens of d to tell you exactly what vecna's plan is and how they're ultimately gonna stop him spoiler alert our lovable gang from hawkins indiana are gonna have to make a couple horrible sacrifices to do it millie bobby brown the actress playing eleven she recently said in an interview that she wished that the show had more deaths well let me be the first to tell her she's gonna get them this next season in fact i have a strong suspicion as to who's gonna die next season and their deaths won't be completely pointless like eddie's sidenote loved eddie as a character it's cool and all that you got to do that epic guitar solo but seriously these guys are smarter than that they thought through their plan they could have just set up a tape to play on top of a speaker system and don't even get me started on the whole i need to buy them time thing no just no hashtag justice freddy he was too cool and too smart he deserved a better death okay rant over so can i predict the ending of a show whose ending hasn't even been written yet and likely won't air for at least another year and a half when mike is old enough to join aarp hop on your trailers friends today we're shredding some lore so first off just to be clear stranger things has made no effort to hide how much of its mythology is inspired by dungeons and dragons i mean all of its main monsters are straight up named after famous dnd enemies but names aren't the only thing that they borrow the basic concepts behind the d d monsters are also incorporated into the stranger things iterations think about it like that meme where you copy your friend's homework but you change it just enough so you won't get into trouble if you want an example just take a look at season three's mind flayer in the game mind flares are illiterate technical faced creatures from a different plane of existence that operate a hive mind telepathically controlling intelligent creatures as minions and reproducing via creepy slugs that infect the brains of host bodies now take a look at stranger things their mind flare is a hive mind check from a different plane of existence check that often takes the form of creatures with tentacles check it has the ability to control the minds of people like we see with billy check and the demogorgons controlled by the mind flare will reproduce with gross slugs that live in hosts like will check again and this pattern holds true for vechna too if you play dnd you knew that things were about to get serious the second they revealed the dude's name in the game vecna is a lich basically an absurdly powerful undead wizard he also holds the title master of the spider throne cool name terrible building material for a throne he's also the closest thing to a thanos that you're going to get in d d in one of the most famous vechna stories the adventure starts with him killing the council of eight collection of the strongest sorcerers in the entire world talk about making your presence known for a while the only parts of vekna that remained in the world of dnd were his eye and his hand and those alone were considered legendary artifacts with the ability to grant incredibly evil powers the long and short of all of this is while we can't look at d and d lore as a hard blueprint for exactly what's gonna happen we can use it as a sort of cheat sheet to get an idea of where the show might be headed to next so how does all of that map onto stranger things well as i just mentioned vecna is the true ruler of the upside down but he's not native to it he's actually a human boy named henry creel the very first child become part of the experiments where eleven honed her powers this in turn gave him the moniker one to kill him back now slash henry he might not be a powerful wizard but he is a powerful psychic he may not sit atop a spider throne but he does like spiders and just like dnd's vekna killed the other mages in the council of eight one in stranger things killed all the other powerful kids in the psychic experiments to start his story in fact eleven gets so angry in this moment that she basically tears him apart it's only once he's in the upside down that he's able to regain his strength in short henry is quite literally killed and then reborn in a lot of ways you could say that he's undead just like vecna the lich and remember the whole eye and hand being powerful artifact thing from d d while vector in the show is shown with one enlarged hand and is just oozing with eye imagery the parallels here are very clear and this is even looking past how stranger things as vector looks an awful lot like some incarnations of the d d character so a lot of that lines up really well and that naturally got me asking what else in vecna's dnd lore can we look at to figure out what the next season is going to do well most iterations of the character have one major goal to become a god vechna's been trying to do it for basically as long as he's been around and he's even succeeded in some dnd storylines that's also going to be vecna's goal in stranger things as one explains in season four imagine what we could do together we could re-shape the world we make it however we see fed he's likely going to do this by transporting a great deal of the upside down out into the real world if what nancy sees in her vague vision of the future is to be believed he showed me things that haven't happened yet there were so many monsters an army and they were coming into hawkins and this actually lines up with perhaps the most popular iteration of the character one that predates stranger things i'm talking about vecna's appearance as the villain from the massively popular dnd livestream critical role he wasn't really going to offer information anyway who are you standing by the doorway you see their arms crossed casually standing before you now before you bring it up yes critical role is independent from d d's publisher wizards of the coast but because of its popularity wizards frequently references the events of critical role as part of dnd canon in short the stories of critical role in their version of vechna are absolutely parts of the dnd canon that we can look at to chart the future of stranger things and in that story vecna bides his time building his power in a realm called the shadowfell a dark reflection of the real world often associated with spider gods dark reflections of the real world filled with spider-like things you say hmm in the end vecna teleports his entire army from the shadowfell out to the real world attacking a major city before the heroes stop him so i expect that stranger things is going to follow that basic outline as well but the bigger question is obviously not what he's gonna do but rather what do you do to stop him is there anything in the dnd lore that can tell us what our main characters need to do thankfully yes in fact the way to stop vecna is foundational to his lore you see one constant across every incarnation of the character is that he's betrayed by his right hand man the vampire lord cast the bloody hand in that is dead killed by cats so it was thought my friend so it was thought see vekna made the classic bad guy mistake of trusting another bad guy elevating coss and granting him a powerful magic weapon that would eventually come to be known as the sword of coss of course koss eventually uses this sword to cut off vecna's hand and rip out his eye before banishing him to another realm in the present day the sword of koss remains one of the only ways to destroy the remaining artifacts of ekna so clearly stranger things is gonna have their own iteration of costs in fact many online theorists think that they've already got a handle on who exactly the betrayer is gonna be so let's quickly talk about that in a mini morty we're gonna talk about a popular theory for just a minute that's why we call it a mini morty a popular theory that's been floating around the old reddits is that the late great eddie munson is gonna return as the show's iteration of koss according to them koss was most well known for using a sword just like eddie uses against the demobats during the final battle koss was a vampire lord creatures often associated with bats and eddie was killed by a swarm of demobats plus the choice of metallica's master of puppets as the song that eddie rocks out to could be