Stranger Things designer explains how time works in the Upside Down

We’re less than a week out from Stranger Things 4 Volume 2, and the floodgates are opening. Earlier this week we got a new trailer that played up the looming confrontation with Vecna, who has been murdering teenagers throughout season 4 from his stronghold in the Upside Down. Now we’re getting another layer of the mystery surrounding that otherworldly dimension peeled back.

During season 4, we finally started to get a better understanding of the physics of the Upside Down. Apparently there’s something funny going on with time there; when Nancy leads the group to the Upside Down version of her house in search of weapons, they discover that the house is exactly the same as it was on the day that Will Byers disappeared in Stranger Things season 1. Whether time was going extremely slowly or had stopped completely wasn’t quite made explicit, but now we know the answer.

Stranger Things production designer explains “creation” of the Upside Down

The official Stranger Things YouTube channel has released a video where the show’s longtime production designer Chris Trujillo goes into detail about some of the season’s most impressive sets. Trujillo has worked on Stranger Things since the beginning. He discusses making the bleak Demogorgon pit set for Hopper, as well as the “organic but bruised” color scheme of the season. But things start to get really interesting when he talks about the Creel House and the Wheeler home.

“The Creel House this year was the home of this character, and essentially he is psychically responsible for this mindscape space,” Trujillo explained, referencing the eerie floating Creel House vestibule where Vecna’s victims are displayed in horrifying organic pillars. “We see it in a 1959 version, and we see it in a present day dilapidated version. And then we spend some time there in the Upside Down. We have fragment elements of the Creel House [set] that we’re kind of twisting and distorting and breaking apart in a way directly related to the Upside Down.”

While Vecna is the looming evil in the Upside Down in season 4, the mirror dimension has been a constant threat for the characters on Stranger Things ever since season 1, when Eleven came into contact with a Demogorgon and accidentally opened a gate to that realm. In season 4, we saw that something weird was going on with time there, courtesy of a field trip to the Upside Down version of the Wheeler household.

“We spend some time in the Wheeler house, both in the Upside Down and the real world. It’s always been a part of how we have conceived of the mythology of the Upside Down, and kind of the rules and the physics of the Upside Down,” Trujillo said.

"The moment that the Upside Down was quote-unquote “created” inadvertently by Eleven, the set dressing and the world of the Upside Down is frozen in that moment. So like when we’re in Nancy’s room, we’ll discover in the Upside Down that Nancy’s room is as it was season 1 when we first were introduced to it."

This might be one of the most fascinating info drops we’ve gotten on the Upside Down yet. Trujillo was careful to put that “created” in quotations when speaking about Eleven, but the question of how the Upside Down came to mirror Hawkins has lingered throughout the show. Now we know, for sure, that time is frozen there in that moment when Eleven contacted the Demogorgon and the gate opened in season 1.

Another interesting layer is that the Demogorgon/gate stuff in the first season wasn’t the first time Eleven came into contact with the Upside Down; we saw that in the Volume 1 finale, when she blasted One (Jamie Campbell Bower) there. It’s interesting that the landscape that One flies through in that sequence does not look like Hawkins, but rather just a nebulous vista filled with twisted mountainous shapes and red lightning.

Could the Upside Down only have really come into its current shape when Eleven contacted the Demogorgon, or did it always exist? No doubt we’ll learn more about that in Volume 2, and season 5 beyond.

The Duffer Brothers and David Harbour hype up Stranger Things 4 Volume 2

Speaking of Volume 2, the hype train is speeding ahead. Creators Matt and Ross Duffer are teasing that we should expect a very dark finale. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

“I don’t really want to say, but I would be concerned about the characters going into Volume 2, for sure,” Ross Duffer told Empire magazine, via IGN. “I hope that that is sort of the sense, because it is a darker season and the kids are no longer kids. And there’s sort of an ominous feeling that things might not go well. Now, whether they do or not, you’ll have to watch.”

Meanwhile, David Harbour (Jim Hopper) told Reuters that, “you’ll be blown away” by Volume 2.

"If you’ve enjoyed season four up until this point, get ready because the (last two episodes) are the best thing that makes what you’ve seen look like chump change compared to it. It’s a masterpiece, it’s beautiful, it’s epic… but it’s also on a scale and a scope that almost gets silly and it’s like wondrous, almost manga-esque… You’re going to be blown away."

We need no convincing; with a two-and-a-half hour finale that may as well be called Stranger Things: The Movie, we’re fully expecting this to be one of the most talked about episodes of television of 2022.

Stranger Things 4 Volume 2 premieres on Netflix on Friday, July 1.

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