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reikunrei · 1 year

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Observations on the Behavior of Lights in Stranger Things - What Really Happened to Will in Season 1?

Recently, I watched all of Stranger Things again with the purpose of keeping an eye out for interesting details that I might have missed while just casually watching. This resulted in the flickering pattern of the Christmas lights in the Byers’ house in season 1 catching my eye, and now my question is:

Was it really Will talking through all of the lights in season 1?

I do believe that he’s responsible for certain instances, such as the “blink once for yes, twice for no” conversation with Joyce. However, I’m not so sure about many of the other moments.

While I do have several possible theories for what could be happening, my goal with this post isn’t to propose any one theory (or multitude of theories) as an explanation or as fact. I’m not that confident in myself! Rather, I wanted to catalog and share all of the different ways that the lights behave throughout the show, who is present in each scene, what activities are being performed, and how that makes certain scenes across seasons link together to possibly explain the disparities in season 1.

I haven’t seen anyone talk in-depth about the behavior of the lights, despite it being such an important visual element in the show, so I wanted to share my observations and thoughts and see if anyone else has ideas as well! I won’t be getting too off topic, and will only briefly mention details and information other than the lights to offer any necessary context, or things I find interesting to aid in some of my theories. Therefore, this might not be a totally complete and comprehensive post! I’ll get into personal interpretations and theories later, but I want to start with merely the objective appearance of the lights and how they aid in displaying the possible lore of the show.

Anyway, buckle in, because this is gonna be long as fuck!

First, let’s start with objective observations of how the lights behave throughout the show.

Here’s a list of descriptions of what each “type” is and the names I’ve attributed to them. I’ve also provided some visual examples for clarity, which I took only from season 1. Apologies for the low quality, I just used the free adobe gif converter tool lmao.

Flicker: Could be blamed on “faulty wiring” or a loose socket; the light appears to go on and off. Examples include the first time we see Joyce follow the lights leading to Will’s room in season 1, or when Terry manipulates the lights to lead El through the house back to the TV room in season 2.

Bloom: When lights suddenly become impossibly bright. Examples include when the lightbulb in the Byers’ shed gets bright when the Demogorgon corners Will, or when El uses her full strength against 001 in season 4 in the lab.

Strobe: When the lights require a photosensitivity warning; going on and off rapidly, leaving split seconds of no light. Examples of this include when the Demogorgon appears at the Byers’ house in season 1, when they’re fighting the Flesh Flayer in season 3, and when 001 is on his rampage in season 4.

Flutter: I might use this sometimes to describe when a light flickers, but it’s much softer and doesn’t necessarily appear to turn on and off; rather, it might merely get brighter and dimmer. Also like “faulty wiring.” Examples of this include when the light in the door at the Wheeler’s house reacts to the teens passing through in the UD in season 4, and the lights at the Russian prison when the Demogorgon is still locked in its cage.

Snap or Blink: When lights flick on suddenly, but aren’t turning rapidly on and off. Examples of this include some of the ways the Christmas lights behave in season 1.

Glow: When lights fade in and out softly without also becoming impossibly bright. Examples of this include when anyone interacts with lights from the UD.

A lot of these definitions are very subjective, and many of them are likely to overlap with each other, and I might view one scene as behaving one way, while you might think it’s another, and that’s fine! Any scenes that aren’t very distinctly different will likely end up grouped together anyway.

And now, for the longest part of this post: the play-by-play of each instance the lights do (or don’t) act up throughout the whole show.

I considered removing this list and just sticking with the parts I find relevant for my discussions later in the post, but I didn’t want to cherry pick. I also considered putting this at the end of the post for supplemental reading for anyone who was curious, but I feel that it’s important to objectively see the behavior of the lights first, and I want you to draw your own parallels and conclusions before my biases and interpretations come into play! But you can also just skip it if you want to, I can't stop you.

I haven’t added any timestamps or what episode each scene happens in, but I feel like they’re specific enough that you could go searching for them if you wanted to see it for yourself. And I encourage you to do so! It’s really quite fun to track down all of the discrepancies like this, imo.

Anyway, let’s go!!

Season 1

When Will first comes across the Demogorgon on his bike, the headlight flickers and goes out very briefly before turning back on.

When Will tries to call 911, as soon as it picks up, rather than getting the operator, we hear static and indistinct screeching/growling. Then, the chain lock on the door comes undone and he drops the phone, which is now beeping with its off-hook tone.

When the Demogorgon appears in the shed behind Will, the lightbulb doesn’t flicker, but it does bloom bright and then abruptly switch off when the two of them disappear.

When Hopper investigates the shed later, as he touches the hooks where the gun had been, the lightbulb flickers once and then goes out. He notices some damaged shelves and other messed up objects in the back corner, and investigates with a flashlight, which holds on steadily. Then Callahan comes into the shed and startles Hopper, which also makes the light flicker once and come back on.

The first time the phone rings at the Byers’ house, Joyce answers and hears Will’s breathing. There’s static, his breathing, and then a garbled chitter from a Demogorgon (subtitles say “garbled voice chitters”), followed by a growl and the phone getting fried. The lights do not flicker.

The phone rings the second time at the Byers’ house and Joyce answers. She hears Will say, “Mom,” and the lights in the house flicker/flutter briefly.

Then, the phone gets fried again and the lights flicker at the same time.