foreshadowing that he'll be risen as coss under vecna's control they specifically point to lyrics like master of puppets i'm pulling your strings twisting your mind and smashing your dreams and while i think i made it clear earlier just how much i'd love to see eddie get some well-deserved justice i just don't think the parallels here make a lot of sense first off yeah eddie uses a sword i guess but there's nothing special about that particular sword if anything eddie's guitar was his much more iconic weapon you could say that he's much more of a bard character who uses an axe secondly well yeah he did die to demo bats steve also got bit real bad by the bats so the connection isn't just with eddie finally the lyrical connection between master of puppets and vekna is really cool but the show runners made it clear that eddie's guitar solo wasn't originally planned all they knew was that eddie was just gonna distract the demobats in some way they didn't know how the concert angle wasn't pitched until very late in the writing process after the main beats of the story including eddie's death had already been set in stone master of puppets was also chosen after the scene was conceived partially because the lyrics which described drug addiction not only matched up so well with vechna but also eddie's past as a drug dealer do i think that eddie might come back reincarnated or as a vision in some way sure especially considering how popular he was this season but do i think that he's costs and will bring down vecna no the biggest reason for that actually has nothing to do with bats or swords i think that there's already a far better candidate for koss one that's already completed part of the thematic arc for the character within d and d lore 11. yeah i know shocking revelation that the main character might have the best shot at beating the main villain but who else did you expect see one was the person that encouraged eleven to embrace her powers taking her on as his right-hand man in that way it's his encouragement that ultimately helps her find herself in our dnd comparison that parallels the way vecna uplifted koss and gave him his sword one even offers l a place at his side when he reveals his plan to take over the world again like their d d counterparts however just like vecna was betrayed by kos 11 betrays one by using her powers her sword to rip open the very first portal into the upside down throwing one inside just like coss banished vecna so true to form it's clear that this is the direction that they're taking with eleven and even if taking down vecna is gonna be a team effort from the full cast l and her powers are absolutely the sort of cost that's going to be needed to deliver the final blow but there's one final piece to our puzzle here like i said when we first introduced the d d bad guy vekna's a lich and the thing about liches is that they're undead they sacrifice their humanity for immortality ripping their souls out of their bodies and putting them into magical objects called phylacteries as long as the lich's phylactery remains intact they literally cannot die think of a phylactery like a horcrux from harry potter now just like other dnd concepts borrowed by stranger things i don't think the show's vecna literally ripped his soul out of his body and put it into a baseball or whatever but with vecna coming back next season despite being lit on fire shot point-blank with a shotgun and falling several stories out of a window think it's safe to say that he may have himself some phylacteries lying around so if the hawkins gang want to put an end to vecna once and for all they're gonna have to find that phylactery and destroy it sadly d d lore is very secretive about what exactly their vechna uses as his phylactery so we're not going to be able to find a clean equivalent within stranger things but that doesn't mean that we can't figure it out in fact i think what vecna's phylactery is on the show is kinda obvious we already know that vecna's connected to the mind flare's hive mind and that when he kills people with his powers they join that hive mind and increases strength they're not gone eleven they're still with me likewise when something like a demogorgon dies vecna is weakened so it would make sense that 11 and the others would need to destroy that hive mind to weaken vecna so he can be defeated there's just one problem with that there's someone else that's tapped into the hive mind will byers ever since he was trapped in the upside down in season one will has had some sort of a connection to the realm to the mind flair and now to vechna he begins seeing glimpses of it in the real world he begins to draw the same spidery shape that vecna was obsessed with when he was a child more explicitly in season two vekna and the mind flare use will as a vessel possessing his body and puppeteering him like a marionette and since then will can feel vecna he senses when he's in pain or when he's nearby in the upside down and that means that will is likely a major part of that phylactery that'll need to be destroyed in order to kill vecna it also provides an added layer of bookending to know that the series started with a season-long mission to keep will alive but will end with a season-long mission that requires the team to kill him and honestly this is just a brilliant setup for a beautifully tragic storyline eleven has been welcomed into the buyer's family as one of their own an adopted daughter they love eleven and eleven loves them and now she has to go and kill her own adopted brother but of course will's not gonna be alone in this there's a very real possibility that we're gonna lose a lot of our beloved idiots remember that vision of the future that vekna showed mike's sister nancy while parts of it have already explicitly come true he showed me a dark cloud spreading over hawkins downtown on fire but the vision didn't stop there for nancy he showed me my mom holly mike that's right if other parts of that foretelling come true mike is likely going to eat it next season as well which will destroy everyone who loves him as they made explicitly clear this season mike is the leader he's the heart of the team see how you're leading us here you're guiding the whole party and inspiring us and see your coat of arms here it's it's hard that's what holds this whole party together heart so what better way for vecna to strike than by ripping out the heart by killing off the one character that gave 11 the boost that she needed to overcome him here's the way that i see it all going down the team realizes that will is the final phylactery the thing that's keeping vecna alive and that he has to die by eleven's hand her power her sword of course except there's one problem she can't do it will and her are like brother and sister he's the one person who understands her it's gonna be okay it's not that bad we'll fix it together okay however mike and the rest of the family are killed during the final battle dealing critical emotional damage to both will and eleven enraged and devastated eleven does what she has to do she turns and kills will the boy that everyone on the show has been trying to keep alive since the very first episode and this is the final act that allows vecna to finally die from there you have to deal with the bittersweet aftermath on one hand the buyers are grateful that the world is saved but at the same time they can't be around 11 one who took will away from them this then puts a strain on the relationship between joyce and hopper and the rest of the crew suddenly has to find their new roles without mike their heart their team leader to guide them and hey this sets up some awesome sequel potential i mean netflix has already announced that they are milking this cash cow as far as it'll go with a whole stinking production company called upside down pictures and a spin-off where an emotionally scarred adult 11 travels the world getting up to psychic shenanigans in the waning years of the cold war yep seems like a pretty safe bet to me or you know i could be completely wrong and they just decide that they're gonna bring back that long-lost sister of hers from that one random episode in season two nah i don't think anyone even netflix is that desperate but hey that's just a theory a film theory and cut [Music] you

