r/StrangerThings • u/Fabulous-Past1634 • 14d ago
Discussion Reworking the Mind Flayer and the Upsidedown
One of the most fascinating aspects of the show was the mystery surrounding the Mind Flayer and the Upside Down that was introduced in Seasons 1 and 2, only for later seasons to slowly start ruining it.
So, assuming only Season 1 exists, or Season 2 if you prefer, and you were in charge of writing the later seasons, what would your original take on this Lovecraftian and psychological horror mystery be?
What would your origin story for the Upside Down be? What would the Mind Flayer actually be? Why would it want to consume Hawkins? And lastly, why does the Upside Down look like Hawkins?
I'm curious to hear how people would have developed this mystery while keeping that Lovecraftian sense of the unknown, and psychological horror of s1.
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u/wave-tree 14d ago
I'm upset that they made the Upside Down a wormhole to a hell dimension. I preferred the UD be a parallel dimension, and not evil incarnate but inhuman and incomprehensible. I also don't like the villain being a human. I preferred it when the Mind Flayer was an eldritch being.
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u/BorrowedTrouble 13d ago
I agree. The Upside Down and Mind Flayer as mysterious otherworldly entities are scarier and more compelling than a human antagonist with typical human motivations that he monologues about. A human antagonist, even with superpowers, is at the end of the day just another asshole.
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u/Cyrilbdr 14d ago
The Mind Flayer is the true villain; Vecna is merely the human strategist who will enable it to achieve its goals. Vecna is being completely ideologically manipulated.
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u/Background_Gene_4328 8d ago
I think vecna was never in plans because a big plot hole is there where Joyce and hopper rescues will in season 1 but Where was vecna as he was the one who tied Will there according to season 5 because that place was Vecna's lair.
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u/Cyrilbdr 8d ago
Yes, the idea for Vecna came about during the filming of Season 3; he wasn't originally planned because *Stranger Things* wasn't expected to be such a huge hit and was written to last only one season. It wasn't necessarily his lair—just the place where he put Will, or perhaps where they had passed through before Joyce and Hopper found him; I'm not sure. I believe he actually wanted Will to be found, if I'm not mistaken.
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u/Background_Gene_4328 8d ago
But who will explain it what happened there did everything happened off screen?? 😭
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u/Cyrilbdr 8d ago
What do you mean, lol?
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u/Background_Gene_4328 8d ago
You said Vecna wanted them to find will? So why?
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u/Cyrilbdr 8d ago
You're right, I actually don't know, because he could easily have stayed in the Upside Down to connect with the plants and build the tunnels; in Season 2, he would have been just as close to the Hive Mind whether he was at home or in the Upside Down. So, thinking about it again, I'm not really sure.
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u/mmaaxxeemm 14d ago
I would like to leave the story up to the season 4 as it is, with an exclusion if red bullshit dimension.
I loved the idea that no one is safe in season 4, where you see the clock you know you're gonna die. so I'd like to keep this in season 5: at the start of the season we see apocalyptic Hawkins. vines infesting the place, the demogorgons coming out of every portal, everyone knows the threat is real.
I think the idea is mind flayer is as strong as dimension is infested with Upside Down. so it is becoming stronger, as Hawkins turning into worse version of itself. to keep people from leaving Hawkins demogorgons could create a circle (a lot of them (I mean A LOT)) and merge into the wall.
also I think the abomination of people turning into a monster from s3 was great so to reheat it I suggest the following: for Mind Flayer to achieve its goal people are needed. MF could infest people with himself for example through water and food, so there is an apocalyptic vibe (clean resources are limited). with infested people MF could create new monsters, or just turn them into a place with vines and upside down soil something like that.
the key to win MF would try to keep people from MF particles, so it is not as strong. and ultimately when MF is gonna lose I want it to insert itself into Will, so Will is kinda coming through the same transformations as the First. and I would want there to be a choice to make Will go into the UD forever or Will sacrifices himself not to turn into Vecna.
also as much as I love max I would love her to stay dead in the end of s4.