Then, the light in the hall ahead of her on the wall flickers/flutters, followed by the lamp at the end of the hall, and then the stereo in Will’s room blares “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” We also see the lights flickering under the door. When Joyce opens the door, the stereo is playing but no lights are flickering.

After she stands there for a moment, the lights flicker, and she touches a lamp that then surges super bright, and then everything abruptly turns off. Then, the Demogorgon starts to come through the wall and Joyce flees the house to try to drive away. However, the stereo turns on again and the lights flicker in Will’s room, and she goes back in.

Karen and Holly visit Joyce after she has up all the Christmas lights. One string of lights leading to Will’s room blinks on one bulb at a time, until a dozen or so are lit. Then, they all blink off at the same time, and then repeat the single-blink pattern again. Holly follows it to Will’s room.

We see the circle of lamps that Joyce has set up around Will’s bed, and all of the bulbs are blinking on in a repeating pattern, around in a circle. They speed up, getting faster and faster when Holly stands in the middle of them all, until they suddenly all go out. Then, Holly sees the Demogorgon begin to push through the wall, but Joyce and Karen find her first.

Joyce is at home when another string of lights starts blinking in the living room. Chester barks at it until she notices and follows it. A dozen or so blink on in a line, one bulb at a time, then all go out, and it repeats several times until Joyce follows it to the crawlspace in the wall. The trail of lights only stops after the bundle of white lights glows the first time.

The bundle of white lights glows when she asks if Will is there. They fade in and fade out. They don’t appear to be any brighter than they would be normally plugged in, but it’s possible that they might be brighter than normal. Then, she asks him to blink once for yes and twice for no. I also noticed that, when she’s holding them while they’re off, we can still see the filaments of the bulbs like they’re hot. With every question she asks, they glow in the same exact way.

Joyce makes the alphabet on the wall, and with the way it’s laid out, it’s one bulb per letter. There’s no extraneous bulbs floating between letters or anything. When those come on, they blink like the trails of lights did before, and sometimes they blink relatively fast between letters.

Joyce receives the RIGHT HERE and RUN messages. After the RUN message, all of the lights in the house start strobing and the Demogorgon breaks fully through the wall and Joyce runs out of the house.

When Nancy crawls through the gate in the tree, her flashlight flickers and turns off for very brief instances, but always comes back on. When she gets closer to the Demogorgon, it flickers more.

When Jonathan, Nancy, and Steve are at the Byers’ house, the lights start strobing when the Demogorgon shows up. When it disappears while they’re in Will’s room, the lights go back to normal and stay on. Steve makes to leave, but the lights start strobing again as he watches from outside.

The lights suddenly all go out, leaving Nancy and Jonathan in the dark, as it looms up behind Jonathan, and the lights begin strobing again when it attacks him and pins him to the floor.

The lights continuously strobe as they fight with the Demogorgon, and they only stop once it disappears after getting caught in their trap.

As Joyce and Hopper walk through the UD Byers’ house, the Christmas lights glow as they walk under them, fading in and out and following their presence, rather than blinking like we’d seen them behave before. We also see one of the street lights flutter/flicker as they walk down the street.

When El uses her powers to fight the agents at the school, their flashlights and the lights in the hall flicker and strobe.

When the Demogorgon shows up at the school, they strobe.

When Will coughs up the slug in the bathroom, the lights flicker when he goes in and out of his vision of the UD.

Season 2

When we see Kali use her powers for the first time, no lights flicker.

The games and lights at the arcade only flicker after Will falls into his UD vision, then they turn off completely.

When we first see the lab burn the gate, none of the lights around them flicker.

When Will sees the Mind Flayer out his front door in the middle of the night, none of the lights flicker.

At the same time, the alarms at the lab start going off as their research equipment inside the UD gets fried, and the lights only stop flashing when it gets fixed in the following episode.

When we see El use her powers sparingly at the cabin, the lights don’t flicker.

This includes when she “finds” Mike.

When Dustin finds Dart in the trash can, the light above it doesn’t flicker at all. Even when Dart gets worked up, no lights react.

When Will finds Dart and is startled out of the bathroom, he goes out into the hall and looks around like he senses something. Then, the lights all start flickering/strobing until it turns into the UD.

When El has her frustrated outburst at the cabin with Hopper, she shatters all of the windows but none of the lights appear to react.

When El “finds” Terry, no lights flicker.

When Hopper first goes into the tunnel, his flashlight doesn’t flicker. It holds steady the entire time he’s down there.

Terry makes the lights flicker/flutter in a trail around the house until El joins her in the TV room again. Then she changes the channels until it hits static, and El is certain it’s Terry telling her she wants to talk.

When Steve and Dustin go into the storm cellar after Dart, no lights flicker.

When Hopper goes down the lift to see the extended gate, no lights flicker.

When Kali and El confront Ray, El makes the TV turn off, but the lights don’t react otherwise. When Kali makes him see them as kids, the lights flicker between their changing appearances, but this may have been a deliberate choice on Kali’s part for the drama of it all.

When El strangles Ray, the lights don’t react.

When the Demodogs come up the elevator shaft, the lights don’t flicker. They also hold steady even when they break through the glass, the only flashing is that of the alarm.

Then the power through the whole lab goes out. The lights flicker as they go out, but otherwise the rest of their time before they return power is completely dark. Flashlights don’t even flicker as they maneuver through the building.

