The following contains spoilers for Season 4, Volume 1 of Stranger Things, now available to stream on Netflix.
After years of anticipation, Stranger Things has finally returned with a new season, and with it, a new villain: Vecna. Equal parts Freddy Krueger and Psycho Goreman, Vecna is a psychic boogeyman from the Upside Down who lives to torture the teens of Hawkins with their own guilt and shame before gruesomely killing them. He might be the most insidious fiend the party has ever faced, but there’s still hope for Eleven to overcome his evil, thanks to a sly shout-out to a scene from the X-Men movies.
Before Vecna’s true identity is revealed, he’s introduced as Peter Ballard, an orderly at Hawkins Laboratory who aided Dr. Brenner in his experiments with the psychic children. He took a particular interest in Eleven and began manipulating her, trying to turn her against Brenner while also coaching her in how to use her powers. Ballard told Eleven that by focusing on a memory of sadness and anger, she could focus her telekinetic abilities to become even stronger. Eleven recalled the last time she saw her mother and the pain was enough to make her the strongest of Brenner’s pupils — at the cost of alienating herself from the other children.
In the mid-season finale, “The Massacre at Hawkins Lab,” we see what became of Ballard. After tricking Eleven into removing a power-inhibiting device, he revealed his true identity as Henry Creel, the son of Victor Creel and the true culprit behind the murders his father was blamed for. After killing his mother and sister and falling into a coma, Henry was taken in by Brenner and became the first psychic he trained. However, it became clear that Henry’s psychopathy meant he could never be controlled, so Brenner simply managed him by implanting the device and giving him a job with the lab.
Now free of Brenner’s control, Henry slaughters the other test subjects in one of the most horrific scenes in the show’s history. He offers Eleven the chance to join him in eradicating all of humanity. She refuses and a telekinetic battle breaks out between the two. When it seems Henry is about to win, Eleven recalls a different memory than before: her own birth, and meeting her mother for the first time. That feeling of love is strong enough for her to overcome Henry’s power and send him through a portal into the Upside Down, where Henry languished for years before finally becoming Vecna.
Eleven’s fight with Vecna recalls a similar scene in X-Men: First Class. When Charles Xavier begins training his fledgling mutant agents to use their powers, he asks Erik Lehnsherr to use his magnetic abilities to move a satellite dish. Erik says he can’t because the dish is too big and too far away, but Charles comes up with a solution. Erik’s anger has always been the fuel for his powers, but as Charles puts it, “true focus lies somewhere between rage and serenity.” Using his telepathy, Charles pulls forth a memory of Erik celebrating Hanukkah with his mother, a rare moment of genuine happiness for him. With his new outlook, Erik is able to move the dish and prove Charles’ theory correct.
Like Erik, Eleven is able to pull from a positive memory to make her abilities stronger. More than that, she reveals the key to defeating Vecna. For all his power and all his malice, Henry Creel relies exclusively on negative emotions to bring his powers to their fullest. By contrast, Eleven has love in her life thanks to the connections she’s made in Hawkins. She has a strength to her that Vecna lacks, and that difference might just be the key to saving the world from his evil.
Stranger Things Season 4, Volume 1 is available to stream on Netflix. X-Men: First Class is available to stream on Disney+.