SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for the entirety of Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 1 (the first four episodes).
Though Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) has had her own previous encounters with elements of the supernatural Upside Down dimension haunting Hawkins Indiana since Season 1 of Stranger Things, nothing compares to what is in store for the youngest Wheeler sibling in Season 5.
As the first episode opens, Holly can be seen greeting a mysterious figure after setting the table for breakfast at the Wheeler house, where Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and her two sons Will (Noah Schnapp) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) are staying. She later talks to the same invisible “imaginary friend” at school, summoning her mother Karen (Cara Buono) to talk with her teacher. Her older brother Mike (Finn Wolfhard) finds her waiting outside the classroom reading A Wrinkle in Time before he encourages her to be her own savior from “monsters in Hawkins” that her invisible friend warns her about.
“As we just broke Season 5, we realized that Holly playing a larger role, that’s really when the season started to take shape. What we really wanted to do, and what that scene with her and Mike is talking about is, obviously our cast is older now, but we wanted to bring back the show full circle to Season 1,” Ross Duffer Told Deadline. “And to really do that, we needed kids in there again, so it felt like the best way to do that was through Holly.””
The imaginary friend, whom Holly calls Mr. Whatsit modeled off the character Mrs. Whatsit from Madeleine L’Engle’s Award-winning novel, makes himself known to some of Holly’s classmates as well, and they use the same name for him because they’ve all read the book.
“A Wrinkle in Time was one of our favorite books growing up. And so as we were talking about Holly’s storyline, just as how our kids in Season 1 and in later seasons, use [Dungeons and Dragons] as a way to help explain and understand these crazy going-ons, for Holly, she doesn’t play D & D, but she needed something else to help explain what is going on in her world, in her storyline,” Ross said. “As we looked at various books and we looked into, we went back and reread Wrinkle in Time, we’re like, ‘Well, this is perfect,’ because she can use it to help understand and comprehend all these weird goings on.”
Turns out Mr. Whatsit is actually Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), but in his human Henry Creel form. After the Demogorgon takes her, she somehow ends up with Henry in the Creel mansion, glistening like the day Henry’s parents first rolled up to the house. He makes Holly breakfast and knows her favorite fruit as well as her favorite song.
“This super refined, very nice version of who he is. It’s this very warm, nice, natural way of being that hopefully makes them feel at home. It’s so icky,” star Jamie Campbell Bower said of Henry’s persona. “But hopefully it makes them feel at home enough for him to do what he needs to do, which is just disgusting, really, if you think about it.”
STRANGER THINGS. Nell Fisher as Holly Wheeler in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
Bower, who cited A Wrinkle in Time and Mr. Rogers from A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood as inspiration for the layers of Henry Creel versus Vecna, had his own reasoning for the connection between the two and why the villain would target Mike and Nancy’s (Natalia Dyer) youngest sister.
“I’d considered my father’s relationship to alcohol, and interestingly enough, Karen Wheeler’s relationship to alcohol as well. Holly is a very smart and bright child. Somebody asked me the other day. ‘Why her? Why her first?’” Bower told Deadline. “And I think that where I got to with that was, I was like, well, yes, there’s a connection between the fact that we’re both bright. I think Henry’s always seen himself as quite bright. But also that presents a challenge as well. If I can win you over, then the rest of them will come easy.”
For the fifth and finale season, Fisher took the reins to portray a grown-up version of Holly, who was played by twin sisters Anniston and Tinsley Price in the first four seasons. In Season 1, Holly followed a trail of glowing lights in Joyce’s house in Season 1, and she sensed the foreboding Mind Flayer in the trees on the Fourth of July in Season 3.
“She was so young, she probably doesn’t even remember following the lights, but we like that she’s been on the outskirts this whole time, and to finally bring her into the fold was one of the joys of the season,” Ross Duffer said. “The youthful energy of her and her group of friends every day on set, just how amazed they were by this whole production — we’ve been doing this for 10 years — and to see it through their eyes again, it really brought us back to that feeling of when we were making Season 1.”
Katie Campione contributed reporting to this piece.