When Will screams, “Why am I tied up?” in the shed, the lights in there and in the house begin flickering/strobing. They only stop when he deflates and settles back in his chair.

When Will figured out where they were, it didn't make the lights react.

When they’re at Hopper’s cabin, the electricity doesn’t go wack when Will wakes up right away.

The flashlights don’t flicker when the kids go down into the tunnels, not even when they light the hub on fire.

When the Mind Flayer finally tries to leave Will’s body, then the lights start flickering. They continue when he strangles Joyce. The lights only stop when the Mind Flayer is totally gone from his body and flees the cabin.

When El closes the gate, the lights bloom super bright. The car headlights, the lights at the cabin, and likely elsewhere that we don’t see. Then, they gently fade back to normal when she finishes.

Season 3

When the power goes off the first time the Russians turn on the key in Hawkins, it just flat shuts off like a normal blackout. The second time, just the magnets fall and we don’t see another power outage.

When Billy gets dragged into the steel works, the lights don’t flicker or anything. This could just be because there’s no real power at the warehouse, but there are some lights on the outside and his car is still there. None of these appear to react in any way.

When Billy runs out, we still don’t see any lights react and his car works fine. Only when he gets to the phone booth does anything happen. When he recalls what just happened before speaking to the 911 operator, it’s possible lights may have been flickering inside the steel works, but it may just have been a visual stylistic choice to have dark frames interspersed in his memory. Still, it’s reminiscent of the strobing of lights.

The light in the phone booth flickers, the phone gets distorted and full of static, and then the power completely shuts off as he’s plunged into his UD vision.

When Heather meets the Flesh Flayer, we again see no lights flicker.

When Billy is first trapped in the sauna, no lights flicker. After he busts through the window and Lucas hits him with the Wrist Rocket, the lights finally begin strobing as he’s “activated.” At the same time, Mrs. Driscoll becomes activated at the hospital and the lights start strobing in her room.

The lights continue to strobe as Billy and El face off, and they appear to strobe even faster when El uses her powers on him. When El throws him through the wall, the lights keep flickering, and finally stop when the Mind Flayer picks Billy up and walks him away.

When Tom shows up at Driscoll’s now-empty room with Nancy and Jonathan, the lights inside start flickering, and then the lights in the hall start up too. As they’re chased by Bruce, the lights across the entire floor are strobing heavily. Nothing is flickering on the main floor where the kids are.

The lights seem to ease up just a little when Nancy and Jonathan get far enough away from Bruce, but they speed up again when he catches them up.

After the two of them are killed, the lights start to slow down but are still flickering. Now we also see that the lights on the main floor begin to flutter, light enough that Will is the only one to notice it first.

Then, the lights upstairs begin strobing again as the bodies melt. When the Tom and Bruce sludges meet, the lights go out completely for a few beats, leaving us in darkness, before abruptly and rapidly strobing as the creature stands up and roars. They continue to strobe as El fights it and flings it out of the window.

As the Flesh Flayer gets closer to them at the cabin, the lights begin flickering/fluttering very sparingly. When the first tendril breaks through the wall, they flicker faster, and may technically be strobing, but it’s not as noticeable with the soft cabin lighting. They don’t get any more or less intense when El uses her powers.

When we first see the blood from El’s wound “come alive” on the floor of the supermarket, the lights don’t flicker. They only flicker when Billy shows up and touches it to confirm it’s El’s.

When El uses her powers to save the Scoops Troop, it doesn’t make any of the lights go off. The only lights that flash are the car headlights, but that’s because she set off the alarm deliberately.

When the slug on El’s leg first starts moving, no lights react, and they continue to behave normally even when Jonathan cuts the wound open and fishes in her leg. When E uses her powers to rip it out herself, though, the glass of the storefront behind them shatters and the lights flicker/strobe. Once it’s out and flung away, they go back to normal.

When the Flesh Flayer first shows up on the roof, the lights don’t react. They only start to flicker and strobe when it settles on the floor of the mall and roars. While the Flesh Flayer is present, the lights continue to strobe throughout the whole mall.

An odd discrepancy is that when they all get outside to try to leave, the outdoor lights aren’t flickering despite them having clearly been flashing when Steve saw the mall from Wheathertop. They also don’t flicker when the Flesh Flayer crawls over to chase them in their car.

As El, Mike, and Max are running back into the mall in the back halls to flee from Billy, the lights are strobing. They continue when Billy gets El back to the food court.

The lights continue to strobe as they fight with the fireworks, and keep strobing in the same amount when they run out of ammo and Billy and the Flesh Flayer face off. They continue even when Billy dies.

The lights only stop once the Flesh Flayer is in a heap on the ground after the key is destroyed. Some lights do keep flickering, but it appears to be from structural damage.

When we see the Demogorgon in the pit in Russia, the lights flicker when it comes out of its cage.

Season 4

When we see the beginnings of the massacre, no lights are reacting. When Brenner wakes up, they are. By the time Brenner makes it to the Rainbow Room, the lights have stopped.

When Chrissy is in the bathroom, the lights start strobing when “her mom” makes the comment about loosening her dress. Then the door is rattled as they continue to strobe, before suddenly stopping.

When Chrissy first falls into her trance in Eddie’s trailer, the lights don’t flicker. In her trance, we see the lights flickering in her house. This happens at the same time as when Eddie tries to wake her up and the lights in his trailer flicker. They become more strobe-like when she lifts into the air and is killed.

