Stranger Things: The First Shadow is the canon stage prequel that explains how Henry Creel became Vecna, how the Upside Down first touched our world, and why Hawkins keeps turning into a target.
The Duffers and the creative team developed the play and season 5 side by side, and they’ve stressed that you don’t need to see the stage show to follow the final season. The idea is that both stories “talk” to each other: if you watch the series first and then see the play, you’ll spot extra context in Henry’s backstory, the early Hawkins relationships, and a handful of Easter eggs that only theatre-goers will fully clock. At the same time, now that we know the whole plot, it’s clear that understanding what happens in London and on Broadway deepens almost every scene tied to Vecna, Project Rainbow, and Patty. Which is why a detailed Stranger Things: The First Shadow recap becomes so helpful: if you can’t get to the theatre, reading through the story first is the closest thing to being there, and it quietly prepares you to enjoy the fifth and final season on a different level.
The play moves between three timelines:
- A wartime experiment in 1943
- Henry’s childhood accident in Nevada
- Hawkins High in 1959, where Joyce, Hopper, and Bob Newby are seniors, and Patty Newby meets the new boy in town, Henry Creel.
Project Rainbow, Dimension X, and the infection of Henry Creel
The play opens in 1943 with Project Rainbow, a secret Navy experiment meant to make a ship invisible using electromagnetic fields. The experiment works a little too well. The ship blinks into Dimension X, a primordial version of the Upside Down.
A Demogorgon slaughters the crew. The only survivor is the captain, who is also Dr. Brenner’s father. When the ship snaps back, his blood type has changed, and he’s carrying something inside him: mind flayer particles from that other dimension.
Before he dies, he tells Brenner exactly what happened out there. That truth becomes the hinge of Brenner’s entire life. He pours himself into Project Rainbow, joins the research team in Nevada, and continues the work his father never got the chance to finish.
A Russian spy steals a container of those particles and flees. He dies near a cave system, the box goes missing, and a local boy is found wandering after being gone for twelve hours with no memory and a new blood type.
That boy is Henry Creel.
The play confirms what the series only hints at: Henry didn’t wake up “born wrong.” He was infected by Dimension X. The mind flayer gets in early and waits.
Hawkins High, The Dark of the Moon, and Patty Newby
Jump to October 1959. Hawkins looks familiar, but nearly everyone is a teenager. Bob Newby hosts a local radio show, Joyce dreams of a theatre scholarship, and Hopper is a restless gearhead with a bad relationship with his dad.
Henry walks into Hawkins High. It’s picture day, and in one sweep, we meet young versions of Ted and Karen, future parents of Mike, plus the parents of Lucas, Dustin, and Eddie.
Henry is shy, tightly wound, and already rumored to have “hurt a boy” at his last school in Nevada. When a bully presses him, the lights flicker, and a camera flash explodes.
Patty Newby, daughter of stern principal Robert Newby, steps in to defend him. Patty is “the girl from nowhere” with a mysterious past, a stack of comic books, and a father who resents her. She and Henry bond over their comics and over feeling like outsiders.
Joyce secretly ditches Oklahoma and chooses Dark of the Moon for the school play: a story about a witch boy who gives up his powers for love and pays the price. She casts Patty as the lead and Henry as her witch-boy counterpart, turning them into on-stage lovers before they’ve even had a real first date.
Animal killings, the bathroom vision, and Henry’s first nightmare
A string of pet murders hits Hawkins. Every dead animal belongs to someone in Joyce’s play. Bob, Joyce, and Hopper start investigating on their own, photographing Claudia Henderson’s mutilated cat and tracking patterns with Bob’s radio equipment.
We already know who’s responsible. Henry, still linked to the mind flayer, slips into the void (shown through red lasers and clock chimes) and unconsciously kills Claudia’s cat in a trance. His voice warps into Vecna’s tones as he lifts the animal and crushes it. When he wakes, he thinks it was only a nightmare.
The most crucial early scene for this Stranger Things: The First Shadow happens in the school bathroom. Henry suffers a vision where Patty appears as a puppet of the shadow, taunting him about future killings and urging him to “peel her open” so they can see what she’s like inside.
It’s the clearest look yet at how the mind flayer speaks through people and feeds on fear. The West End version keeps this disturbing but controlled; Broadway pushes it even further, turning Patty’s vision into something close to a horror set-piece.
Back in rehearsal, Henry, still rattled, insists that if Patty stays with him, she’ll die. Patty refuses to accept that. She calls his powers a “miracle,” not a curse, and kisses him. Every light in the room explodes.
The attic at the Creel House: Patty’s father and the mind flayer revealed
The investigation and Henry’s inner war collide at the Creel House.
Victor and Virginia Creel worry about their son’s “incident in Nevada” and what his friendship with Patty might trigger. Virginia has her own trauma from an abusive father who locked her in closets full of spiders, which Henry weaponizes against her in one of the play’s nastiest scenes.
Meanwhile, Bob’s interference tracker leads him, Joyce, and Hopper to the Creel property on the same night Henry tries to help Patty use his abilities to find her birth mother.
In the attic, Henry blindfolds himself, holds Patty’s hand, and takes them both into the void. They find her mother singing on a Vegas stage, but the shadow notices and hijacks the vision. Patty’s mother starts speaking directly to Henry, and the mind flayer pushes through.