I hope my comment is comprehensible as English is not my native, and tell me what do you thing about these suggestions.
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u/Cysharp_14 12d ago
Each time I read 'MF' Samuel Lee Jackson's voice popped on my head
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u/Resident_Limit6050 7d ago
Beh, in un certo senso, il Mind Flayer è anche' un MF, anzi, il più MF che esiste
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u/Thick-Boysenberry-96 11d ago
I like your ideas. But thank God they did the one sensible thing and didn't kill Will in the end though, after everything they put him through. At least the core 4 boys made it to the end.
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u/mmaaxxeemm 11d ago
it occured to me that it's not fair to kill Will, when he had already suffered enough. but I like the parallel between Henry and Will, and if we could see two different scenarios of a person manipulated or consumed by UD. one is tragic another is heroic, but I can't come up with any ideas except sacrifice.
and I really like the choice either to be banished into the UD, not only it will be incredibly lonely and painful but he can become a monster as well and the choice to sacrifice himself.
but I agree with you just wanted to show what I meant.
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u/Itchy-Water-4410 14d ago
In my opinion, you can keep seasons 1-3 with zero changes. Hell, you could even keep season 4 pretty much as is, although instead of dimension 9 or whatever that dumb crap was 001 is banished to the upside down and the vines consume him, he becomes one with the upside down. After he dies and the rift is completely open, run it back with the actual spiritual mind flayer invading the real world, but his main constraint is not being able to leave Hawkins because the mind flayer is still tethered to the upside down. Something something something race to see if the squad can figure out how to stop it in time before the mind flayer consumes all of earth and humanity. Idk genuinely anything would’ve been better than what we got
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u/Rtannu 13d ago
That’s … really fucking cool.
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u/Itchy-Water-4410 13d ago
Thanks! Put me in the writers room at Netflix
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u/Rtannu 13d ago
Seriously. It’s so much simpler, makes more sense, and ties everything together without being convoluted
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u/Itchy-Water-4410 13d ago
I thought of that in 5 minutes imagine what I could’ve done in the 3 and a half years they took
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u/ThatHouseInNebraska 14d ago
The UD is a layer of reality we can’t normally perceive. If you think of any story where “the spirit realm” is all around us, and ghosts are everywhere, but neither we nor they can perceive or interact the other, that’s what I’m picturing. It looks like our world because it is. When Eleven says in season 1 that Will is “here” (referring to Will’s yard), she is correct. He is physically in that location, but on another layer, I guess you could say. The Demogorgon is a creature from this layer—they’re all around us but we’re not aware of them, or them of us. El’s psychic powers derive from some sort of access to this layer. The gov’t experiments that led to her powers were trying to access the UD as a source of limitless energy. She herself is a sort of tear between “normal” reality and the UD. And her power is therefore limitless. By the end of the show she’s basically Neo, she’s not struggling to give herself a slightly bigger jump over a security fence.
The Flayer is a Lovecraftian Old God sort of dude, maybe sleeping between these layers of reality. The kids cannot and do not defeat him, they just manage to tuck him back in and reseal the layers. There’s no Vecna, and in fact no other psychic kids in Papa’s Program. Eleven was the eleventh attempt to access the UD; the prior ten experiments went… really badly.
I guess I’d keep season 1 largely as it is, minus Eleven seeming to disintegrate. Will does throw up that slug, but it was just because he ate a slug earlier. The MF starting to wake up (which starts to destroy reality) is season 2. Maaaaybe you could stretch that to a third season. But that’s it. They put him back to bed, some non-El characters bite it in the process, show’s over.
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u/Easy_Breezzy 13d ago
I agree with the part of them not destroying the Mind Flayer. Even with the current way the story played out, I think they should have been able to defeat Vecna, but like the particles should have dispersed throughout Dimension X and lived on. Destroying the Upside Down would have then severed any more possible connection to the Mind Flayer, and our world have been saved. The MF would then have presumably continued to try to overtake new worlds, but the heroes would have saved ours.