Max tells Dustin that the lights in her trailer flickered too, also fairly close to strobing, but only for a few brief seconds. They stopped just before Eddie ran out of his trailer.

When the Hawkins gang all leave the trailer park, the Chrissy gate starts to grow (though still looks more like a water stain) and the lights flicker and the trailer shakes briefly.

In Max’s trance at school, none of the lights flicker in or out of the trance.

When Victor tells Nancy and Robin about his history, we see Henry sitting in the house drawing and the light behind him flutters.

When the murders happen, it starts with the radio coming on and flipping through channels. The lights only begin to flicker when Victor tries to touch the device, and they continue as he tries to escape with the kids. When Victor comes out of his trance, the lights are back to normal as Henry lays on the ground.

When El is first in NINA, when she gets the memory “wrong,” the lights flicker and go out before “resetting” the memory.

When the Hawkins gang first gets to the Creel house, the lights are all off, no power at all. When Steve and Dustin go upstairs, one of the overhead lights flutters to life very briefly.

After El runs in and out of doors at HNL, she stops in the hall frustratedly and the lights flicker until they turn off, and the memory resets again.

The light next to Max and Lucas starts glowing and pulsing, flickering lightly, then goes out when Max tries to touch it. The flickering/glowing moves to a new spot. They are glowing, fading in and out, with a slight flickering mixed in, as Vecna moves past them.

We see the circle-of-lightbulbs memory, and when 002 does it, they move very fast. It’s hard to tell if they’re snapping on and off as he makes the light move around or if they’re fading in and out because of how fast it is. When El tries it, one bulb glows and flutters very weakly, then fades out before she can get it to move.

The exercise is interrupted by sudden memories of the massacre. Her hands are covered in blood, she’s suddenly alone, and when she walks out into the hall toward the Rainbow Room, the lights are strobing.

The Hawkins gang gets together in the Creel living room (?) and the chandelier above them glows and flutters. Then, it goes out and they run around with their flashlights. Their flashlights glow as they follow him to the attic. We can see off screen that the light in the attic is fluttering/flickering.

Then, as they all stand under the light, the bulb and their flashlights begin to glow and pulse, no flickering now, just a steady fading brighter and dimmer. When Patrick is killed, all of the lights bloom impossibly bright, before all of the bulbs shatter one by one in quick succession.

When El uses her burst of power when she tries to escape NINA the second time, the lights around her bloom super bright, and some shatter, sending sparks flying behind her. After the outburst, some of the lights are still flickering, but more like they’ve been damaged.

During the pushing exercise at the lab, the lights don’t flicker, even when El uses her grief to give her strength.

In any other snippets El gets of the massacre, the lights around her flicker.

When Steve approaches Watergate, his flashlight holds steady, and continues to hold steady the whole time it’s in the UD.

Season 4 continued bc of the way text posts work i guess

When they get to the UD Wheeler house, the lights at the door in the RSU flutter gently. Then, Steve hears Dustin talking. They try to mess with the lights, but when Nancy tries a nearby table lamp, it doesn’t react at all. The light switch also doesn’t work. Then, they see the sparkly particles around the chandelier when the flashlight beam runs over it. When they touch it, it glows and pulses, getting brighter the closer they are.

When the demogorgon in Russia roars from behind its door, the lights outside flutter, but it could also be shoddy wiring.

When they use the pegboard lightbox, the particles appear in the UD after they turn it on. The lightbox glows and fades when they use it, no flickering at all.

The door to the demogorgon pit opens and the lights are the same, just very sparingly fluttering. They actually start flickering when the Demogorgon rushes out. They continue even when Hopper gets the spear in its mouth, and they flicker in the Demogorgon cage once Hopper and Antonov get inside. However, when they get out the other side of it, those lights aren’t flickering at all.

The lights in RSU Eddie’s trailer don’t flicker when they get the gate open.

When El takes Soteria out of 001, the lights strobe and flicker, and only stop once it’s out and the two of them settle.

When Nancy is in her trance, we don’t see any lights in the RSU flickering.

When El leaves the closet to find 001, the lights in the hall are flickering. They begin strobing the closer she gets to the Rainbow Room. They’re the most intense in the room itself and only stop once 001 has killed 002.

When Nancy goes through the Creel house in Vecna’s mind, she follows Henry and sees lights fluttering around/behind him.

When Henry turns back the clock, we don’t see any lights flicker.

When El and 001 face off, the lights strobe rapidly. When El gets the memory of her birth as 001 has her in the air, about to kill her, the lights continue to strobe, but also bloom impossibly bright as she gets up the strength to fight back. She gets him through the window and pinned to the wall as the lights strobe. Lights in real life in NINA even begin to flicker. In the memory, the lights go dim, but continue to flicker as she dematerializes him. Then, as the red gate glows in front of her, the lights in the rest of the room go out completely. The vines crawl inside the gate and it closes, and the lights flicker back on and hold steady when Brenner enters the room.

As Nancy walks through Hawkins lab during the massacre, the lights are strobing. “Take a seat, Nancy.” The lights flicker and go out, and when they flicker back on, she’s tied to the tattoo chair. When Vecna shows her his plan, the lights strobe rapidly.

