This essay contains spoilers for the series “Stranger Things.”
I have been trying to teach my kindergartener (and myself) that people who seem bad can always turn toward good. We’re often talking about a remote possibility indeed, but the Christian story has always been a study in the improbable. Conversion should be our abiding hope.
No such conversion happened in the series finale of the hit Netflix show “Stranger Things,” which was released on New Year’s Eve. Yet the episode contained a moment that was arresting simply because it admitted the possibility of redemption for the worst of sinners.
The show has always depicted evil vividly, much like Dungeons & Dragons, the game that helped inspire it. The finale reminded me in a unique way that evil is never one and the same with any human being. The Enemy goes back much further.
Set in the fictional town of Hawkins, Ind., in the 1980s, the series began with the disappearance of Will Byers, a preteen D&D enthusiast whose friends join his mother, brother and the local police chief to search for him. They discover the secret, government-run Hawkins Lab, where experiments into psychokinetic powers have run amok and opened a portal to a malevolent dimension, the Upside Down, which infernally mirrors their familiar small town.
Though Will is rescued, he retains an enigmatic psychic connection to that underworld—one mystery among many that are unraveled in subsequent seasons. It transpires that Will is intermittently controlled by a shadowy force that one of his friends dubbed the Mind Flayer, a hive mind forever seeking to merge new consciousnesses with itself. In Season 4, as we sense bigger answers at hand, we meet an alpha fiend, Vecna, whose human alter ego is the stony-faced Henry Creel.
Along the way, evil takes many forms: sinewy “demodogs” and “demogorgons”; a sprawling spider monster; the possession of humans whose eyes roll back in thrall to the Mind Flayer’s relentless power. As seasons progress and that power makes greater incursions into the known world, physical and psycho-spiritual realities become less distinct from each other. Evil literally looms over Hawkins, in crimson-tinged skies swirling with dark clouds.
Henry’s Journey
Perhaps I should have known, laying out the puzzle pieces, that Henry was not inherently evil, that his soul was, in a way, fallen territory in a very long war. His back story, after all, includes a human childhood in 1950s Hawkins. Nonetheless, I interpreted Vecna as one and the same with the Mind Flayer. Occasionally, he took the form of Henry—say, when he wanted to deceive children into befriending him. Then, as soon as this human disguise became unnecessary, it would fall away to reveal the tangled root-like contours of his true self.
Or so I thought. As it turns out, the show’s melding of the physical and the intangible means that Henry’s spiritual condition is represented through the melting face of Vecna. His “true self” remains an open question, right up until his final gruesome end.
When the children he has abducted finally escape from the prison of his own mind, Henry forces himself to pursue them into a cave that is the site of a traumatic childhood memory. He is shaky and weakened even before he sees the manifestation of himself as a boy—dressed in a Boy Scout’s uniform, no less—bludgeoning a Russian spy who has just shot him in the hand. After bashing the man with a rock, Henry opens the briefcase the Russian was clutching and finds a fragment from the Mind Flayer. “It will consume you. It will consume all,” the dying man gasps. It dawns on us, and on the observing Will (who has found his own powers, allowing him to spy through the hive mind), that Henry was not born as he is, but was infected with the Mind Flayer by chance through this fateful encounter.
“It wasn’t you. It was never you,” says Will, his voice full of sympathy, from deep inside Henry’s consciousness. “That’s why the Mind Flayer didn’t want you in the cave. It didn’t want you to remember.”
“Leave me alone,” answers Henry, but the ice in his voice has melted to liquid vulnerability. His face is transformed, too, softened by grief, fear and confusion.
Any daylight between Henry and the Mind Flayer is short-lived, however. Hard as Will tries to dislodge him from the Mind Flayer’s grip (“You can resist it.… Don’t let it win, Henry, please!”), Henry finally rejects his efforts, insisting that the Mind Flayer is right and the world of humankind is broken. “It needs me, and I need it,” he concludes, hardening again to proclaim his perverse anti-theology. “We are one.”
I don’t think I believed Will’s pleas would convince Henry to join the Hawkins gang of heroes. But seeing him teeter between light and dark electrified me all the same. Here, clearly signaled, was the agency God has granted us as long as there is life in us. Even Henry gets his opportunity to turn away from the demonic and be cleansed.
