Every Stranger Things Fan Theory

Hi, I'm David Harbour,

I play Chief Jim Hopper on Stranger Things

and today I've been asked to do

Stranger Things fan theories on Reddit

to discuss your fan theories.

It is an open-ended show.

Some of these theories may be close to the truth.

They may be where far away from the truth.

I will offer my insight what I think.

So these are not spoilers,

these will just be hypotheticals from my point of view.

[upbeat music]

@Ahhuati says;

the Upside-Down is actually the future.

The Upside-Down is actually the future.

When Will is taken there,

he's impregnated by an alien creature.

Impregnated is interesting.

When Will returns to our time,

he births the slug,

which in turn develops into the Demogorgon,

which in turn is aware of how powerful Eleven is

because it inherits that knowledge from Will

or reads his mind.

Sometime later, the Thessalhydra emerges

and the United States government

is forced to drop a nuclear weapon on Hawkins.

Hawkins is destroyed, but the Demogorgon survives.

Eleven accidentally uses her remote viewing abilities

to see into this future, thereby causing the Demogorgon

to travel back in time and hunt her down.

It instead takes Will,

thereby restarting the events we see in the show.

Wow, I love this theory.

This is crazy and insane.

This could be true, I mean, I like the idea

of the Upside-Down actually being the future.

I do think, I personally don't know,

I think that the Upside-Down will be revealed

to be a specific place or time.

I don't know about the US government

dropping a nuclear weapon on Hawkins

because if Thessalhydra emerges,

I guess we would drop a nuclear weapon.

I guess that would be like the weapon of choice

if you're gonna fight some intergalactic monster.

I like the idea that this character

actually births the events and then restarts the events.

This kind of, I think it's kinda like a time loop element

that I think is very interesting.

But I don't know how much of this is true.

I mean, the one thing that you have hit on

is that the Upside-Down is something specific.

It may be the future, it may be something else.

It exists as a reflection of Hawkins

and so it has certain things like the library.

I mean, it has certain things in it that are Hawkins.

Yeah, it's a very interesting theory.

@GameDemon 24 asks: what is a Demogorgon?

My theory on it comes

from a scientific and evolutionary perspective.

I believe that somewhere

thousands upon thousands of years ago,

humans did inhabit the Upside-Down

in a very similar incarnation

to whatever humanity looked like at the time.

Until that is some natural disaster

occurred in the Upside-Down to make the atmosphere toxic.

The Demogorgon is a descendant of human beings

that evolved according to the toxic conditions

of the Upside-Down.

We have Homo Neanderthals in both realms,

then we turn to homo sapiens in our realm

and homo demagorgus in the Upside-Down realm.

I love this, I think it's amazing.

I don't have any knowledge of this

and I think you're probably very far off.

I think the time one is probably a little more

apropos or something like that.

The idea that this realm has existed

and that beings have actually evolved

over at least a hundred thousand years,

I feel like why would it have emerged in 1983 in Indiana?

I think that the Upside-Down

is more related to the specific events

of this particular town, of this particular area.

I don't think it's its own entity that has existed

for a long period of time.

I think it coincides with the idea

of Eleven's powers opening this gate.

But I think it's a really interesting theory and I love it

and you should write your own show.

@Connvex thinks the source of the Upside-Down is Terry Ives.

If L, a powerful psychic was strong enough to open the gate

to the Upside-Down, it seems plausible

that if her mama is also a psychic,

the intense grief of losing her baby could have caused her

to unknowingly create a distorted reality of despair.

Wow, one of the things that I think makes Star Wars

so epic is not that there's just good and evil

and a light side and a dark side,

but the fact that Darth Vader says to Luke,

I am your father, so that it becomes like a soap opera.

Everyone's kind of interconnected

and I think that if the Upside-Down is an entity in itself

that's born of emotional content,

that's born of despair or pain or loss,

that could link it to a specific reason

for all of this to have been occurring in Hawkins in 1983.

I think that in some sense, the show can be a monster show

or it can be a show that wraps up where the events of

the show are actually directly related

and couldn't have happened to any other characters

but these characters

as a result of whatever they went through.

I like the idea of it being explicitly referenced

as some kind of manifestation of a subconscious of a town.

There's something dark in Hawkins, but we'll see,

I have no idea.

So again, I'm the most useless person to do these things,

but thank you for having me.

@Nellanaj_10 if Steve is Jean Ralphio's

from Parks and Rec's real father,

then Billy changed his name

and became Chris Traeger from Parks and Rec.

I haven't watched Parks and Rec, I'm sorry.

I know it's hilarious,

it looks hilarious, but I haven't seen it.

So I do know that these two guys look alike.

Steve and Jean Ralphio.

I also, when I was 20 years old,

looked a lot like Steve Harrington

and I'm not related to the character.