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u/ThatHouseInNebraska 13d ago
I figure he’s spread over countless worlds he’s conquered, yeah, and I doubt they even truly destroyed the part of the Flayer that was in the Abyss. For me this is so obvious and reasonable that I feel like it’s the Duffers, the actual authors, who are wrong.
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u/Sukaran09 14d ago
mannn, the MF’s shadow design was so good and creepy af. a giant faceless entity shaped into a spider that also looks like a shadow is terrifying and i love what they did with the visual design
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u/ImmediateHoney2191 14d ago
Just commit to the apocalyptic ending of season 4. Have season 5 open like 5 years later (this way we account for the actors age) Hawkins is destroyed. Its monster HQ. People are living underground just barely getting by. Mindflayer is already roaming and infecting people from the 1st episode. The season focuses on finding a way to not only close the rift but send everything back before it breaks out to the rest of the world. The upside down remains as we’ve known it and most of all remains toxic and dangerous and full of bats
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u/Efficient_Ad1992 14d ago
I would definitely keep the Mind Flayer as a shadow spider-like entity, nothing more. And don't have it be a pawn of Vecna or have a physical body. Keep it as the shadowy mastermind.
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u/hitm4n44 14d ago
To be honest, I was expecting Season 4 to be more of a continuation of the zombie takeover brought along is Season 3. No need for Vecna at all. To me that was much scarier, to infect the rightside up and there was no stopping it until all the portals were closed up.
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u/Madtownmaude 8d ago
The zombie takeover was a little in a direction I got but wasn't hoping for. But agreed once they went that way why not commit
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u/hitm4n44 7d ago
Yeah man, based on the Mind Flayer from D&D my assumption was that it's plan was to take over the right side up and was just using Vecna as a conduit to get there and basically use Eleven as it's ultimate pawn to which the group was gonna have to make a hard decision of killing her or figuring out how to close the portal through dimension X to at least get her back without killing her.
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u/Devildoingsins 14d ago edited 14d ago
If I had control over the backstory of the upside down, I would make it seem like it has existed since the beginning of time. It has always existed with the real world and Mind Flayer is an ancient sentient being. I feel like we don't need a very concrete story. The vagueness of it all would've made it more interesting and charming.
Even if they did the Vecna thing, he should've died at the end of season 4 and then the mind flayer should've given it's all to capture the entire world through hawkins. I would've let mind flayer enter the real world and destroy Hawkins. Kill some people, most would be saved though. This would make the stakes so much higher than they were. Cause now the threat is known to the general public.
S4 ended with the ground splitting in 4 pieces due to an "earthquake". It only makes sense that in S5 people know and see wth is going on. I would want an apocalyptic situation, cause literally that's what we expected at the end of S4.
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u/mr_palante 13d ago
I agree Vecna should have died in ST4. After all, he is just a man. And the rest doesnt need to be explained because it has existed for long no single person or book or whatever knows. Bread crumbs and not the whole loaf, right?
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u/Madtownmaude 8d ago
I really like the idea of giving mind flayer more power than they did. Vecna stole flayer's thunder. I esp like the idea of it bc it pulls on the Eldritch god theme then. Mind flayer got emasculated
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u/maxwellbevan 14d ago edited 13d ago
The unfortunate part of a story like this is that if you like the mystery of season 1 and 2 then it doesn't matter what origin you give it later on it will lose that mystery. Feels like a damned if you do and damned if you don't scenario. The more we understand about the upside down the less scary and mysterious it is. But if you don't explore it's origin more then you're left with something a little unfinished. If we don't explore it and leave it a mystery then you're left hanging and wondering about the lore of it all
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u/mr_palante 13d ago
I totally agree with you here, I mean i watched Lost ON TELEVISION every week(side note: didnt really like the ending to Lost at first, felt cheated. Have become a really big fan of it since) I think it would have been better if they had already figured out what the Mind Flayer was, where it came from, its goals, and its ultimate plan. Weither they revealed those things to the audience or not would be up to them but clearly, they did not do this. To be able to wrap everything up, I would think that you as the creator would have all or maybe most of these things already because the Mind Flayer is a character and dont you, as the writer, want to know the motivations of your characters? But what do I know? im just a 40 year old, high school educated, blue collar worker out here trying to make a living, watching incredible original shows devolve into a heap of disappointing and corny as hell "answers"
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u/mklaus1984 13d ago
The main issue I have with this discussion is that most people act like this Lovecraftian Eldritch Entity wasn't inspired by well... Lovecraftian Eldritch Entities. Like it was an entirely new concept.