Facing the Devil
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils,” C. S. Lewis wrote in his preface to The Screwtape Letters. “One is to disbelieve their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”
The latter error is what worries those religious observers who have objected to “Stranger Things,” D&D, the Harry Potter series and almost any entertainment that personifies evil without following an explicitly biblical framework. They charge that these stories lead children toward the occult. For those of us leading a high-tech, 21st-century life, though, the first of Lewis’s possibilities seems the greater pitfall. To classify Satan as a cartoonish figment is the default.
I value a show like “Stranger Things” for its visceral depictions of an entity that has many vessels but one hideous intent. It reminds us that evil is not a gauzy abstraction but a real thing: a lying, manipulative force that understands and preys on our weaknesses. This serves several purposes that we might call “spiritually practical.”
The most obvious is that comprehending a specific enemy automatically rouses the imagination and makes us take our soul’s battle seriously. Let us be, each in our own way, teenagers throwing flames at the demogorgons of greed, envy and lust.
Maybe less obvious is how believing in the devil mitigates the temptation to hate other people whose actions we consider monstrous. A quick thought experiment shows me how different the models are. If I call someone evil (or, popular in today’s lexicon, toxic), I quickly become preoccupied with their wrongs. How can they be so cruel and heartless? Yet if I imagine that the Evil One has gained ground in that person’s soul, I can still hope for the person’s redemption without changing my attitude toward their deeds. I can partake in that hope while maintaining my baptismal vow to reject Satan’s works. Adding fellow humans to the blacklist no longer makes sense, since we share a common enemy.
Here we return to Lewis’s warning about “excessive interest” in devils. Our work isn’t to fixate on evil, no matter how prevalent it may be. “Whenever we foolishly turn our attention to those we deem not to be on a spiritual path,” wrote the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich, “our Lord God tenderly touches us and blessedly calls to us, speaking to our souls: Let me be the only object of your attention, my beloved child. Focus on me alone, for I am enough for you.”
Pathways to Sin
If we listen attentively to Christ and refrain from projecting our will on what we hear, then our mission is to love God and our neighbor. Anything that pulls us away from this mission is an evil. I’ve tried to limit my news consumption for this reason, noticing that gross injustice without any recourse to action is a swift path to wrathful thoughts. If my eye is leading me to sin, I’ll adhere to Matthew 18:9 and tear it out—or, as a first resort, shut the browser.
Believing in the existence of “the prince of this world” means being awake to his threat while comprehending his limits. The enemy is bigger and older than any one person, which makes it daunting—but redemption is available to every person because no one “is” evil, only subject to it. Evil is a trespasser in creation, and it can be driven out. Like Christ in the desert, we resist the tempter by seeing right through his sparkling cities, keeping our focus on the work of loving each other in humility and faith. If a partially corrupted vessel can wreak great evil, how much good can God accomplish with even a partial saint?
Not long ago I rewatched “Schindler’s List.” Its famous scene portraying Oskar Schindler’s remorse, though perhaps melodramatic, is instructive here. Schindler has a moral awakening, and his conscience is suddenly sensitive to the infinite potential of God’s goodness. This allows him to do right, but it also opens his eyes to “what I have done, and what I have failed to do.” The fact that he lives in a time of rampant evil, among men so corrupted they must be bribed to spare human lives, is peripheral. He is not seething with outrage but concerned with the only thing he can actually control: the work God might do through him.
Hope dwells here, in connection and love. Henry Creel seals his destruction by doubling down on isolation. Will Byers finds his strength by humbly reaching out to friends and family, asking for their embrace, and finding it.
Despite its hellish settings, “Stranger Things” draws us in like a cozy hearth. The dim realm of the Upside Down gives us biological matter minus any sense of God’s order: Tentacles reach, mucus oozes, particles float like dead skin in the air. Our heroes enter it and become steadfast in their bonds of mutual responsibility, sure in their mission, brave in their willingness to sacrifice. Call it “horror-comfort”: goodness shining brighter through the power of contrast.
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