@Arames thinks Hopper's daughter is still alive.

When it's showing the flashback of Hopper's daughter playing

and she had her first cancer episode,

does it look like she's freaking out?

Like maybe she's seeing a creature from the Upside-Down.

So is it possible the government got her sick

and faked her death and she's being held at the facility?

They did a good job faking Will's death.

I do not think that this is true.

If we were to introduce the idea

of some sort of time loop concept,

the idea that Hopper's daughter could exist in some way

would be very interesting.

The Upside-Down brings with it a lot of

elements which we'll start to see that are,

we haven't even seen about what the Upside-Down can do,

but I don't think that in the physical world,

she's still alive

and that the government has faked her death.

I think that that pretty much was what it was

that we've seen where she does die of cancer.

She does live on with Hopper

and we'll sort of see more about her relationship

with Hopper, which I think is a little more complicated

maybe, but I don't think she's still alive.

@ScalabrinelsGod: Dustin was playing the long game

to get Nancy this entire time.

Dustin obviously has a big crush on Nancy,

but it predictably doesn't go anywhere.

Nancy's different.

Yeah, she seems pretty special, I guess.

In the second season when Max is introduced,

we are led to believe that he likes her.

This is just a trick to distract us.

Dustin knew what he was doing

when he and Steve formed their seemingly unlikely duo.

Despite all the chaos and shit around him,

he was able to get key information out of Steve.

That key information being like how to be suave

for the teenage gals, I guess.

That sort of implies that Dustin is extremely sophisticated

as an individual of 13 years old.

Not just this dude who's looking for chocolate pudding

and running around.

May, I found the chocolate pudding.

But that he's a calculated lady killer

and just needs that little extra zhuzh from Steve

about The Farrah Fawcett Hairspray

and that's gonna take him to the finish line with Nancy.

The beginning of this was, I'm a bit drunk right now,

sorry if this has already been established

and if I don't make sense,

my memory of the first season's pretty spotty

because I didn't re-watch it.

Well, rewatch it 'cause Dustin is dumber than you think.

[Dustin growls]

Yeah, don't do that, okay? Okay.

@Hallad thinks Murray is a Russian spy.

He's the one character who frequently mentions

Russia in the show, he drinks Russian vodka.

In an ep called, The Spy,

he easily reads and manipulates

Nance and Jonathan into hooking up.

How was the pullout?

When Nancy and Jonathan tell him the truth about Barb,

he advises them to tell the public

a watered down version of events to make it more believable

almost as if he's experienced

at spreading disinformation campaign.

Murray's goal is ultimately to learn US intel

and cause instability in the community.

So this is a very interesting theory.

I don't think that it's true.

I think that you're gonna see

more of Murray in seasons to come.

I think Murray is a very interesting character.

I mean, it would have to be a big double bluff

because he comes to me in beginning of the episode

and says there's a Russian spy presence in Hawkins

and I don't believe him.

So he would theoretically have to be revealing himself to me

at the beginning of the season

only to for it to be a subterfuge.

Again, that would be giving me a tremendous amount of credit

that somehow I was like sort of onto it

and then he wanted to align himself with me

to pretend that he wasn't it.

I think that the Russian thing

is sort of a funny conspiracy theory that Murray has

and he's a real just conspiracy theory nut.

I think he is what he appears to be,

but we'll speak more of Murray in the future

and we'll get to investigate these things.

@Nothingtosee thinks Demogorgons are more afraid of us

than we are of it.

Whenever the Gorgon realizes that there's someone behind it,

it simply turns around, opens it jaws and roars,

something that will only get them running away

as fast as they can.

So I thought maybe that's the idea.

The most damning evidence

is that when Nancy's about to escape,

the portal is to her right, but she can't go for it

because the gorgon is also to her right

until it moves to her left, positioning itself

so that Nancy is in between the portal and it

and it doesn't close the portal until Nancy is outside.

This makes me think that it is afraid

and if disturbed in the Upside-Down,

it will do its best to chase the offender out.

However, it seems to disregard any sort of caution

when attacking the bleeding victim,

even attacking three very pissed teens

armed with a spiked club.

Yes, and one minorly bleeding Barb on a diving board.

I mean I love this theory

'cause it's the real like animal conservation

environmentalist theory.

The idea that like, we all are afraid of sharks

but they're just as afraid of us.

I was in Antarctica pretty recently

and the interesting thing about the animals down there

is that they have no interaction with humans

or very little interaction with humans

and they were very unafraid.

So I think the reaction to being afraid of humans

is a learned reaction from animals.

I'm sorry, you ate my cat.

So I don't think that it would exist

for this Demogorgon being,

and even as we see in season two, the Demodogs,

they again are pretty self interested

in just terms of eating and in terms of existing as animals

and the only thing that does transcend that

is when the host is attacked,

like when we are closing the actual gate

and the Thessalhydra monster is threatened in some way,

they all will forego food like Steven and Dustin

and will run to help the hive mind sort of place

to stop whatever's attacking it.

