Ok so how are Vecna and The Mind Flayer now connected after the finale of Stranger Things 4?

For the entirety of Stranger Things thus far, The Mind Flayer was our big villain (pre Vecna). An omnipresent entity that ruled over the Upside Down and spent its time trying desperately to bleed into the Hawkins where our heroes live. The Mind Flayer was the hive mind that controlled all the vines and tendrils of the Upside Down, had full control of the Demogorgons and Demobats and was responsible for the possession of Will Byers in season two and then Billy in season three, as it sought for Billy to help it create the proxy body made from the guts and gore of the Flayed.

In season four of Stranger Things, the focus shifted from The Mind Flayer to Vecna – a new villain who walked and who talked. In the first volume of the season, Dustin described Vecna as being The Mind Flayer’s “four star general”, and that when Vecna killed in Hawkins he was assisting open gates for The Mind Flayer from the Upside Down. In the finale, we learn this to actually not be the case at all.

In a flashback sequence, we see Vecna / Henry Creel on his first arrival in The Upside Down, just after Eleven has banished him there after their duel in Hawkins Lab. The dimension looks different. Vecna stumbles upon a swirling mass in the sky and then moulds it himself into the spidery shape of The Mind Flayer that we already know from Stranger Things seasons gone by. Basically, this twist reveals that Vecna himself has been pulling all the strings the whole time and moulded The Mind Flayer to his will.

I personally think this twist is a bit of a weird choice. The Mind Flayer always felt like this massive and all knowing presence, and now the writers have retconned its mystery to keep Vecna as the genius behind it all. Even though Vecna feels like less of a physical threat than the massive Mind Flayer did?

Stranger Things is available on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

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