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There are too many questions after season 3. For half a year, our fandom have been wondering if Hopper is alive and who is that mysterious American in the cell on Kamchatka. Now we know the answer, but we still have no clue where El’s powers have gone. It’s a full-blown mystery.
There are a lot of theories on the Internet, from the most obvious to the most incredible. Some of them seem to have appeared out of thin air. There is an idea about Billy somehow taking Eleven’s power, for example. It's not a popular one, but it's my favorite indeed. Thinking it through, I came to the conclusion that, if a lot of people from all over the world were struck by the same strange idea, there is some reason for it. It seems to me, I’ve found it.
As you know, in episode 7 of season 3 Eleven was badly hurt, and she was hiding with the Party in a supermarket. After dressing her wound, the Party went to find Dustin. But as soon as they were gone, we saw a puddle of blood behaving in a really weird way. It is changing its shape, bubbling, boiling and reducing in size. The blood is like a living creature, it seems to be sucking something in, as in the background there is a hushed shriek of the monster.
This feeling is increased by the next frame where we can see a close-up of a toilet being flushed. It's called motion phase editing: some motion is started in the first scene and is continued and somehow reflected in the next one, possibly by another character or object. Such continuation creates some additional meaning for the audience.
A few minutes later we see Billy turning up in the supermarket.
He is following the fugitives.
Finding the puddle of blood on the floor, Billy kneels down and dips his fingers into the blood.
Then he looks at them very closely, raising his hand to his eyes.
He looks like an experienced hunter, as if he is trying to understand how much the blood has curdled and how far away his prey might have fled. However, there is no point in checking it, for the blood is evidently boiling.
But if you look closer you may notice that the moment Billy touches the blood with his fingertips, it stops boiling, and there is a very soft sound you can barely hear. It’s real, though. It sounds like sucking, hissing and an Upside Down monster’s shriek at the same time. A few seconds later, Billy lifts his hand to his eyes, and the sound goes again, loud and clear.
While watching season 3 for the first time, at this very moment, for no particular reason at all, I thought that Billy had just somehow taken away Eleven’s power. He had absorbed it. It turned out I might be right, as El lost her power, as we learnt later.
Then we can see a close-up of one of Billy’s eyes, showing us black blood vessels. It is a sign of Mind Flayer activation. It is accompanied by the monster’s shriek somewhere offscreen.
A few minutes later we can see a scene where Eleven uses her powers to throw a car at a couple of Russian securities. Then she feels sick, and her bitten flesh is transformed into the monster. Eleven can retrieve it from her ankle with her mind’s power. One may think that all is well that ends well, but not quite so. There are two large “buts” left, actually.
First of all, Billy is already waiting for Eleven and her friends at the parking lot. How did he find them? I think being a part of a hive mind helps him. All hosts and all upside down monsters are interconnected, including vines, demodogs and so on. The thing in El’s wound is a part of the general system, too.
Secondly, Eleven’s next attempt to use her powers fails. We can see she has lost her gifts. Maybe the reason is she is over-stressed and exhausted. But there is a possibility that Eleven accidently activated the monster sleeping in her leg while using her power; and this thing absorbed her power, passing it via their sympathetic connection to Billy as the main host. After Billy and El’s cabin scene I have the impression the Mind Flayer has some bond with El. He seeks to come into our world to pursue her.
That makes sense. No one but Eleven has opened the Gate letting the Mind Flayer into our world. Anyway if that’s true or not we will find out not soon enough. The filming of season 4 is frozen for the time being because of the quarantine and having a premier at the end of 2020 or at the beginning of 2021 is out of the question. So we can only rewatch Stranger Things looking for hidden clues and thinking up new theories. I have just tried to get how one of them appears.