So that seems to be the only consciousness of higher thought

that the fingers of the Thessalhydra has.

@Peters45 thinks the Demogorgon

is a manifestation of Eleven's trauma.

I think the monster's actually

an extension of Eleven herself

and a physical manifestation of her troubled psyche.

After saving Mike from jumping off the cliff,

Eleven tearfully tells Mike,

I'm sorry, the gate I opened it, I'm the monster.

What if she knew that the monster was a product of her mind

and was admitting that she had accidentally let it out

and into the physical world?

I love this theory.

I actually believe in this theory

and I pretty much know that it's not true.

I thought that from the first season,

from watching the first season,

that Eleven when she says, I am the monster,

that that was some sort of weird foresight thing

where she actually was the monster.

And I talked to the Duffers about that

and they were like, No, she just feels

upset about opening the gate and opening up these monsters,

she's not actually that monster.

And especially as we see in the second season,

there's so many more monsters

that it isn't just a manifestation

of Eleven's consciousness,

this is a world that is full of monsters.

I thought it was literal as well,

but the fact that Eleven feels like she herself is a monster

is very powerful and made me cry.

So I love this theory,

I think it's beautiful, but it's not true,

No L, you're not the monster.

So that's it.

Fan theories on Reddit, they're all very interesting.

You guys are very creative.

Thank you very much for having me

and thanks for being fans of the show.

The kids buy a van,

unmask the evil head of the Hawkins lab and adopt a dog.

It is then revealed that Stranger Things

is simply a Scooby Doo prequel series.

This is my theory. Wow.

[Announcer] It's time.

[upbeat music]

Hi there, I'm Joe Keery.

I'm Maya Hawke.

I'm Natalia Dyer.

And I'm Joe Quinn.

And we're the cast of Stranger Things,

and we are going to be answering

some fan theories for Vanity Fair.

Paul De Paola's theory is,

the whole show is just an elaborate D&D game.

The kids are actually all grown up and fantasizing

about their imagined childhood nightmares.

Love this theory.

Wow. Love this theory.

Great idea.

Who play old versions of them?

That's a great call.

Gotta get Bill Hader for Finn because he did it in it.

[Maya] Natalie Portman, they always say

that Natalie looks like Millie could play the older one.

Yeah, that's great.

That's really fun though.

That's a great three.

Isn't there a movie that,

that is like pretty much the plot of the movie?

Yes.

It's kind of like Jumanji, honestly, right?

Like you're going in and then you're...

Yeah, I wonder if we would be

characters playing that dungeon and dragon

or if we would be figments of their imagination.

That's what I was imagining, I don't think we're the...

I think we'd be figments.

I think like the core kids are like,

those would be the players

and we would just be sort of the bards, what have you.

I think we'd probably be

kind of people that they encounter in their normal lives.

Like you be like the postman,

you know how you dream of people?

Of course.

Okay, good luck.

@Aydnagl.

Excuse you.

@Aydnagl. What?

@Aydnagl, this is their theory.

Eleven will end up being the villain

whether of her own accord

or under the control of the Mind Flayer.

I'd say this is the most kind of feasible theory.

This feels very classic.

Yeah. Yeah.

The hardcore killing that happens in the flashback

is pretty maybe indicative of such a thing.

@Animestrangerthings' theory is,

I'm probably gonna get negative comments,

but I'm gonna list off facts

as to why I think Robin is a Russian spy.

Sick. Love it.

What did you-

I learned Russian alarmingly quickly,

I guess is one of the plausible flags.

That would be a thought.

I'm fluent in four languages, you know?

Russian?

[speaks Russian]

Appear from nowhere,

I was never a background actor

in the earlier seasons in this school.

Just a plant, just a total plant.

I like the idea.

I also like the idea.

@Snoo-22937: wow, I've been so focused on the chest hair.

I never realized that Steve was wearing

Eddie's jacket in this sequence.

Maybe this could mean Eddie could've sadly died

and Steve wears his jacket as a memorial sort of thing.

Just a theory.

I don't know, and it's a vest. Astute observation.

And it's a very metal D vest.

Yes.

[Joe] You do have a distracting chest though.

[Joe Keery] Yep, I had to wax it for season whenever?

Maybe we could do it twice.

I did it, I did did.

It was a 40-year-old virgin

@MasSonia's theory is, if you noticed,

in every season there's a death of a character

that starts with the letter B.

True. Interesting.

Benny, Barbara, Bob and Billy.

The only character remaining is Becky.

Also, we had some scenes with her mom and Kali,

the girl with the 008 tattoo,

but the story is not completed, I think.

