How ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Connects to ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’: Henry’s Memories, Max’s Hideout, the Spyglass, and More

Sure, you steadfastly rewatched all of Stranger Things in the lead up to this week’s Season 5 release. You made notes about Easter eggs you missed, dove into fan theories, and even clocked that Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) was probably going to be more important to the Netflix show than ever before. Still, after binging Stranger Things Season 5 Part 1, you might feel like you’re missing something. You might be asking, wait, does that Stranger Things play — Stranger Things: The First Shadow — have anything to do with the fifth and final season of the Netflix hit?

**Spoilers for Stranger Things Season 5, now streaming on Netflix**

Yes, we can confirm that Stranger Things 5 does connect to Stranger Things: The First Shadow in potentially huge ways. Now, you can totally watch the fifth and final season of Stranger Things without having forked out a fortune to watch the play on Broadway or the West End, but if you have just even a basic understand of what goes down in The First Shadow, you might be able to figure out why Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) and Holly Wheeler have a shot at escaping Vecna’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) mind prison…

When Stranger Things 5 begins, Max is still in the coma she landed in at the end of Season 4. Meanwhile, Holly Wheeler is now an imaginative young girl who loves reading A Wrinkle in Time and talking with her “imaginary” friend, Mr. Whatsit. The twist is Mr. Whatsit is actually Henry Creel (aka Vecna) in disguise. By the end of Stranger Things Season 5 Episode 1, Holly has been kidnapped by a Demogorgon and taken to the Upside Down. There, Vecna has physically hooked her up to his hive mind. Holly only knows that Mr. Whatsit has invited her to stay in a pristinely perfect version of the Creel House in order to “keep her safe” from monsters.

Holly then receives a letter, seemingly from Henry, asking her to help him. He’s in trouble, you see, and only by being brave and entering the forbidden forest can she save him. Holly thinks about what her D&D alter ego, Holly the Heroic, would do and decides to go after her friend. Stranger Things Season 5 Episode 3 ends with the reveal that Max is actually the person who has lured Holly away from the Creel House and into her cavernous sanctuary.

In Stranger Things Season 5 Episode 4, Max explains that she has been trapped in Vecna’s mind, his memories, this whole time. While she almost managed to escape by following the sound of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” she’s also been forced to travel through all of Henry Creel’s twisted memories. Ultimately, Vecna finds Max and she has to run away. She finds a southwestern cave system that Henry seems actually scared of and makes it her secret base. She doesn’t know why he’s scared of the caves, though. Fans of Stranger Things: The First Shadow will know why!

Here’s everything you need to know about how Stranger Things Season 5 connects to the Stranger Things play…

How Stranger Things 5 Connects to Stranger Things: The First Shadow Play: Why is Vecna Afraid of the Caves?

In Stranger Things Season 5 Episode 4 “Sorcerer,” Max recounts to Holly how she found herself in Vecna’s memories. First, she saw the carnage at the Rainbow Room — the battle between 001 and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) — that left the other children at the Hawkins lab dead and Vecna stuck in the Upside Down. Then, she found herself in the 1950s. There, she witnessed Henry’s memories of being a teenager. This includes a vision of a young Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), back when she was just Joyce Maldonado (Birdy), a teen girl hoping people would come to the school play.

During Stranger Things: The First Shadow, we see Henry as a teen at Hawkins High and, yes, Joyce is a theater girly. In the play, she’s trying to stage a version of The Dark Side of the Moon.

But the most important connection between Stranger Things: The First Shadow and the fifth and final season of Stranger Things are the caves where Max is hiding. There’s a reason why Henry is terrified of them and it comes up in the play.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow leans heavily into the urban legend that in 1943, the USS Eldridge disappeared during a government experiments to develop cloaking and teleportation techniques. In the play, the ship travels to Dimension X, an even more terrifying place than the Upside Down. When the ship returns, all but one officer has been massacred by alien beings. the sole survivor? Dr. Brenner’s (Matthew Modine) father, who returns to our reality with a different blood type. This inspires Dr. Brenner to devote his life to rediscovering Dimension X.

In the early 1950s, Brenner was involved in the Nevada Experiment. One of the scientists working on the project defected and stole equipment that he hid in caves near Rachel, Nevada. One day, a local little boy — Henry Creel — wandered into the caves while exploring with his toy spyglass. (The same one Holly finds!) The stolen equipment activates, sending Henry and the defector to Dimension X. There, Henry encounters the “entity,” or Mind Flayer.

When Henry returns to our world, he is forever altered, gifted powers and a new blood type. Brenner tracks him across the country, to where his family would settle in Hawkins, because he dropped the spyglass. This is how the Hawkins Lab began and why Henry is so terrified of the caves. It’s how he first became infected, if you will, with his dark, cosmic powers.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow was written by Stranger Things staff writer and story editor Kate Trefey. Interestingly, Trefey is credited with writing a single episode in the show’s fifth and final season: Stranger Things Season 5 Episode 6 “Escape from Camazotz,” set to debut on Christmas Day.

Camazotz is what Holly Wheeler nicknames Vecna’s mind as a nod to the prison planet in A Wrinkle in Time. Considering the title of the episode and the writer attached, expect any and all additional Stranger Things: The First Shadow crossover moments and Easter eggs to pop up there.