The lights in the prison are still flickering as the Demogorgon runs around in the pit. When they get to the room with the tied up Demodog, the lights are strobing in there as well. When Hopper kills it, the lights stop. The presence of the part of the Mind Flayer (?) doesn’t seem to make the lights react.

When El wakes up and uses her powers for real, all of the lights in NINA flicker and strobe.

When El forces the door open to leave, the lights flicker and continue to do so when she fights with Brenner. They only stop when the drugs kick in and she falls to the ground.

When Erica finds Vecna, the lantern glows and pulses rhythmically with his presence.

When El gets in the pizzeria bath and starts to find Max, the lights flicker rapidly. They get more and more intense, closer to strobing, the farther she goes. Then, once she’s settled in Max’s mind, they continue to flicker/strobe, but not overbearingly so.

As Max runs through the Creel house in her trance, the lights flicker.

When the Russia crew gets back to the prison, the room where the Demodogs were has some lights flickering, possibly also from damage.

In the RSU, the lights aren’t flickering at the Creel house; not the lantern nor Lucas’s flashlight.

The flashlights of those in the UD Creel house don’t flicker.

In Russia, as they wander closer to where the creatures are, the lights flicker more and more.

The lights at Eddie’s trailer don’t react, even when the bats attack.

The lights in the pizzeria strobe faster when El starts fighting Vecna. No lights react in Max’s mind.

While El is choking and during Mike’s speech, the lights in the pizzeria are a little more subdued but are still flickering. They pick up speed and intensity when she gets her strength back.

When the Demogorgon is killed in Russia, the lights stop.

When the gate in the Creel house opens, the lantern doesn’t react in any way. The lights in Eddie’s trailer don’t react either, other than from structural damage when the gate bursts outward. The lights of the nearby trailers don’t react. Even the lights at the Wheeler house don’t react during the “earthquake.”

The lights in the pizzeria are still flickering as El tries to save Max, but less intense than before.

When El tries to go into Max’s mind at the hospital, no lights in the room react.

Tired of reading? Too bad! Time to get into my personal thoughts, baby.

What Can We Infer from Each of These Different Behaviors? What Scenes are Linked to One Another?

Obviously, there’s going to be moments where the lights are used for stylistic reasons, and so they may behave in a certain way purely because it “looks nice.” However, I want to mention again my whole reason for noting down all of these observations:

The fact that we have been told that, whenever any lights react in season 1 (other than the strobing when the Demogorgon appears), they should be attributed to Will. And yet, there is a distinct difference in the way a person interacts with the lights from within the UD and when they’re affected by some other energy or manipulation. Specifically, the way the colorful Christmas lights behave early on in the season when “Will” is manipulating them, and when they react to the presence of Joyce and Hopper in the UD.

If they were purely for visual stylization, they likely would have behaved in the same manner: either all of them would have glowed and faded in and out, or they all would have snapped on one at a time. The fact that they behave so differently has me so interested in what was really happening there.

So, certain behaviors can be linked to certain kinds of scenes:

Flickering lights most often occur during lower-energy moments, or almost like “transitional” details within a scene. This includes the light in the shed flickering on and off when Hopper investigates; when visuals change such as the visions of the RSU vs UD, or even when Kali changes her and El’s appearance to Ray; when the Demogorgon is present, but not on a rampage. It also happens as a way to grab the attention of a character. This includes the lights flickering in the Byers’ house to get Joyce into Will’s room; Terry “talking” to El in season 2; and, while less deliberate, grabs the attention of Will in season 3 in the hospital. It also often happens in conjunction with something else that requires more of our attention, and appears as an additional background detail. This includes when the lights flicker as the Byers’ phone gets fried and when the Chrissy gate grows minutely. Out of any kind of light behaviors, this one feels the most “unimportant,” for lack of a better word. It’s used in a lot of different situations, which can only loosely be linked to one another simply because it’s a different behavior from the more notable or “important” ones.

Blooming lights happen very sparsely, and so it’s very easy to pick out. The only times lights bloom impossibly bright are when the Demogorgon finds Will in the shed; when Joyce touches the lamp in Will's room; when El closes the gate in season 2; when Patrick is killed; when El fights off the guards at NINA when she tries to escape after her first bath (and tbh this one is a little more up in the air for me, as it’s not as blatantly an example of this phenomenon); and finally when she garners the strength to fight back against 001 in the HNL massacre. That is a total of 5 (or 6) times in the entire show thus far. It’s been most frequently tied to El using her powers during great moments of strength, but it’s also connected to Vecna when he obtains another victim, which he admitted was a way to acquire El’s powers. Overall, the blooming lights happen during extremely high-energy moments in which an action requires a lot of effort, and seems to be directly tied to El and Vecna’s powers. That leaves the season 1 Demogorgon as the only outlier, but we won’t touch that just yet!

Strobing lights are what I would consider to be the most recognizable light behavior in Stranger Things. They’re tied to very high-energy, chaotic moments. They occur most frequently whenever a Demogorgon appears and is on a rampage; when the Mind Flayer appears and is on a rampage; when El uses her powers to fight back against someone other than the Demo-monsters (such as in the school in season 1 when they’re cornered by the HNL agents), or in generally high-stress situations such as removing Soteria from 001’s neck and finding Max; and when Vecna and 001 use his powers.