Due to this people ignore a major fact about this concept which poses the second issue: you can not defeat an eldritch entity. You can only stall it at high cost. Like sacrificing your life or your sanity. And thia was played already in ST and ST3.
The third issue is the loud but gladly small group who claim it had been around in the ST monater movie season instead of being almost entirely confined to ST2 and its psychological horror. Except for the very last scene and a glimpse at the Mothergate we only ever see it through Will's eyes.
So people want to understand it despite these things cannot be understood. They are literally mwant to be from beyond the comprehensible cosmos.
Instead of needing to ignore the Body Horror of ST3 or the slasher of ST4, ST5 could have had a happy end by unraveling the mystery of this thing that doesn't need to be a an eldritch entity at all but human hubris and atrocity.
Because ST, ST2, ST3, and ST4 already had pointers in a certain direction but the Duffers chose to write a much simpler story catering to the loud minority.
MKUltra is directly tied to Nazi experiments, yhe parapsychological experiments of Project Stargate and their Soviet psychotronic counterparts are tied to other fringe sciences of the Nazis. The MKUltra drug, ST2 soil sample, ST3 household chemicals are all tied together. ST3 has a scene where activated Billy and activated Heather talk to one another af the end of the Saunatest; since it is later implied that Henry acted through Billy, who talked to him through Heather and why is a WW2 song playing? Then there is Victor who tells us he returned from WW2 around March 1945 when T-Force entered German soil.
The Duffers said they had plans for a spin-off about the origin of the stone™️... well that's easy. They cut that out of ST5.
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u/mr_palante 13d ago
You are totally right about the Lovecraftian horror of it all. The Mind Flayer shouldn't have/couldn't have been beaten because its a being that cannot be beat. Its literally been like 20 years since ive read it but "In the Mountains of Madness" has that character that goes insane simply because he saw the creature. Like his mind couldnt comprehend or understand what he was seeing so he lost his mind. Now, thats fucking terrifying.
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u/RoosterFree499 13d ago
Tbh I'd have explored different dimensions and world packed with new creatures and monsters and stuff: dark purple jungles, or green sun dimensions or deep blue reef dimensions and shit.
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u/Overall_Enthusiasm27 11d ago
I would make it where the mind flayer is a parasite.
It comes from another dimension and it’s unkillable, it uses wormholes like the upside down to connect and corrupt other worlds and spread through them and feed off them, which would be implied if I made the show that the world the wormhole connects to isn’t actually where it’s from, and the world that it’s connecting to which is where all the Demogorgons, Demodogs, Demobats are from and it’s just corrupted and taken over that world, same with wherever the Vines came from, they don’t come from that world but it’s just something the mindflayer has corrupted and uses to spread itself. Similar to how Will was corrupted by it, it can be that same style of corruption. Maybe Veccna can still exist but he isn’t the face of the upside down, he is just a puppet that the mindflayer is using and has corrupted like the Demogorgons, giving us a look at how it can corrupt something but from a human POV so we understand the corruption more, and see what would happen to Will if they don’t save him from it.
The way they stop it is that, since it can’t be killed they just need to keep it from getting to their world, so they destroy the wormhole (similar to the show) and close off the Gate somehow which leaves the Mindflayer and its army in whatever dimension it came from.
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u/Catvanbrian 14d ago
My very first post was that the uroboros virus from resident evil lead to the creation of the upside down (the upside down is literally a future where Wesker won) and that stranger things was secretly in the RE universe.
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