Henry fights it and begs Patty’s father, Principal Newby, to get her out. Instead, in the struggle, Newby switches places with his daughter. Henry levitates, vines erupt, and Newby is crushed and thrown, his eyes later destroyed in a way Stranger Things fans will recognise.
Bob, Joyce, and Hopper arrive too late to understand the supernatural context. They see the aftermath: a traumatised family, an injured principal, and a boy who looks like the likely killer.
The montage that follows is crucial to Stranger Things lore:
- Principal Newby is blinded and later sketches the mind flayer in his own blood.
- Government reports flag Henry as a potential “subject” contaminated by “exotic material.”
- Contractors quietly recommission an old power plant that will become Hawkins Lab.
- Hazmat teams move into town, and Dr Brenner arrives at Henry’s bedside offering help.
Brenner’s lab, Project Rainbow, and the creation of Number One
Act Two shifts to Hawkins Lab, where Brenner interrogates Henry about the missing twelve hours in Nevada. He needles him until Henry explodes a lab rat with his mind, confirming what Brenner suspected: Henry is a weapon.
Through brain-monitoring equipment, Brenner forces Henry to relive opening the stolen Project Rainbow box as a child. Screens fill with Dimension X, a Demogorgon attack, and the first true human contact with that place. In some Broadway performances, Brenner’s father even appears in person, still half-possessed, tempting Henry to “let us in” before a temporary gate opens.
For Brenner, this is proof of concept. Henry’s blood type matches his father’s. When Henry kills, he doesn’t just lash out; he draws energy from his victims and grows stronger. If Brenner can tap that, he can open gates on command.
The problem is Henry himself. Patty reaches him in the void and convinces him that the shadow is using him, not loving him. For a brief moment, the mind flayer recedes. Henry runs, tries to quit the program, and refuses to kill a condemned inmate to “power up” the experiments.
Brenner pushes him too far. Henry snaps, kills the inmate and several guards, and escapes.
The play night, the Creel murders, and Patty’s fall
The Hawkins High production of Dark of the Moon becomes the hinge of the entire Stranger Things: The First Shadow.
Joyce, Hopper, and Bob plan to grab Victor Creel during the show and force a confession for the pet killings and the Creel House incident. Instead, they bag the wrong man, Lonnie, and miss the absolute horror unfolding above the stage.
Back at the Creel home, Henry, in the void, overhears Virginia bargaining with Brenner and planning a “last supper” before turning him in. This feeds his sense of betrayal. We see the dinner scene that later appears in Stranger Things season 4, but now from Henry’s perspective, with the mind flayer looming overhead. The white smoke of the shadow enters him as his mother and sister scream.
At the same time, Patty is backstage, ready for the final scene, rigged with angel wings to descend from the catwalk. On the catwalk itself, Henry begs her to run. He gives her the address of the Stardust casino in Las Vegas, where her mother works, and tells her to leave town without him.
Brenner climbs up, frames Henry as a killer, and insists he belongs to the government. Patty defends Henry, saying she has seen him fight the shadow. Then Brenner drops the final truth: Henry has just murdered his family.
Patty recoils. Henry admits it, torn between love and the rush of power. The shadow presses in. The mind flayer forms in red clouds above the stage as clocks chime and lights blow.
Henry and Patty pull at opposite sides of the tether. In the struggle, he pushes her away. The catwalk gives way. Patty falls in slow motion to the stage, the spotlight lands on her broken body, and Bob rushes to her side.
In the newspapers that follow, Patty is reported “missing.” In reality, she survives with lasting injuries and disappears from Hawkins.
Patty’s Vegas ending and what Stranger Things: The First Shadow sets up
The play’s epilogue jumps ahead. At Christmas 1960, Joyce works two jobs and flirts lightly with Hopper before he ships out to the army. Bob hosts a radio show and dedicates a song “for someone special, wherever she is.”
That song carries us to Las Vegas, where Patty, now using a cane, sneaks backstage after a show. A chorus girl finally recognises her as her daughter. They embrace, and the lights flicker. Patty looks up and whispers, “Henry,” suggesting their connection through the void isn’t entirely gone.
The final sequence is the most critical part of any Stranger Things fan. A blueprint of Hawkins Lab appears, with Henry at the top and ten lines running down to other children: the first wave of test subjects. Brenner explains that those ten have all survived blood transfusions with Henry’s unique blood. His powers now live in them.
The Department of Defense wants Henry eliminated. Brenner refuses. Instead, he offers Henry a role: help raise the children as their “brother” and handler.
A little girl sits on the floor with a toy. Henry kneels, introduces himself, and says he’s there to help. It’s Eleven. As he takes her hand, the play flashes a single, unforgettable image: the giant silhouette of Vecna holding a small child’s hand.
The lights cut to black.
What this Stranger Things: The First Shadow recap means for Season 5
As a bridge to season 5, Stranger Things: The First Shadow does three crucial things:
- It confirms that the mind flayer is the true puppet master and Henry is its most powerful host, not its creator.
- It shows that Brenner built the Hawkins Lab program by literally putting Henry’s blood into children, including Eleven’s generation.
- It anchors Joyce, Hopper, and Bob inside the same origin story, giving their adult choices in the series deeper roots.
When Stranger Things season 5 talks about Project Rainbow, Dimension X, Patty’s Vegas life, why Henry/Vecna is afraid of entering the cave, or Henry’s missing twelve hours, this is the text you’ll want to have open beside you.
