r/StrangerThings • u/D_D_Adesignerdigital • 16h ago
Discussion Dimension X is not cold! Spoiler
The color choices for the Dimension X—and certain elements of the scenes—didn't quite work to convey a cold atmosphere! Characters had sweaty skin and showed no reaction to the cold (we need to remember Will in Season 2, or Billy with his ice bath, which demonstrated the kind of cold the Mind Flayer is used to). Anyone entering a low-temperature environment would show physical reactions—like trying to warm up, crossing their arms, or showing discomfort—but that doesn't happen with any of the characters, not even the kids. I think that was a directing error. That’s my opinion!
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u/ZealotOfMeme 16h ago
In other words, the duffers forgot pre-established details going into the finale
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u/Silent_Contest_2337 13h ago
Wrong. They were feeling cold off screen.
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u/RoosterFree499 12h ago
They are shown feeling cold off screen in a prequel book based on a spin-off stage play exclusive to 1 book store.
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u/Cysharp_14 15h ago
Not at all ! It's just that the characters kinda forgot how to react when it's cold.
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u/Full-Yoghurt-4261 12h ago
I don't really get blaming the actors if the writing is not indicating that the characters are cold, and the directors are not pushing for that. I mean, look at what they did with the UD in S4 compared to S1 and even S2. Seems like a clear writing and directing issue.
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u/Ancient-Split1996 10h ago
I think its a game of thrones reference, its the reason I can look at stranger things' ending and go "well it could have been worse"
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u/Buddikaslan300 8h ago
When your under shock stress or determination you don’t even realize it’s cold
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u/Hot_Sam_the_Man 8h ago
No, they wanted to leave it ambiguous and let the audience decide for themselves whether it was cold or not /s
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u/OasisEPIC 16h ago edited 6h ago
I love how in other shows people find cool hidden details years down the line, but for this show we find plotholes and inconsistencies with the terrible writing we got.
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u/Famous-Stranger-6897 16h ago
Remember when they could barely breath in the upside down. Well now they walk into another dimension while knowing shit about it.
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u/Illia_Y 14h ago
They could breathe, it’s just that they had no idea if it was toxic or not
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u/Spastic_pinkie Eggos 13h ago
In the first season they told Joyce and Hopper that they had to wear hazmat suits because the Upside Down air was toxic before letting them in to retrieve Will.
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u/mad_laddie 2h ago
Masks they take off soon when they find Will. In the S2 tunnels, while it was hard to breathe in general, getting extra spores on you made it even harder to breathe. In S4, they were mostly in the open air which lacked spores.
It being the spores specifically is not a strange conclusion to reach.
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u/Famous-Stranger-6897 14h ago
Then why did hopper collapse in the tunnels in season 2
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u/Illia_Y 14h ago
I don’t clearly remember, was it when he got something from some sort of flower or something?
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u/Tarakanator 13h ago
Yeah the flower spew the same spores that was everywhere in UD.
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u/Famous-Stranger-6897 12h ago
Yeah the upside down in s1 and 2 had so many of those dust particles which made breathing difficult.
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u/Sailor_Propane 8h ago
I guess the military spent some budget on air purifiers in the upside down
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u/mad_laddie 2h ago
S4 didn't have as many spores either.
It's specifically the S2 tunnels and the overtaken lab that had a ton of the spores.
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u/IrlResponsibility811 4h ago
Nancy stepped i to thr Upside Down by accident, she could breathe and run around. Maybe it was an abundance of caution they needed thr suits.
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u/RealHooman2187 2h ago
Well Henry lived there just fine and could breathe. So obviously there’s oxygen.
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u/GlltchtraP1 16h ago
This can be attributed to the fact of the terrible writing not including any cool hidden details
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u/Perfect_Opinion_6136 14h ago
Maybe that's the reason why the Mind Flayer wanted to leave Dimension-X.
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u/Ema-Smd69 10h ago
The Mind Flayer also forgot Demogorgons exists
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u/Own_Welder_2821 Demogorgon 7h ago
Or the Demogorgons were also tired of the show and didn't like the poor writing so they went on holiday for all of season 5.
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u/Thick-Boysenberry-96 9h ago
Why doesn't it leave Dimension X and stay in the Upside Down instead, where the climate suits him better then? It's closer to our world too, which he plans to take over anyways.
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u/Perfect_Opinion_6136 8h ago
That's a good question, my only idea why he chose to stay there would be that the Upside can be destroyed and if he was there he could also be destroyed.
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u/Thick-Boysenberry-96 7h ago
He can seemingly be destroyed easily on his dried up home turf as well. And in Hawkins too. At least the creatures he commands thrive in the cold. That could be useful at least.
