Who is Mister Whatsit and why is he talking to Mike Wheeler’s little sister Holly?! The final season of Stranger Things kicked off with a return to basics, a.k.a. a missing child, in the creepiest way.
Spoilers for Stranger Things Season 5 ahead! Seriously… start running up that hill if you haven’t started watching the new episodes on Netflix and/or don’t care about getting majorly spoiled.
At the beginning of the season, we see that Holly has been talking to someone that other people can’t see. She calls her imaginary friend “Mister Whatsit,” like a gender-swapped version of the character from A Wrinkle in Time. For some unknown reason, despite everything that has happened in Hawkins, this doesn’t raise any red flags with any of the adults or teengers. Sure enough, early in the second episode, a demogorgon attacks the Wheeler house and Holly gets kidnapped.
Has the whole show been leading up to this Holly subplot? It’s more than just a nice parallel to Will going missing in Season 1. (In the immortal words of George Lucas, “it’s like poetry. It rhymes.”) But she’s always been in touch with the supernatural. She sees things before the adults do, like the blinking lights, moving trees, and falling spores. It’s high time she got involved, though deeply unfortunate that it happened this way.
Spill: is Holly’s imaginary friend who we think it is?
Based on what we know from previous seasons of Stranger Things, it’s pretty easy to tell that she’s talking to Vecna. He loves to single out a youth, like Will and Barb in Season 1. Something similar but different happened with Billy and the hive mind in Season 2, then Chrissy and Max in Season 4. However, things are just off enough to keep everyone on their toes. Could Holly’s imaginary friend be Eddie Munson? A new threat? Wouldn’t it be a gag if Mister Whatsit was, like, Barb?
Will and Robin think that figuring out who Whatsit is will help them find Holly. They think he might have been trying to save her from Vecna. They were only half right. Unfortunately, Will and Robin figure out that Holly’s imaginary friend was Henry Creel himself, a.k.a. Vecna and “One,” all along. He’s been appearing to Holly in clean-cut human form, wearing a three-piece suit and a fedora and carrying a pocketwatch.
Holly’s not the only Hawkins child that the Big Bad plans on grooming and luring away. Vecna’s latest plan is to be a Pied Piper of sorts, like if Pennywise from It and the Goblin King from Labyrinth were a dapper young gentleman.
Is Holly in the Upside Down, though?
Yes and no. It’s definitely connected to the Upside Down, but Holly is held captive in a clean version of the Creel House on the edge of a sunny forest. The vibe is unsettling to us, but idyllic to her. Holly doesn’t realize she’s being held captive. She doesn’t know she’s in danger. She’s having a grand old time, and thinks Henry is protecting her from monsters like the demogorgon that came to their house. He feeds her his favorite foods and gives her just the right presents. Again, perfect from her POV and so creepy from ours.
While Henry is out doing Vecna things, Holly changes into an instantly iconic look: a yellow cape, a red Boy Scout neckerchief, and a blue dress that’s giving Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and Laurey in Henry’s high school production of Oklahoma! all at once.
The little girl is then successfully lured into the woods by none other than Max Mayfield, who is half-trapped here as well while in a coma. She explains that this corner of the Upside Down is a kind of memory palace prison. The memories we’ve seen so far appear to be Henry’s memories, like the house and especially the cave that Max has turned into her lair. Whatever memory Henry associates with that cave is so traumatic that he won’t even step inside. Max has a plan to escape that involves Holly, but we won’t find out what it is until Stranger Things Season 5 returns for Part 2 on Christmas freakin’ Day.
(featured image: Netflix)
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