David Harbour Breaks Down Stranger Things Fan Theories from Reddit

Hi I'm David Harbour, I play Chief Jim Hopper

on Stranger Things and today I've been asked to do

Stranger Things fan theories on Reddit

to discuss your fan theories.

It is an open-ended show.

Some of these theories may be close to the truth.

They may be far away from the truth.

I will offer my insight, what I think.

So these are not spoilers, these will just be

hypotheticals from my point of view.

(electronic music)

@ahhuati says, the Upside Down is actually the future.

The Upside Down is actually the future.

When Will is taken there, he's impregnated

by an alien creature.

Impregnated is interesting.

When Will returns to our time, he births the slug

which in turn develops into the demogorgon

which in turn is aware of how powerful Eleven is

because it inherits that knowledge from Will,

or reads his mind.

Sometime later, the Thessalhydra emerges

and the United States government is forced to drop

a nuclear weapon on Hawkins.

Hawkins is destroyed but the demogorgon survives.

Eleven accidentally uses her remote viewing abilities

to see into this future, thereby causing the demogorgon

to travel back in time and hunt her down.

It instead takes Will, thereby restarting the events

we see in the show.

Wow, I love this theory, this is crazy and insane.

You know, this could be true.

I mean I like the idea of the Upside Down

actually being the future.

I personally don't know.

I think that the Upside Down will be revealed

to be a specific place or time.

I don't know about the U.S. government dropping

a nuclear weapon on Hawkins, oh,

because the Thessalhydra emerges,

I guess we will jump on their weapon,

I guess that would be the weapon of choice

if you could fight some intergalactic monster.

I like the idea that this character actually births

the events and then restarts the events.

This kind of, I think it's kind of a time loop element

that I think is very interesting but I don't know,

I don't know how much of this is true.

I mean the one thing that you have hit on

is that the Upside Down is something specific.

It may be the future, it may be something else.

It exists as a reflection of Hawkins,

and so it has certain things like the library

and it has certain things that are Hawkins.

Yeah, it's a very interesting theory.

@gamedemon24 asks, what is a demogorgon?

My theory on it comes from a scientific

and evolutionary perspective.

I believe that somewhere, thousands upon thousands

of years ago, humans did inhabit the Upside Down

in a very similar incarnation to whatever humanity

looked like at the time.

Until, that is, some natural disaster occurred

in the Upside Down to make the atmosphere toxic.

The demogorgon is a descendant of human beings

that evolved according to the toxic conditions

of the Upside Down.

We have Homo neanderthalensis in both realms,

then we turned to Homo sapiens in our realm

and Homo demogorgus in the Upside Down realm.

I love this, I think it's amazing.

I don't have any knowledge of this,

and I think you're probably very far off.

I think the time one is probably a little more apropos

or something like that, the idea that this realm

has existed and the beings have actually evolved

over at least 100,000 years, I feel like why would it

have emerged in 1983 in Indiana?

I think that the Upside Down is more related to

the specific events of this particular now

at this particular area.

I don't think it's its own entity that has existed

for a long period of time.

I think it coincides with the idea of Eleven's powers

opening this gate.

But I think it's a really interesting theory and I love it

and you should write your own show.

@connvex thinks the source of the Upside Down is Terry Ives.

If El, a powerful psychic was strong enough

to open the gates to the Upside Down,

it seems plausible that if her mama is also a psychic,

the intense grief of losing her baby could have caused her

to unknowingly create the distorted reality of despair.

Wow, one of the things I think makes Star Wars so epic

is not that there's just good and evil on a light side

and a dark side but the fact that Darth Vader

says to Luke, I am your father, so that it becomes

like a soap opera.

Everyone's kind of interconnected and I think that

if the Upside Down is an entity in itself

that's born of emotional content, that's born of despair

or hate or loss, that could link to a specific

reason for all of this to have been occurring

in Hawkins in 1983.

I think that in some sense, the show can be a monster show

or it can be a show that wraps up where the events

of the show are actually directly related

and couldn't have happened to any other characters

but these characters,

as a result of whatever they went through.

I like the idea of it being explicitly referenced

as some kind of manifestation of a subconscious El.

There's something dark in Hawkins.

But we'll see, I have no idea.

So again, I'm the most useless person to do this thing,

but thank you for having me.

@nellaj, nellanaj_10,

if Steve is Jean-Ralphio's from Parks and Rec, real father,

then Billy changed his name and became Chris Traeger

from Parks and Rec.

I haven't watched Parks and Rec, I'm sorry,

I know it's hilarious, it looks hilarious

but I haven't seen it, so I do know that

these two guys looks alike.

Steve and Jean-Ralphio, I also when I was 20 years old

looked a lot like Steve Harrington,

and I'm not related to the character.

@Arames thinks Hopper's daughter is still alive!

When it's showing the flashback of Hopper's daughter playing

and she had her first cancer episode,

does it look like she's freaking out?

Like maybe she's seen a creature from the Upside Down?

So is it possible the government got her sick

and faked her death and she's being held

in the facility.

They did a good job faking Will's death.

I do not think that this is true.

If we were to introduce the idea of some sort of

time loop concept, the idea that Hopper's daughter

could exist in some way, would be very interesting.

The Upside Down brings with it a lot of elements

which we'll start to see that are,

we haven't even seen about what the Upside Down can do.

But I don't think that in the physical world

she's still alive and that the government

has faked her death.

I think that that pretty much was what it was

that we've seen where she does die of cancer.

She does live on with Hopper and we'll sort of

see more about her relationship with Hopper

which I think is a little more complicated maybe.