Fluttering lights are a little harder for me to pick out, as you probably noticed with the several times I accompanied it with “flickering.” For the most part, fluttering lights are something soft and inconsequential. More like the last ripple on the surface rather than the drop of water itself, if that makes sense. It’s also most often tied to something more akin to actual electrical damage or faulty wiring than anything actually being supernaturally manipulated, at least in my opinion.

Snapping or Blinking lights are also extremely sparse. The only actual moments I feel 100% confident in attributing this label to are the Christmas light trails in season 1, and even that only happens twice. I also connect it to the alphabet, as they do individually blink on and off rather than fading into light. It can also be attributed to the circle of lamps that Joyce set up in Will’s room, and that scene immediately reminded me of the circle-of-bulbs experiment we see El’s memory of in season 4. However, as I stated previously, it was hard for me to tell if the bulbs were fading on rather than snapping on when 002 was manipulating them, and when we saw El try it, the bulb faded in and glowed gently rather than merely snapping on. However, it’s not a stretch to assume that a light could just be snapped on by using their powers if they were fine-tuned enough.

Glowing lights are most often connected to manipulation from the UD. This includes the bundle of white lights, the colorful Christmas lights that glow when Jim and Joyce pass under them, anytime the Hawkins gang follows Vecna’s presence in the Creel house, and when the teens talk to Dustin, Lucas, and Erica in the Wheeler house. I took zero notes of any glowing lights in season 2 or 3, because at that time, there was nobody in the UD that we were immediately concerned with.

So, now that all of the evidence is laid before us, we return to my main question:

What was going on with Will in season 1?

We’ve established that when someone physically touches or interacts with a light in the UD, they glow in the RSU, fading in and getting brighter the closer you get to it. So, why do the Christmas lights behave so differently?

When I first noticed how they blinked on in their little trails in the scenes with Holly and Joyce, part of me thought that maybe it was something that was retconned later, and it was always meant to be Will physically interacting with them to get the attention of the people in the RSU. However, I knew that this could be tested when Joyce and Hopper were in the UD. So, I eagerly waited for that scene in the final episode.

And, boy, when I tell you I was excited, I was excited.

It was immediately proven that when someone physically interacts with lights from the UD, they glow and fade rather than blinking on and off. It was a deliberate choice to make the Christmas lights in “Will” scenes blink on in rapid succession, and a deliberate choice to make them fade in and out when Joyce and Hopper passed underneath them. We see the lights behave in the same way throughout season 4, where we’re directly shown people interacting with them in the UD.

So, automatically, those blinking trails and the alphabet are an obvious outlier and cannot be immediately attributed to Will’s physical manipulation.

Now I want to discuss some specific scenes and details I found interesting or important, both in the way they connect to moments in season 1, and simply for the lore of the UD and its inhabitants:

In season 4, when Nancy first runs to one of the lamps in the Wheeler house to try and turn it on, it doesn’t react. We don’t even see any of the glowing particles around it. This made me wonder if the light possibly no longer exists in that spot in the house in the RSU, since we know that the UD is stuck on November 6, 1983. Nancy makes a point to pick out all of the things that are different in her bedroom, so it’s easy to believe that a simple table lamp may have been moved to another spot, so that its mirror in the UD is no longer accurate, and therefore there is no power in the RSU to manipulate in that spot. I tried keeping an eye out for it in shots of the RSU, but couldn’t spot it to prove whether this was a correct assumption.

I also want to highlight again the similarities between the circle of lamps in Will’s room in season 1, and the circle-of-bulbs exercise we see in season 4. The lights in Will’s room do not blink on randomly like they do the first time Joyce goes in there, or when the lights strobe around a whole room. These lights continuously blink on in a circle over and over again, and speed up, appearing much like how the circle-of-bulbs looks when 002 is manipulating them. Even when they get going really fast, they don’t lose their pattern, and they do not behave like Will’s in the UD running around in a circle through these little spots of glowing particles. I’m extremely drawn to how similar it is to the scene in season 4, and I can’t help being convinced that we’re meant to tie them together.

The alphabet is also interesting to me. It makes sense that it would be Will talking to Joyce, trying to communicate that he’s right there, that she needs to run before the monster shows up, but the behavior of the lights is too similar to the blinking trails to fully believe they’re being physically manipulated by someone in the UD. I’ll say that when I was watching the scene, I hesitated a little bit, and am not entirely certain where to place these lights. While they do blink on and off rather than explicitly fading in and out, they don’t appear to be as snappy as the trails from before. There are also moments where it looks like some of the letters that are farther apart blink on too fast, seemingly faster than Will might have been able to achieve with his physical body.

I was also very interested in the fact that, when Joyce is explaining to Hopper that she “just talked to Will,” she’s far more insistent on the glowing bundle of white lights being Will rather than the alphabet. It could just be because she’s trying to not make herself out to be crazy, but they could have very easily made her insist on the alphabet being Will as well. Throughout season 1, there’s several instances where she talks about how she can “feel” Will, and even admits that she can no longer “feel” him after she hacks open the front wall of the house when she saw Will there. I’m inclined to believe that she somehow can feel him. Whether it be supernatural or pure motherly instinct, something is telling her that Will is there or that he isn’t, and so when she insists that the bundle of lights was Will, but doesn’t insist that the alphabet was, too, that sticks out.

