After having a noticeable absence in Stranger Things’s season 3, a brand-new comic book reveals what Kali Prasad (perhaps better known as test subject Eight) was up to during that time – and, just maybe, paves the way for her return in season 4. Thanks to a plethora of tie-in materials that are quickly forming a type of Stranger Things Expanded Universe, audiences are getting introduced to a lot of the test subjects from Project Indigo that were never seen on-screen: showing where they are and what they’re doing just as Mike Wheeler and his friends come across Eleven and discover the Upside Down.
Most of these additional releases are, unsurprisingly, set in the past and flesh out the character of Dr. Martin Brenner, his relationship with his “children,” and how he comes to lose most, if not all, of them. Three, who can plant suggestions in people’s minds (or perform “Jedi mind tricks,” as the characters themselves joke), manages to escape from the Hawkins National Laboratory five years before Stranger Things starts up, and he takes Nine-Point-Five (9.5) with him; in the process, Six (who can see the future) dies and Nine, 9.5’s twin sister (and the one with actual powers), is believed to also be deceased. The two juveniles flee into the wild and go on the lam from Brenner and the Department of Energy, attempting to live their lives free of pain and government manipulation.
That’s where the newest comic book miniseries, Into the Fire, comes into play. It moves the narrative focus to just three months before Stranger Things 3, in April 1985, when Three and 9.5 learn of the lab’s closure and begin an attempt to round up all of the other subjects who may have also broken free. Their quest leads them to the rural Hastings Glen (a fictitious town from Stephen King’s 1980 novel Firestarter), where they find Eight and her crew from Chicago, hiding out in a dilapidated barn and still carrying out their revenge murders against all who have wronged them in the past. The reunion is cut short when Kali reveals that Nine is, in fact, still alive – she is being held in some type of hospital or facility, where she’s kept on medication in order to suppress her pyrokinetic abilities.
While it’s a given that this issue sets up Into the Fire’s story, showing the three surviving Hawkins lab rats banding together to rescue their imprisoned “sibling,” what might not be so immediately obvious is that it may also be setting up the backstory for Stranger Things 4, which could possibly see all of the subjects band together in order to defeat the forces of the Upside Down once and for all. Granted, the comic’s main characters of Ricky, Marcy, Jamie, and Kali might not survive the miniseries – and, even if they did, it’s still not guaranteed that they’d make the jump from the page to the screen – but it’s still planting the seeds for a larger storytelling payoff somewhere within the ever-growing Stranger Things universe.
And that payoff, of course, just may have something to do with Dr. Brenner himself. It was in Eight’s season 2 episode that the good doctor’s continued existence was hinted at, and the revelation of a sedated Nine just might be the tip-off that audiences have been looking for as to his current whereabouts. Indeed, with season 3’s big twist of the Soviet Union having stumbled upon Stranger Things’s parallel dimension, attempting to corral its deadly denizens for their own Cold War purposes, it could just be that Brenner and Nine both are now in the cold embrace of Mother Russia, waiting for the final showdown between the worlds of the East, West, and Upside Down.
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