There's a lot of stuff with the mom and the aunt

that like there's more there, there must be more there.

And it's also interesting

'cause your full character's name is Bobbin.

Oh yeah, that's true. So that might play into it.

Bobbin. Good point.

Bobbin Buckley, My last name is Buckley.

I wonder, I wonder if the brothers know that.

Did the beating of her.

They know, but I don't think they did it on purpose.

That's a pretty big coincidence.

Yeah, I'm also curious about the Kali girl.

Lot of questions. Lots of questions.

@ShayWolfie's theory is, I feel like it's possible

that Nancy might die saving Robin's life.

They're going to be together

and paired up for the entire season.

Robin was once Barb's best friend too,

so I'm sure they're gonna bond over that.

There are a lot of things that are right in there.

Pretty in depth.

And it's very well researched.

It's a great theory I think,

But it's an excellent theory.

Clearly you read the book.

We never talk about the Barb thing

because that book was written by a different person,

not the Duffer brothers.

And that actually is not their idea or their theory,

it's sort of a different take

on the same character from another writer.

So it's not necessarily true in Duffer brother world.

Okay, from Twitter, @Crysteries: Max gets powers,

and becomes an avatar sort of person for the Mind Flayer.

Pretty unsupported. Man, I don't know,

it could happen, couldn't happen, I don't know.

That's kind of what happened to-

No one's gotten powers.

That kind of happened to William.

Yeah, yeah. Kind of like that idea.

Runs in the family, Runs in the fate.

Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, that's nice.

Yeah, Billy gets powers, I guess they do.

They just don't use their powers for good.

Okay.

@RachelLeishman's theory is:

Alexei also still alive with Hopper

'cause Alexei deserved better.

I agree. I agree.

Yeah.

Lovely guy. Lovely guy.

Can you imagine just being a scientist and doing your job

and then all of a sudden,

you just get wrapped up in some stuff like that and then?

Yeah, shame.

Bye-bye. Zippy doo-da.

@ItsLunaCassidy's theory is,

my first theory is I definitely have a feeling

a major character or two is going to die this season.

My list is Steve, Dustin, Nancy, or Max.

In order of preference or? I don't know.

Okay. Dude!

That's their list.

Should we just?

I mean. Tell?

I don't know.

They just wanna know.

Yeah, I mean that's always,

it's always a possibility, right?

We're dealing with some pretty crazy things.

Stakes are high.

Oh, stakes are, yeah, stakes are high.

Pretty creepy. Pretty creepy.

@StrangerEmmie says: could there be some elements

of time travel next season?

There were several hints of this in the last season,

including the obvious Back to The Future reference.

He went back in time.

Then why is it called Back to the Future?

Time Travel, you say?

Great theory, love time travel, cannot confirm or deny.

Fluffy Duckling's theory is I want poor Steve

to have any kind of screen time with his parents.

He says his dad's an asshole

and his mom is super well respected around town.

Like who are they?

I'll tell you what, I have always wondered.

People have always asked me

and my dad has been petitioning the Duffer Brothers

for years to be my dad on the show.

I think it would be a great opportunity to just start

pop's career and it would be great.

Heather Antos's theory is The Upside-Down

is just another portal to Middle Earth.

Samwise has gone to return to Frodo, his one true love.

I'd love that to be true.

Who is Samwise? Who is Samwise?

Oh, of course, Bob. Bob.

[Joe Keery] That's pretty fun.

Man, that was so crazy, him being on the show.

That was. Me and him being like.

Such a nice guy.

From, look at this dude's theory.

Max is being possessed

and that Eleven is going to get her powers back.

Of course Steve might die

only 'cause he's laying down in season four trailer

as if he was dead.

This is strong.

This is pretty strong. This is strong.

We were all pretty tired though when we were filming, so,

it could just be that

There were a lot of naps.

I feel like it's about time that there are some deaths.

Kind of remarkable that we haven't died.

Yeah, it's true.

So they can smell it.

Ozzieoz06888's theory is:

Nancy and Jonathan break up.

Jonathan looks kind of stoner-ish in the trailer

and Nancy also did not go to Cali to visit with Mike,

so I'm guessing they probably break up.

It's pretty good, I mean.

Pretty good.

Solid guessing.

To be fair, we really don't even know what's going on.

Yeah.

But there is some lovely guessing in there.

Mico Escorp's theory is: the Mind Flayer

living inside Steve's glorious hair.

You never know.

Is that how it gets so voluminous?

Yeah, exactly.

It should make a mousse called Mind Flayer.

Mind Flayer Mousse, yeah.

It's branding.

You're welcome, Netflix, I get a cut.

Take that.

What people don't know is that it's just all

a Lego haircut and at the end of the day I just go.

[actors laugh]

[All] Thank you so much for watching.

[upbeat music]