I was also intrigued by the fact that Terry could manipulate the lights in her house when El showed up. Did Brenner try to place powers into grown adults, before giving up and going for children, and then genetically engineering them from birth? I’m not going to get too into this whole line of thinking right now, because the history of his experiments deserves a whole post of theories on its own, but I wanted to point out the fact that Terry did manipulate the lights and the TV, or at least El was led to believe that was the case, especially because the way those lights behave is very similar to the way the lights in the Byers’ house flutter and flicker when Joyce is first led to Will’s room. In both cases, the lights are trying to grab their attention.

The fact that the Demogorgon seems to be able to open temporary gates is confounding to me. Overall, the way the Demogorgon appears throughout the entire first season is very bizarre, and doesn’t seem to be normal Demogorgon behavior. We don’t really see a lot of the abilities of a Demogorgon throughout the rest of the show, but I feel like it’s safe to say that it’s not normal for them to be able to open gates because otherwise the one trapped in the Russian prison would have tried to escape into the UD already. The way it appears is either in the blink of an eye with no sound or hole it was climbing out of, or it pushes through the wallpaper or drywall very viscerally. The way the walls seem to stretch and rip is extremely notable to me; we never see this happen anywhere else. Plus, how can it open gates? And why are they temporary? It leads me to believe that Vecna might be opening the gates for it to go in and out, but because his true power doesn’t lie in opening gates like we’ve been led to believe with El, they simply might not be strong enough to stick around. It should also be noted that even in the instances that the Demogorgon tears through the walls or ceiling, there is never a scratch left when we return to the same spot later. The only time a hole is left in the wall is when Joyce hacks through it with the ax.

In season 1, while the Christmas lights fade in and out as Joyce and Hopper pass through them, the street lights outside instead flutter. The main difference between these two is that the Christmas lights were off, while the street lights were on. Perhaps this means that when lights are off, they have room to turn on without getting overpowered. Meaning, if the lights are already on, they don’t have room to “fade on” and thus might flutter instead as the power surges greater than the bulb or socket can handle.

We see something similar to this in season 4 when the Hawkins gang are following Vecna around inside the Creel house. The lights do glow and fade into being whenever he’s present near one, but they also often have a flickering quality. This could possibly be attributed to the fact that the power has long been cut off at the RSU Creel house, so rather than manipulating an existing electrical current, he’s forcing power through dead sockets. It also could possibly be because he’s no longer entirely human, and we have yet to explicitly see the presence of a Demo-monster in the UD make a light glow on when it draws near. Instead, a Demo-monster only ever makes lights flicker or strobe. Therefore, the way the lights in the Creel house behave could be because Vecna is part human and part Demo-monster.

Now you might be saying, but Wilbur, the light in the shed in season 1 glowed and bloomed super bright! That one didn’t flicker! And to that I say, yes, you’re right! Where else have we seen that phenomenon? When El uses her full-strength powers and when Vecna kills his victims.

Theories

As I stated at the start of this post, I don’t have any single theory, or even any multitude of theories, that I’m married to. I will not be disappointed if any of my ideas do not end up proven correct in the show. But I will be upset if no explanation is given at all lol. Some of these theories also won’t be super fleshed out, and ultimately lead to more questions than answers, as many of them are just brief thoughts that would require further research that I haven’t done! Rather, I want to present them for folks to chew on in their own way.

The question at the core of all of these theories is: What was really going on with Will, the Demogorgon, and the UD in season 1?

Will has powers and he was manipulating the lights outside of his physical body. I am 100% on board with the “Will has powers” theory, though I don’t believe they’re powers in the way El or Henry or 001 have powers. If anything, he might be closer to Henry, in that it’s something he was “naturally born with,” while it’s becoming more and more obvious that El’s powers were genetically engineered, either from the drug experiments Terry endured or due to some level of “breeding” using Henry’s genetics. It also could have been something he gained when he entered the UD, rather than having it the whole time in the RSU, which is even something Mike proposes in season 2. While the lights that glow and fade are directly tied to a person’s physical presence, the lights could behave in other ways if being affected by a mental energy input.

Vecna (or some other version of him) was present with Will in the UD. The way many of the lights behave in season 1 can be linked with ways Vecna, Henry, and 001 make the lights behave in season 4. It can be assumed that 001 also performed that circle-of-bulbs exercise in HNL, and he could have become very skilled at it, and therefore could have made the same thing happen in season 1 with the lights in Will’s room to lure in Holly as another victim for the Demogorgon.

El was present with Will in the UD, perhaps from the future/an alternate timeline. Similar to the Vecna version of this theory, many of the ways the lights behave in season 1 can be connected to other ways they behave in the presence of El in later seasons. First example that comes to mind is the brightly blooming lightbulb in the shed. This could also be linked to Vecna, but the way it goes so bright without bursting makes me think of all the times El has done the same thing when using her powers. How was she connected to the Demogorgon, then? Was the Demogorgon going to kill Will, but El swooped in to save him, thus resulting in the surge of power as she perhaps fought or distracted the Demogorgon long enough for Will to slip away and hide? We don’t see the lights bloom when Barb gets taken, so there has to be some other factor making that happen, especially also because the Demogorgons and other Demo-monsters are never again connected to bright blooming lights, only flickering and strobing. Also no I’m not going to further explain the alternate timeline thing, you just have to trust me on it if you’re not already aware of that set of theories.

