Stranger Things 2: The Upside-Down Will Never Be Fully Explained

[THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR STRANGER THINGS 2]

The second season for Stranger Things is finally here, and a lot of fans have spent their weekend binge-watching the show. Though the new season gave us a lot of new insight on the world that is the Upside-Down, it seems that the showrunners will want to keep a lot of things about it a secret for the rest of the show's run on order to preserve the mystery element of the series.

Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, co-creator Ross Duffer explains:

"It's a balancing act. If you tell too much, it loses a little bit of that mystery. We obviously will shed more light on it moving forward, but we want to do it a little bit at a time. Even at the end, I don't think we're going to answer all of those questions, and I don't think we even necessarily need to."

We're telling this story from the point of view of very human characters. There's no way they can ever truly fully understand this place. We have our Upside Down document which describes its rules and its mythology in quite a bit of detail, but I think we're just going to slowly parse that out, and maybe not even fully use all of it. Our favorite thing to do on this show is that these characters, especially the kids, are able to make these leaps about the Mind Flayer and how it operates and what it wants, but they're just basing this off of games that they've played. They don't really know for sure. There's really no way for them to fully understand it. In real life, you wouldn't be able to fully understand this entity from another place. You could never fully understand its motivations. That, to us, is scarier than knowing exactly what it wants."

Withholding information from the audience is definitely a good trick when it comes to making horror movies. The reason why Pennywise the Clown is such terrifying entity is because we don't really know that much about him. You think he'll be as scary when we find out that he's an alien whose mortal enemies with a cosmic turtle? Because that's what he honestly is.

As far as it goes, I think the Duffer Brothers did really well when it came to expanding the world of the Upside-Down in the second season. I'm starting to think that there's an influence from the Alien franchise, where the first movie only had one Demogorgon/Xenomorph to handle, and the sequel had a bunch more of them this time with a much larger Mind Flayer/Alien Queen as the main threat.

Hopefully they still manage to keep this energy until the show officially ends.

Stranger Things 2 is currently out on Netflix.

See Also: Stranger Things 2 Character Was Meant To Die Earlier