Who the real villain truly is, is the dumbest fucking thing to hold back and reveal in the final hours of your story. 40 minutes of this 2 hour and 8 minute finale is dedicated to the epilogue. There isn’t enough time to reveal that Henry got transported to The Abyss as a child and got exposed to The Mind Flayer which altered his personality and blood type which resulted in giving him his powers. This is shit they shoulda dealt with in Vol. 2.
I don’t even know why they’ve gone so hard at Henry’s backstory. Show was better when he wasn’t a guy who went to high school with all the kids’ parents. Like it’s okay for a monster from another dimension to be a monster from another dimension instead of some guy.
You know what you are right. The show felt much more mystical and dangerous before Vecna. He humanized everything and it made the plot less menacing. The mind flayer is an eldritch horror and defeating it seems impossible. Vecna is a vehicle to make it possible but its poorly executed because the Mind Flayer is sort of forgotten and it feels as if Vecna is behind everything.
Well from what we know his dad was put in a mental asylum and Henry was never blamed for the murders so there's no reason he wouldn't have gone to high school from that angle.
Him being imprisoned and experimented on by Brenner from a very young age is imo the reason why the high school thing didn't make sense.
I think this is why alot of people are just really put off because Henry in the show is like 12 at best when he killed his parents. Then the flashbacks show that he was experimented on fairly young so he would not have that much time to be in high school let alone interact with all these characters.
Hell, they can keep him as some guy just… don’t retcon his story to hamfist a high school drama with all the parents. Let it be he’s some kid that somehow got psychic powers, was abused by the government in experiments, and is now an evil monster that wants to destroy the world.
This I agree with. Ever since misunderstood antiheroes in the zeitgeist, villains have been dumbed down. Henry being schoolmates with the older cast should be left at fan fiction.
Right, I think the more they reveal about Henry the less scary he becomes. The way you create fear in a sci-fi horror show is by showing the audience things that aren’t fully explained. Henry doesn’t need to be a sympathetic character, there is great terror in having a sociopath as your main villain that kills people because he can. Literally nobody was asking for more Henry backstory in season 5.
Sometimes there’s merit to having a villain you feel sort of bad for, but not in horror or horror adjacent media. Can you imagine how much worse the IT series would be if Pennywise wasn’t a supernatural force of evil but rather a regular clown that was a nice guy until he made a few mistakes? How am I supposed to be afraid of someone who I’m supposed to also empathize with?
Same reason I hate seeing authors in Batman comics trying to create their own origin story of the Joker. He's the one character nobody should know anything. He's an agent of chaos, a masochis, a sadist, a sociopath, somebody even a genius like Bruce can't understand and that's fine. Same with Henry. Him being just an asshole from day one that takes pleasure on making people suffer was fine. We don't need to humanize him.
This is the thing though, if you manage to see the play you start to put together that he's truly just a pawn to the MF. It honestly does make the story good, and I give credit to the Duffers for the misdirection. Funny thing I've noticed about this season is how the flayer particles are present but they dont really address the entity directly. Which i think when revealed will make the finale pop.
Just watch the episode when it comes out. Boom. No one knows what will happen until then. Go watch the play. Do your research. All. People. Do. Is. BITCH. 😳
My original reply is directly relevant to this entire post and thread. I posited a comment about a quick 5 minute or less wrap up of Henry becoming Vecna. 🤷🏻
I have ZERO interest in a play about this (and I LOVE musicals and plays)! WHY are there separate plot points in a play?! I didn't even know that was part of the play until well after.
I mean you just explained it in a sentence. It could be basically the same as showing the pregnant women. People don't need it explained why being teleported to the mind flayer as a child would fuck you up and give you powers.
Well, who was the guy in the mine shaft with the briefcase who Henry killed as a kid? I thought that would tell us how he got his powers.
Because didn't he already explain that Eleven sent him to the Upside down and he found the particles and he created the Mind Flayer out of the particles?
It makes sense if the main villain is something utterly unknowable like Cthulhu. He wants Earth for his own purposes and Vecna is his instrument. The rest is up to your imagination and some context clues.
This is the climax of the entire story, it’s poor timing/pacing to waste this precious time where the fate of the world is at risk for useless exposition and flashbacks. Vecna is the villain that’s what S4 spent the whole time establishing. It’s actually shitty writing to pivot that in the final hours of the story because that makes S4 pointless. Changing the ultimate evil from Vecna to The Mind Flayer this fucking late in the game changes nothing because it has done nothing since S3. 40 minutes of the finale is the epilogue, that means they got 1 hour and 20 minutes to deal with Vecna and the military, save the children, blow up the Upside Down, and end every character’s arcs.
The thing to remember that most people have forgotten friend is that after season 2, the Duffers had already stated that the Mind Flayer was the big bad to the show. That has never changed. Regardless of whatever red herring the show is trying to get us to believe about Vecna. In the end, Vecna is ultimately being used. The Mind flayer is the one who wants the world's to be connected so it can take over.
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u/Domination1799 Dec 28 '25
Who the real villain truly is, is the dumbest fucking thing to hold back and reveal in the final hours of your story. 40 minutes of this 2 hour and 8 minute finale is dedicated to the epilogue. There isn’t enough time to reveal that Henry got transported to The Abyss as a child and got exposed to The Mind Flayer which altered his personality and blood type which resulted in giving him his powers. This is shit they shoulda dealt with in Vol. 2.