Go, Thunderbolts!

When Will runs to the shed, the light there is already on, despite of the fact that he was home alone, Joyce and Jonathan both were at work Who switched on that light?

Then it keeps being on till Will’s disappearance

Even gets brighter, but doesn’t switch off, doesn’t explode bc of supernatural presence or anything (and our screen just darkens), but…

the next morning Hopper switches on the light

I think the main problem with all analysis at this point is this: the Duffers aren’t stupid, but they’re not infallible geniuses who’ve thought everything through down to the last detail either. In a creative process that has lasted well over a decade, it’s unrealistic to assume they had everything perfectly figured out from the beginning and then remained completely stagnant - never learning, growing, or changing the way they executed their vision.

They may have had a lot of things planned from the start, but they could just as easily have made poor decisions (prime example of dumb decision: not realizing that Jonathan taking those photos would turn him, for some viewers, into an irredeemable creep to this day), thrown ideas out, or changed things because they came up with something better. Steve is a good example: in the original script, he was supposed to sexually assault Nancy and die in Season 1, but then Joe was too charming, and they changed it*. So much of the character dynamic would have been different if Steve had died. Significant changes like that create a ripple effect.

And a similar situation could have happened at any later point with a different character or plotline. The creative process isn’t that static. 

So it’s hard to distinguish between “this means something” and “they were at an earlier stage of their creative journey, and it was just there because brightening or flickering lights were a common supernatural trope in ’70s and ’80s movies.” (I did a bit of research, and apparently in Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, light bulbs often glow brighter when danger is imminent, while flickering lights generally serve as a warning.)

And there is still so much we don’t know about Will’s disappearance. Who knows - maybe Vecna, El, or whoever else turned the shed light on and then off once the Demogorgon pulled Will into the Upside Down for a yet unknown reason. Which then leads to the question of how Will managed to escape a Demogorgon and hide in the Upside Down for a week. That kid was three apples tall.

*Random thing I found while researching whether the Steve story was actually true or just fandom telephone: apparently the original brainstorming notes shown in the Duffer’s Master Class had no Jonathan. Instead there was a Byers daughter called Vickie, who, according to someone who attended the class and posted screenshots, was essentially a combination of Jonathan and Nancy. She also wasn’t there the night Will - or rather Joyce’s son Dustin (as he was called sometimes?) - vanished because she was at Troy’s house.

The notes were so confusing and mixed up Dustin and Will so often that I genuinely wasn’t sure whether they were even separate characters until Dustin got gruesomely killed (assuming the original idea didn’t involve killing Will in Episode 1???). There was also someone called Nancy, but I’m not sure if that was our Nancy, because it sounded as if she was related to Dustin - so maybe just a different name for Vickie? 

Without ages attached to anyone, it was sometimes also a bit hard to tell what was going on. There’s a Troy bullying Mike, but Vickie was apparently also at Troy’s that night, which only makes sense if Troy was more of an older-teen Steve equivalent. Who was implied to be dating or at least somehow involved with the Byers daughter?

Maybe I’ve stared at my screen too long and fried my brain, but… what?

What also struck me is that, in a one-page outline, they very obviously mix up Dustin and Will several times. How does that even happen? I’m a writer myself, and brainstorming can absolutely get messy, but this doesn’t look accidental. It jumps back and forth between bullet points rather than reading like “Will eventually became Dustin.” And the document wasn’t handwritten. If I changed a character’s name halfway through brainstorming, I’d use search-and-replace so I wouldn’t confuse myself - or anyone else I was brainstorming with.

Vickie and Nancy are each only mentioned once, so maybe they simply changed the Byers daughter’s name later. But Vickie becoming Nancy specifically?

And then there is also this gem:

“[Sheriff] follows [town car] to the radio tower -- the hell is going on there … -- beginning of mystery …”

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/HawkinsAVclub/comments/vtr2rb/the_original_scaffolding_outline_for_the_stranger/

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