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 3,511,155

Keywords: stranger things, stranger things 4, stranger things 5, stranger things season 4, stranger things season 5, eleven, vecna, stranger things master of puppets, stranger things running up that hill, stranger things vol 1, stranger things vol 2, stranger things theory, stranger things predictions, eddie scene, stranger things scene, stranger things easter eggs, stranger things ending explained, film theory, film theorists, matpat, film theory stranger things, robin stranger things

Id: S_LIPvCqPBk

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

OP, please make sure there are no spoilers in the title of your post.

Commenters, please use spoiler code if you are discussing anything super spoilery unless the title specifically says the episode being discussed.

If you see anyone breaking the rules, please report the post or comment. Thank you.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/ObsessiveGamer1]

I saw this earlier and thought the video had a few good points but it goes way off the rails by the end and completely lost me. I disagree that El, Will or Mike are going to die but there were decent points in other regards but the ending is just what.

The video suggesting that El would kill Will after Vecna gets Mike is overly dark and would be a horrible way to end things.

I have a feeling that Will is going to find out he has an important connection and the idea that he has to die to break the connection is going to be hanging over the characters but they won't actually go through with it and find another way/Will only dies temporarily and gets brought back.

[u/Horrorfan5]

Nope

[u/WildButterfly85]

Stranger Things may have a lot of DnD references and villain names, but the show isn’t a direct parallel to DnD. The key to destroying Vecna for good might be something completely different.

[u/rosewoodlliars]

they already said they're not killing off any main characters like el because that would ruin the show

[u/SardaukarChant]

No.

[u/KillerDickens]

It's kinda possible but I don't really see The Duffers going with a scenario like 11 can't live if Vecna dies because they're somehow connected like Harry Potter was with Voldemort

[u/AssociationLivid5822]

Absolutely, they’ve been foreshadowing it all series and Millie Bobby Brown has been wanting to be killed off for years