Brenner discovers Junior’s powers, he begins to find ways to recreate his abilities in other children (Project MK-Ultra and The Nina Project) by birthing other superpowered children like El. Brenner takes Creel Junior under his wing. His father Victor is blamed for the crime, and Dr. Perplexed, Nancy soon realizes that while this is her house, it is somehow frozen in the same year of Will’s disappearance - in other words, it is frozen at the point in which the first gate opened. They can enter buildings that exist in both planes, and they know stepping on any “vines” or critters in The Upside Down makes their location known, as they are all interconnected by a “Hive Mind” of some kind.Īrmed with this knowledge, the teens head out to the Wheeler residence to see if they can find any of Nancy’s guns, but instead, all they find in her room are a pair of kitten heels and a barely worn-in diary. There, in a barren Lover’s Lake, a swarm of bats attack him and remove nearly a pound of flesh before Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer), Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke), and Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) come to his rescue and defeat the bats. Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) makes the error of letting curiosity lead him astray - and, more specifically, dives through a squelching underwater portal to The Upside Down. It remains unclear whether or not Max’s connection with Vecna at the cemetery in Episode 4 (“Dear Billy”) successfully opened a portal to The Upside Down.
The first, the “Mothergate,” is accidentally triggered by El at the lab.A strong psychic connection creates the gates: Sent to the Wheeler residence for interrogation, Dustin, Lucas, Max, and Lucas’ sister Erica piece together why, of all places, there’s a portal to a sinister alternate dimension at the town’s make-out spot. Hopper’s prison break, explainedĭustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin), and Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) have just been caught at Lover’s Lake by the cops, attempting to keep an eye out for their older friends who bravely leap into the depths of the lagoon and find at the bottom of it a gate to The Upside Down.
What we do know for a fact, however, is that 001 leads El to the drainpipe that she eventually uses to escape in Season 1.
Given the confusing chronological order of these flashback scenes, it is difficult to ascertain if El had already encountered the Demogorgon and cracked open the first gate to The Upside Down before the massacre or if that sensory deprivation tank experiment took place directly after the chaos. Frightened, El runs away from the lab, circling back to the escape scenes from Season 1’s pilot episode. Brenner’s control and his abilities run rampant as he massacres nearly every living being at the site in a rampage.ĭesperate to halt 001’s butchering, Eleven opens a gate to The Upside Down and flings him across it, inadvertently spawning the supernatural monster Vecna. The white-coat tricks El into removing the chip that was keeping him under Dr. Little does she know that “Peter” is hiding a major secret up his sleeve - or, more aptly, on his wrist: a 001 tattoo, complete with powers that seem to be on par with El’s (or greater, given his age and his malicious intentions).