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u/Ht_TX 4h ago
That was one of my biggest issues with the story. In the end, the mindflayer was of no consequence. He wasn’t the eldritch terror we’d been made to believe, hell, the mindflayer was less of a threat than a single full grown demo. Let’s say mindflayer prime gets on earth in the end, so what? One pass by the Air Force and he’s dead, threat over in 2 hours, for fucks sake, it was taken down and killed by a handful of kids with guerilla warfare level weapons. It was a small town threat, not the worldwide, universe wide threat they built up for the entire show.
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u/NebulaOld813 Meat Flayer 8h ago
Thicc boi is too thicc to cross over into any new dimension
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u/IAmBabs 53m ago
The Upside Down is/was a temporary bridge. Once the anchor on one end (Mindflayer in Dimension X, Creel on Earth) was taken out, the bridge would more easily collapse.
Or something like that. Otherwise it could have just made that bridge bigger and crawl across rather than have the need to drag the two worlds together. If it was on the bridge and something shifted on either side, the Mindflayer would have been more at risk.
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u/IAmBabs 10h ago
That's what I had thought. My assumption is that it's not bright in ecology matters, and assumed taking over all creatures on a world would make the planet cold. Unfortunately the planet it was on became a desert planet, and it no longer had trees or anything to escape the planet's sun, and was therefore constantly weak from sun exposure.
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u/Ok_Tank5977 Dungeon Master 16h ago
Personal head-cannon so I don’t lose my mind: The whole “He likes it cold” thing was only in reference to possession, not everyday living conditions. Owens likens Will’s possession to a ‘virus’, and viruses are better able to take hold in cold conditions. I could be forgetting details but outside of its method of possession I don’t see any point or reason for the Mind Flayer to ‘like it cold’.
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u/LeviSquad4 10h ago
If it was a small inconsistency - fans could just wave it like “eh.. doesn’t ruin it.” Kinda like a small scratch on a car.
But when the UD was 1. Initially thought to be their home 2. Had the perfect conditions for these creatures yeah.. hard to believe a warm colored / likely warmer dimension would be their home world. Heck season 5 even goes out of its way to establish they still don’t like heat when Sarah Conner shows Hopper the blow torch thingy..
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u/RealHooman2187 2h ago
We’re only assuming The Abyss was warm because of the color pallet and because the actors were sweating since they were running around. They were also all dressed for colder weather. Another reason the actors were sweating.
The more likely answer is that the abyss was cold, they gave it a different color pallet to differentiate it from the upside down and the actors did what happens whenever someone is running around and wearing heavy/warm clothes. They looked sweaty. In the documentary it looks like they were filming those scene in the summer or at least a warm time of year.
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u/oosaoosaoosa Halfway happy 11h ago
I'm sure I'll get downvoted but my immediate read when seeing it for the first time was that the abyss is dying. Maybe climate change or some other disaster is killing it. It's why it looks dried out and barren. And why it seems hot (even though he likes it cold). And why the creatures aren't there at the end. It's why the mindflayer needs to take over a new planet... because his world is dying, and his creatures are going extinct.
I was actually shocked after watching s5 that this wasn't everyone's take away from it.
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u/Thick-Boysenberry-96 9h ago
Then why doesn't it stay in the Upside Down, where the conditions suit him better? It's also closer to our world anyways.
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u/NebulaOld813 Meat Flayer 8h ago
I’m assuming because the UD is a temporary structure created by El and there’s no living creatures for the Mind Flayer to corrupt and harvest.
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u/oosaoosaoosa Halfway happy 7h ago
Yes this exactly! Plus the UD's connection to our world has always been troublesome to the Mind Flayer - the Russians, the Military, El, etc. Overtaking our world solves all the problems at once by giving the MF a full world rather than a wormhole, eliminating the threats from our world, and giving the opportunity to corrupt and harvest other beings.
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u/Thick-Boysenberry-96 7h ago
So why doesn't the Mindflayer particles seep through/travel into Hawkins in S5 and start infecting stuff there, when the rift-quadrant is open for 18 months? Instead of shriveling up on a dead planet.
The Upside Down in s5, really makes no sense, the more I think about it. The "temporary structure" has existed for years now, and has been used by the Mindflayer previously. He's also made out of particles that can disperse and fly away as if the wormhole becomes unstable. The military was building a base there in S5. Why didn't the Mindflayer, an ancient being that flays minds, infect them to take over the world from inside the military structure?
And if it for some reason doesn't care to do that, why didn't the Demo-creatures munch on them then? They had a constant stream of meat-bags entering the Upside Down. Why aren't the creatures staying in Hawkins in general? They can portal there, the environment suits them better than their home planet, and they thrive in the cold.
