Warning: contains Stranger Things Season 4 spoilers.
When the Stranger Things gang needed weaponry to fight off the Upside Down’s demobats in Season 4 Vol. I, they stopped off at the Byers house to pick up Nancy’s gun collection. There, they made two major discoveries. The first was how to communicate between the Upside Down and the normal world through lightbulbs, like Will did in Season 1.
The second discovery was that the Upside Down – previously thought to be a copy of the normal world where time ran in parallel – was stuck in the past. Specifically, time there had stopped moving forwards on November 6th 1983, the exact date that Will Byers went missing after Eleven opened a gate to the Upside Down. Nancy realises it when her bedroom décor is outdated and still contains toys, shoes and revision notes that she no longer owns in 1986, and her guns aren’t there. Picking up her journal, she says:
“This diary should be full of entries, it’s not. The last entry is November 6th 1983, the day Will went missing, the day the gate opened. We’re in the past.”
Nancy Byers, Stranger Things Season 4, Episode 7 ‘The Massacre at Hawkins Lab’
Season 5’s Major Unsolved Mystery
In all the demobat venom-hubbub and gate-discovering excitement, that revelation fell a little by the wayside, more of a ‘huh, add that to the weird list’ than a staggering breakthrough. But in a new spoiler-filled post-Season 4 interview with Deadline, Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers have confirmed that the revelation is much more than just another item for the weird list. The Upside Down being stuck on that particular date is Season 4’s major unsolved mystery and the driving question for the show’s final outing.