Both El and Vecna were present with Will in the UD in varying ways, and they’re both affecting the lights in different scenes. If I had to pick one theory to go with, it would be this one. We’ve already established that the lights behave in ways similar to Vecna and El’s powers rather than merely from physical manipulation, but the intention behind some of the scenes contradict. For example, the blinking trail of Christmas lights in the Holly scene results in a threatening outcome, with Holly seemingly being lured into a trap for the Demogorgon. Meanwhile, the blinking trail in the bundle of white lights scene leads to a non-threatening outcome in which Joyce gets to talk to Will and nothing bad happens immediately after. Therefore, Vecna could have been the one present in the Holly scene, while El was present in the Joyce scene, leading her to Will’s hiding spot in the UD so that she could receive confirmation that her son is alive and talk with him, giving both her and Will hope of rescue. For all three of these theories, I believe it could be happening to make the timeline go in a specific direction, with Vecna trying to get his desired outcome with Will, while El fights against him in order to rescue her brother instead. The way the Demogorgon pops in and out of temporary gates also makes me think one or both of them are there creating these openings for it. We even see two different kinds of entrances with the Demogorgon: forcing itself through walls and stretching/breaking them, and intact gates that it and others (like Nancy) crawl through before they’re swallowed back up by the RSU and closed. Based on the context of the different scenes in which these differences appear, I would attribute the stretching/breaking scenes (multiple times with Joyce; Holly; at the school) to Vecna, as he doesn’t have the direct ability to open gates unless he has a victim to go with it, and I would attribute the intact gates (potentially the scene in the shed; the tree; the leftover gate in the school) to El. Similar to the threatening vs. non-threatening scenes with the lights, we have the same distinction with the gates. In the “Vecna” scenes, someone’s life is always in danger and the Demogorgon is dropped in as a way to cause more carnage and chaos. In the “El” scenes, the presence of the gate is a way to create safety. I can’t explicitly assume that there was a gate in the shed scene, since we never actually see one intact and the only evidence of any UD residue is when Brenner and HNL come to investigate, but the one in the tree could be interpreted that way, as the Demogorgon drags the dead deer into the UD before it can entirely register the presence of Nancy and Jonathan and pose a threat to them. And even though Nancy endangers herself by crawling through it, it remains open long enough for her to get out but leave the Demogorgon locked inside. The gate in the school that El exits out of at the start of season 2, while likely the gate that the Demogorgon created when it showed up, somehow managed to stay open, when other instances of the Demogorgon bursting through the wall didn’t leave a scratch, and it allowed El to return to the RSU.

The Demogorgon is actually a person entirely corrupted by the UD. Whether it be Vecna or El (or I’ve seen some sort of vague mentions of it somehow being Brenner), it’s entirely possible that all of these light manipulations are coming from the Demogorgon itself, and it’s somehow much more sentient than the later Demo-monsters that we see.

The Demogorgon is just a Demogorgon, but is being directly ordered by the Mind Flayer and/or Vecna. Similar to above, the Demogorgon could be doing all of these manipulations, but rather than the power coming from the Demogorgon itself, it’s more of a vessel for Vecna or the Mind Flayer, and thus the manipulation is being channeled through the Demogorgon. Maybe they just happen to use the Demogorgon because it managed to get out of the gate and into the RSU.

Closing Thoughts

We’ve slowly but surely been learning more about how the UD behaves, and how our characters manipulate the world they exist in. However, as I stated earlier in the post, it mostly leaves me with more questions than answers. I have plenty of ideas, sure, but this post does not contain the entire plethora of necessary information to formulate an entirely solid theory. I merely wanted to present the observations I collected of the lights throughout the show, and any other details that have stuck in my mind as tangentially related, and bring them into the conversation of just what happened with Will in season 1, why so much of it is so different from other information we’ve been given about the UD and its creatures, and how it will tie into the ending of the series.

All I’m certain of is that these disparities I’ve noticed – these behaviors that I’m confident were not manipulations by Will’s hands – are not flukes and shouldn’t be ignored. They’re deliberate and important, and I think they’re a gigantic clue about what was really happening, and can lead to why it was happening.

If it wasn’t all Will, then who was it? If it wasn’t all physical manipulation, then what was it? Why was the Mind Flayer/Vecna so hellbent on getting Will in his clutches again in season 2? Why can he still feel the Mind Flayer in season 3 and Vecna in season 4? How is he still tied to the UD? How will time travel or alternate timelines tie into the strangeness of season 1?

Was it all merely because the Duffers didn’t know they’d be getting more than 1 season, so they made artistic choices to keep it coherent as a standalone story? But then why not show us anything of Will in the UD, other than him in Castle Byers? Why have the disparities in the way the lights behave? Why have the intention/context of scenes in which the lights behave similarly contradict each other?

What really happened with Will in season 1?

If you made it all the way to the end of this post, first of all, I thank you. But second of all, if you want to humor me, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter as well. Was there anything I missed? Was there a connection you noticed that I didn’t talk about here? Are there other scenes you think are equally important even if they don’t directly tie back to moments in season 1?

Thanks for reading! Go crazy with me!

#stranger things #will byers #i honestly dont know what else to tag this as #i say things #ANYWAY come read my deranged 10k words of LIGHTS BULLSHIT #i should maybe wait to post this tomorrow now that it's late #bc i spent 45 minutes deciding last minute that i would make gifs after all LMAO #BUT i just need it to be DONE

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