Stranger Things was thrust back into the pop culture zeitgeist recently as the first half of season four dropped on Netflix. Be warned, if you are yet to catch up on the latest seven episodes, and you don't want them spoiled, you might want to stop reading here and come back later. This article includes some very spoilery spoilers, and it turns out Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin, was talking about them six years ago.
A clip from an interview the cast of Stranger Things did with AOL all the way back in 2016 has resurfaced courtesy of Pedestrian. The interview took place right after season one launched, and the children of the show were asked which fan theories they thought might be the most accurate. The clip, which you can check out below, shows Matarazzo explaining a theory that sounds a lot like exactly what just happened in season four.
“There's this one in this video, and he was saying how other test subjects, besides Eleven, like one through 10, most of them are dead, but others were banished to the Upside Down ” Matarazzo explains. “It had an effect on them because they were in it for so long. They transformed into what was the monster. So, the monster was a recent test subject.”
As those of you who have seen season four and are still reading this will know, that is almost exactly what has happened so far. While Matarazzo and the theorist he is referencing won't have known about Vecna at the time, the new season's terrifying villain is One. The very first test subject ten children before Eleven who El banishes to the Upside Down after he kills the other subjects.
The first half of season four is available to watch on Netflix right now, but if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to set quite a bit of time aside to do so. The runtime of all seven episodes clocks in at over nine hours. The window in which to watch those episodes before the second half of season four drops is closing pretty rapidly too. The remainder of the new season arrives on July 1. That's less than an hour a day to get all caught up if you start right now, so plenty of time.