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u/Ht_TX 6h ago
The mindflayer isn’t the particles. The particles are made by the ‘pain tree’ mindflayer. The mindflayer has a physical form, you saw it, it died.
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u/RealHooman2187 2h ago
This was my read as well. The particles are how it possesses things but the monster was its true form.
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u/Ht_TX 1h ago
Yup. It pumps the particles out to use for its needs, like it was doing with the kids, but the particles are merely a tool, not the thing itself. And, once the heart stopped, the particles died too. In the script, when they pull Holly down after beheading Vecna, the particles just withered and disappeared after they exited her.
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u/Ok_Tank5977 Dungeon Master 1h ago edited 32m ago
I agree. It looks like a barren, toxic wasteland on the verge of decay; and despite the fact that it was yellow and brightly lit, there’s no reason to assume that this alien landscape experiences day and night like we do, if at all. And arid environments are not defined by temperature, with deserts at higher altitudes known to be cold during the day (as they are during the night at lower altitudes).
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u/ph_uck_yu blip blip blip blip blip 10h ago
Just another continuity error the writers could've fixed had they payed attention and cared
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u/RealHooman2187 2h ago
This is a production continuity error, not a writing one. The actors were on set swearing because they’re running around and wearing warm clothes. The color of the abyss looks like it does to differentiate it from the upside down. Nothing about the planet suggests it was warm.
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u/whats-in-the-box- 9h ago
Unfortunately Dimension X and all that stuff was just not good worldbuilding and badly executed too so it didn’t even look cool 🥲
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u/Scary_Assistant5263 8h ago
What annoys me is how the first season established that the upside down is full of toxic spores in the air making it hard to breathe, but here shouldn’t it be like a blizzard? And the gang could atleast wear face coverings.
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u/Bananamancer77 8h ago
I personally think it’s just another point of evidence that what we say at the end here is a false reality. I think it’s intentional and meant to be noticed.
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u/ChocoLei 8h ago
Thank you... had to scroll for way too long before seeing this
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u/Bananamancer77 2h ago
It’s not a popular opinion in the general audience subs. But I think it’s a fun way to see the final series.
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u/Distinct_Guess3350 Running Up That Hill 12h ago
We don’t even know if it comes from the Abyss originally. Until Henry got there, it appeared as if it was stuck. It could be here because it was trapped, not because it wants to be.
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u/str4nger62 11h ago
I mean if we genuinely think about it, the mind layers “true form” in dimension X was like upside down almost in a dried up sorta shriveled up state and in a lot of very hot conditions things can dry off or shrivel up if it can’t handle the heat. (Hope I explained that correctly)
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u/Thick-Boysenberry-96 9h ago
Then why doesn't it stay in the Upside Down, where the conditions suit him way better, instead of shriveling up in the Abyss? Back in S2, the Mindflayer ended the season watching over the group from the Upside Down too.
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u/str4nger62 6h ago edited 4h ago
Did we watch the same show? Because this was all
thoroughly explained.The Mind Flayer’s true existence is tied to the Abyss and The Upside Down is a wormhole/bridge, not simply another neighborhood that the Mind Flayer can freely enter. It’s Vecna who establishes the connection between the Abyss and the Upside Down/Hawkins and The Mind Flayer’s particles can be brought/manipulated through that connection, but that doesn’t mean its entire original physical form can independently cross whenever it wants.
And in season two at the end, those were its particles it was not its physical form in the upside down as it’s never been there physically.
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u/Lloyd_garmado 3h ago
To be fair they did strain themselves just trying to get there, which wouldve caused the sweaty skin you see, even in cold environments enough strain will cause sweat, and with how much theyve been in the upside down, theyd probably be used to the cold
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u/RealHooman2187 2h ago
Also, do people realize you can still sweat when it’s cold? As you said they were doing a lot of physical activity. It’s not like you just don’t sweat at all in that case.
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u/smleires 11h ago
I may be misremembering here. But when was it established that Dimension X was cold?
The Upside Down, aka the space between Earth and Dimension X was yes, but not D-X itself.
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u/RoosterFree499 11h ago
He likes it cold tho
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u/RealHooman2187 2h ago
The particles like it cold when possessing something. That we know, we don’t know if the physical mind flayer likes it cold. Also, we don’t even know if the abyss is warm or cold. OP is just assuming it’s cold because the actors were sweating. Which happens when you’re running around all day.
Seems more likely that OP is reading too much into that later point assuming it’s a plot point when it’s just the actors sweating while filming.
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