mindthegap

ok this is the last post I write about Stranger Things x Doctor Who (for now) but when I first heard Henry say that he would have saved Holly’s friends and then her family, the first things that came to mind were DW’s Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead

I kind of ignored the idea because I was (and still am) pretty sure that the Duffers&Co didn’t use Doctor Who as inspiration or reference, but now—after ST5E8—I’m starting to see some similarities again so I’ll point them out (+ yk ,,,, the Library. The library that in ST is the center of the four cracks. The center of the X in Hawkins. The library basement, the place where Will was brought to in S1 and in S5 both times Vecna took him. That library). But first thing first:

The Characters and Locations (DW)

The Doctor & Donna Noble

River Song, The Explorers & Miss Evangelista

The Vashta Nerada

Charlotte Lux / CAL

The Library (both the ud and hawkins. it’s confusing)

What they remind me of (ST)

The Spores and/or Shadow Particles

Henry or Vecna

Max and Holly

Camazotz / The Rightside up

Hawkins / The Rightside up (yes twice. this too is confusing)

The Upsidedown or demos

Silence in the Library (S4E8)

“4022 saved. No survivors.”

The episode starts and we have the Doctor and Donna Noble who arrive on this planet-sized Library, no people in sight despite the fact that the life scanner(?) signals plenty of life forms present. A group of Explorers then arrives, wearing spacesuits (seems a detail but it matters). Among them there’s this one girl, Miss Evangelista, who is mocked and ignored by the other Explorers, considered dumb. The only one who actively tries to get close to her is basically Donna.

The story moves on and the Characters find out that the Library is inhabited, seemingly infested, by these invisible creatures that chase them and threaten their lives—the Vashta Nerada:

from Wikipedia: “[the Vashta Nerada] are microscopic swarm creatures which, when present in a high enough concentration, are indistinguishable from shadows, and use this to their advantage in approaching and attacking prey*. They are described as the «piranhas of the air»” *this reminds me of Vecna/One’s monologue in S4, when he says he became a predator, but for good. however, the shadows he uses to his advantage are more... metaphorical?—his preys’ darkest emotions.

These creatures—which I’ve always imagined as some kind of very tiny particles—are invisible to the eye, but live in the air, move and grow in the shadow and inhabit forests. They attack their preys, eating their flesh to the bone, only leaving their skeleton.

“Count the shadows.”

They mimic their pray’s shadow, become a copy of it, which means that a person with two shadows is someone who has fallen prey of these creatures (so a second shadow is a kind of signal that someone’s being targeted, infested, hence the attention to their number). To protect the Explorers from them, the Doctor finds a way to “obscure” their helmets, basically to trick the Vashta Nerada into thinking that the person has already been “targeted” (as said, they hide and move in the dark, as shadows, and to escape them you need to stay in the light). The Explorers’ suits also have these communication devices connected to their nervous system that basically store for a few minutes the last thoughts they had before dying. Some of the Explorers get killed by the Vashta Nerada, which take control of their victims’ suits and chase the others. Among the victims there’s also our sweet Evangelista.

Because of the danger, the Doctor tries to teleport Donna into his spaceship to keep her safe, but something goes wrong:

“Donna Noble has left the Library. Donna Noble has been saved.”

Donna Noble gets accidentally saved. She is no more in the Library... But what does that mean?

Forest of the Dead (S4E9)

Donna is gone, seemingly dead and forever lost, but we later find out that at the core of this Library there’s a massive computer created by one of the Explorers’ grandfather years and years before to preserve the consciousness of Charlotte Lux—his sick little girl, who was close to death. When the threat of the Vashta Nerada originally occurred in the Library, the people who were there tried to escape through the teleportation system, but they were too many and the whole system overloaded so Charlotte (a computer with the consciousness of a child) tried to save them the best way she could and she did so by literally uploading them, like computer files, in what is basically her hard disk drive (which I’ll refer to as CAL), where the minds of all these people are now stuck without even knowing it.

Now let’s ignore the River bit above (sob) and let’s go back to Donna. She also used the still malfunctioning teleportation thingy and so she was uploaded into the system. She now lives in the computer simulation without even remembering how she got there. She finds herself in a clinic and her doctor is Dr. Moon (who serves as some kind of virus checker for Charlotte. He controls the well-being of her system and in the simulation manifests himself as a man, a psychiatrist.

“And then, you forgot.”

Dr. Moon is also the only one aware of the fake reality since he’s not part of it, but can kind of “come and go” and interfere with it—while not even the manifestation of Charlotte is initially “awake”, since she lives in the simulation and therefore thinks she’s just a normal girl in a normal world, watching what happens both in the Library and in her dream world on her TV).

Anyway, Donna Noble. She finds herself in CAL and starts to live a normal life, thinking that it is real despite some “weird” things happening—time and space don’t move normally, one moment it’s morning but suddenly it becomes evening, like in a dream.

Oh and there are glitches, interferences...

Anyway, she recovers, meets a nice man, starts dating, gets married and has children. Just like that. Normal. Ordinary. Everything she wanted (before meeting the Doctor).

“Where’s the face?”

Her mad days with the Doctor are in the past, forgotten, until...

*coff coff* veil = sunglasses /hj

... one day she arrives: Evangelista. She died in the Library but—thanks to her communication device—her consciousness was uploaded and even improved (the computer made her smarter but altered her face—yeah it’s weird but I don’t remember the whole lore about her sorry lmao). She appears one day and leaves a note at Donna’s door, warning her about the world they live in and asking to meet her at the park. They meet and Evangelista explains to her everything, points out all the weird things happening, points out the obvious... and the children.

“Evangelista: The memories are still there. The library, the Doctor, me. You’ve just been programmed not to look. [...] In a way we’re all dead, Donna. We are the dead of the library. Donna: Well what about the children? The children aren’t dead. My children aren’t dead. Evangelista: Your children were never alive. [...] Look at your children!”

The children are all the same. They’re copies of the same boy and girl repeated over and over again (*coff coff* like tempered memories). They’re not real. Almost nothing about that world is.

Now...

The rest of the story isn’t of much importance in relation to ST (of course the Doctor and River Song save the day, together for the first time... or the last?), but I found very interesting the concept of “saving”, especially in relation to what Henry/One told El in S4 about the minds of all the people he has killed being in his own.

And he said something similar again to Will in S5E4.

When Vol. 1 aired part of me hoped that maybe a tiny part of Henry Creel was somewhere there, trying to do something good for once, resisting or even hijacking the Mind Flayer. But Vol. 2 and Episode 8 proved me wrong (of course). However, the weird finale brought back the idea of these two episodes of DW, especially the CAL part, even though Charlotte only had good intentions—opposite to Henry/Vecna—and what she did was more of an accident. Unless it was actually Will who, similarly to Charlotte, tried to save everyone (unlikely, I know).