But I don't think she's still alive.

@ScalabrinelIsGod, Dustin was playing the long game

to get Nancy this entire time.

Dustin obviously has a big crush on Nancy,

but it predictably doesn't go anywhere.

[Steve] Nancy's different.

Yeah she seems pretty special I guess.

In the second season when Max is introduced,

we are led to believe that he likes her.

This is just a trick to distract us.

Dustin knew what he was doing when he and Steve

formed their seemingly unlikely duo.

Despite all the chaos and shit around him,

he was able to get key information out of Steve.

That key information being like how to be suave

for the teenage gals, I guess.

That sort of implies that Dustin is extremely sophisticated

as an individual of 13 years old.

Not just this dude who's looking for chocolate pudding

and running around.

Mike!

I've got the chocolate pudding!

But then he's a calculated lady killer,

and just needs the little extra zhoosh from Steve

about the Farrah Fawcett hairspray and that's gonna take him

to the finish line with Nancy.

The beginning of this was, I'm a bit drunk right now.

Sorry if this has already been established

and if I don't make sense.

My memory of the first season is pretty spotty

because I didn't rewatch it.

Well rewatch it because Dustin is dumber than you think.

(Dustin purrs like Chewbacca)

Yeah, don't do that, okay?

Okay.

@hallad thinks Murray is a Russian spy.

He's the one character who frequently mentions Russia

in the show.

He drinks Russian vodka.

In an ep called The Spy, he easily manipulates

Nancy and Jonathan into hooking up.

How's the pull out? (spits out drink)

When Nancy and Jonathan tell him the truth about Barb,

he advises them to tell the public a watered down version

of events to make it more believable,

almost as if he's experienced at spreading

disinformation campaign.

Murray's goal is ultimately to learn U.S. intel

and cause instability in the community.

So this is a very interesting theory.

I don't think that it's true.

I think that you're gonna see more of Murray

in seasons to come.

I think Murray is a very interesting character.

I mean it would have to be a big double bluff

because he comes to me in the beginning of the episode

and says there's a Russian spy presence in Hawkins

and I don't believe him.

So he would theoretically have to be revealing himself to me

at the beginning of the season,

only for it to be a subterfuge.

Again, that would be giving me a tremendous amount

of credit if somehow I was like sort of onto it

and then he wanted to align himself with me

to pretend that he wasn't it.

I think that the Russian thing is sort of

a funny conspiracy theory that Murray has

and he's a real just conspiracy theory nut.

I think he is what he appears to be,

but we'll see more of Murray in the future

and we'll get to investigate these things.

@NOthingtosee thinks demogorgons are more afraid of us

than we are of it.

Whenever the gorgon realizes that there's someone behind it,

it simply turns around, opens it jaws and roars.

Something that will only get them running away

as fast as they can so I thought maybe that's the idea.

The most damning evidence is that when Nancy's about

to escape, the portal is to her right

but she can't go for it because the gorgon

is also to her right until it moves to her left,

positioning itself so that Nancy's in between the portal

and it and it doesn't close the portal

until Nancy is outside.

This makes me think that it is afraid,

and if disturbed in the Upside Down, it will do its best

to chase the offender out.

However, it seems to disregard any sort of caution

when attacking a bleeding victim.

Even attacking three very pissed teens armed

with a spiked club.

Yes, and one minorly bleeding Barb on a diving board.

I mean I love this theory 'cause it's the real like

animal conservation environmentalist theory.

The idea that we all are afraid of sharks

but they're just as afraid of us.

I was in Antarctica pretty recently

and the interesting thing about the animals down there

is that they have no interaction with humans,

there's very little interaction with humans

and they were very unafraid, and I think the reaction

to being afraid of humans is a

learned reaction from animals.

I'm sorry.

You ate my cat.

So I don't think that it would exist

for this demogorgon being, and even as we see

in season two, the demo dogs, they again are pretty

self-interested in just terms of eating

and in terms of existing as animals

and the only thing that does transcend that

is when the host is attacked,

like when we are closing the actual gate

and the Thessalhydra monster is threatened in some way,

they all will forgo food like Steven and Dustin

and will run to help the hive mind sort of place

to stop whatever's attacking it.

So that seems to be the only consciousness of higher thought

would be the fingers of the Thessalhydra has.

@peters45 thinks the demogorgon is a manifestation

of Eleven's trauma.

I think the monster's actually an extension

of Eleven herself and a physical manifestation

of her troubled psyche.

After saving Mike from jumping off the cliff,

Eleven tearfully tells Mike, I'm sorry.

The gate I opened, I'm the monster.

What if she knew the monster was a product of her mind

and was admitting that she had accidentally let it out

and into the physical world.

I love this theory.

I actually believe in this theory and I pretty much know

that it's not true.

I thought that from the first season,

from watching the first season that Eleven,

when she says, I am the monster, that that was

some sort of weird foresight thing where she

actually was the monster.

And I talked to the Duffers about that.

They're like, No, she just feels upset

about opening the gate and opening up these monsters.

She's not actually that monster, and especially as we see

in the second season, there's so many more monsters

that it isn't just the manifestation

of Eleven's consciousness.

This is a world that is full of monsters.

I thought it was literal as well but the fact that

Eleven feels like she herself is a monster

is very powerful and made me cry,

so I love this theory, I think it's beautiful.

But it's not true.

No, El, you're not the monster.

So, that's it, fan theories on Reddit.

They're all very interesting.

You guys are very creative.

Thank you very much for having me

and thanks for being fans of the show.