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STRANGER THINGS (L to R) Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix � 2022
When Stranger Things 4opens, we’re reunited with Dr. Brenner. It’s 1979, years before El would make her escape from Hawkins Laboratories and find a family in Hawkins, Indiana. However, we’re not immediately reintroduced to a young El.
Instead, we’re side-by-side with Brenner as he goes through his routine. There’s another child he’s working with for the day–his designation is 010. They’re working on the boy’s omnipresence, his ability to see what someone else is doing now matter where they are. It’s a skill that allows him to peer into other rooms using his mind.
This skill is also how 010 recognizes something isn’t right before all hell breaks loose at the lab. Brenner and the boy are knocked out, but the scientist comes to later. When he does, it’s to the horror of all his co-workers and their charges murdered.
Blood is everywhere. Their bones have been snapped and twisted. Brenner stumbles back to the Rainbow Room where the children not being tested or resting were having free time. The massacre he finds inside is just as disturbing especially since a young El is standing in the midst of this horrific chaos with blood running down her eyes and on her hospital gown.
Taking in everything, Brenner asks her repeatedly, “What have you done?!”
Major spoilers ahead of Stranger Things 4. Turn back now if you haven’t finished Volume 1 of the season.
To say this was quite the opening scene would be an understatement. It set the audience up to question everything we know about El, the treatment of her by Brenner, and what was going on at Hawkins Laboratories. However, it’s a red herring. Here’s what really happened.
Stranger Things 4: Did El kill those people in Hawkins Laboratories?
Last warning. Major spoilers ahead of Stranger Things 4.
No, El didn’t kill anyone. It’s not that our super-powered heroine hasn’t killed before. She has in self-defense. This time, however, there isn’t any blood on her hands that wasn’t put there by someone else.
In 1979, El had no allies save for one. Peter Ballard. Brenner’s attention was leading to bullying by the other kids. They didn’t like that she got special treatment and believed that they were superior to her. As such, much like her Lenora Hills bullies, they took their insecurities out on her. It even went as far as assault and death threats. Mind you, she was elementary school age at the time and they were teenagers.
Peter was an orderly who was kind to El. He championed her. Like Brenner, he saw something special in her but instead of exploiting that for science, he used her to free himself. See, Peter was trapped in Hawkins Labs, too. He had been for decades.
When he formed an escape plan and handed El his key card, his intent was to set her free. While it’s not explicitly clear that Peter was manipulating her to escape, too, it’s hard to believe that wasn’t the case. She was a child in desperate need of someone to care about her, and he provided that to her like a guardian angel.
It would only be after El pulled out what must have been a suppressant from Peter’s neck that she became aware that he wasn’t someone she could trust. She’d helped him because she thought they could be each other’s family and, while that seems like something Peter wanted as well, he couldn’t resist enacting his revenge against everyone in the lab.
He put El in a closet, presumably to keep her out of the way and from seeing what he was going to do, but she left that safe place when she heard the screams. She found Peter in the Rainbow Room surrounded by the people he had killed.
Understandably horrified, El was upset that she’d ever relied on Peter. Interestingly enough, he was confused at her anger and despair. The lab was, after all, full of people who used her. People who threatened her life. She had no one but Brenner, and he saw all of his “children” as test subjects (we’re going to assume Kali (008) wasn’t around).
Peter saw him and El as the same. Two special people trapped in a world with rigid, nonsensical rules who needed to break free and create a world just for them. He opened up to her, revealed that he’s actually Victor Creel’s son, and he was the one who killed his family not his father.
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STRANGER THINGS (L to R) Robert Eglund as Victor Creel in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
As a child, Peter had thrown away the shackles of the oppressive human existence that dictated who he was supposed to be and how he was supposed to act. It opened his mind, allowed him to access parts of his brain that no one to his knowledge could. He also befriended spiders because they were as misunderstood as himself.
Peter experimented on animals with his powers, and he slowly tortured his family until he was sick of them. His father didn’t catch on to what he was, but his mother had some suspicions. She intended to ship him off to a doctor, and he had no intentions on going. So, he killed her at the dinner table.
The plan was to also kill his father, but Peter admits to El that he’d overestimated his abilities. He was young, a bit overzealous, and didn’t know his limits yet. Peter killed his sister, but he wasn’t able to murder his father. But, in his mind, the damage had thankfully been already done. The crime was so horrific that someone had to take the blame and that fell squarely on his father’s shoulders.
Unfortunately for Peter, however, he ended up in the care of Dr. Brenner, the very doctor his mother wanted to send him to. While Brenner tried to create a new origin story for Peter by classifying him as 001, it didn’t work. He stuck true to the knowledge he held about his life and bided his time.
Of course, none of this information soothes El. Peter is obviously disappointed and hurt by that, but he’s also a murderous man so if she can’t see his side of things then she has to die, too. In a psychic stand-off, these two go toe-to-toe. It seems, Peter made the mistake of teaching El too well because she uses his advice to power up her attacks and then she flips it on him.
Yes, Peter was right that a deep, meaningful and hurtful memory can increase one’s attack but love is stronger. In a moment that’s honestly hard to believe, El remembers the day she was born, when she met her mother who clearly loved her from the moment she saw her. The same mother who tried to come back for her and was snatched away, the one light in this world that she was born to and that wanted her with her whole heart.
The strength of that memory powers El up so much that Peter is overcome by her and flung against the wall. In her fury, El not only starts to make him disintegrate, she accidentally opens a portal to another dimension which Peter is unceremoniously ripped through.
As he falls, lightning or some kind of kinetic energy strikes him repeatedly. It sears his skin and burns it away. At this moment, as all the pieces are finally put together, it’s revealed that Peter is Vecna. Hence his take over of the Creel House, the time between murders, and his desire to open gates to the world he’d been cast out from.
When Brenner enters the Rainbow Room, sees El covered in blood, and says, “What have you done?!” yes, it’s because of the events that led up to that moment, and the sheer amount of death around them, but it’s also because she opened a door to the Upside Down.
El had repressed this memory because it was traumatic, but she didn’t kill the people in Hawkins Laboratories in 1979. Those murders were Vecna’s, a man who betrayed her trust.
Stay tuned to Hidden Remote for more Stranger Things news and coverage!