Examples of Foreshadowing in the show Stranger Things.
Season 1
- The tabletop game the boys are playing at the start of the very first episode foreshadows what's going to happen later. Mike intones, "Something is coming, something hungry for blood – the Demogorgon!" In both the game and in reality, Will tries to attack the Demogorgon, but "it gets him."
- In the first episode, the boys get excited about how far the signal on Mr. Clarke's ham radio can reach. The radio is later used by Eleven to reach a place farther away than they ever thought.
- Hopper tells his deputies that a fall from the quarry cliff would be fatal, despite there being a lake on the bottom, due to sheer height. Mike later goes over the edge.
- After a big fight in the group, Dustin recalls a D&D session where the party split up and they were picked off by trolls one by one. Sure enough, both Lucas and Dustin and Mike end up in trouble in two separate situations.
- Will has a discussion with Joyce where he mentions that wizards can't always outwit their enemies, and have to resort to spells such as Fireball to defeat them. At the end of Season 2, Joyce ends up using fire to drive the Mind Flayer out of Will after previous attempts to outsmart it went horribly wrong.
- In the last episode of Season 1, the D&D Monster of the Week is a Thessalhydra. Guess what Season 2's Big Bad resembles.
Season 2
- The boys are playing Dragon's Lair in the first episode. Dustin loses, and Lucas smugly says that Princess Daphne is still his. Guess who gets together with Max.
- In the first episode, Murray theorizes that there will be a Russian invasion in Hawkins. In Season 3, Russian soldiers try to open the gate underneath the Starcourt mall.
- Dr. Owens reveals to Nancy and Jonathan that he doesn't want the truth of the lab to be discovered because he thinks Russians will try to use the creatures from the Upside Down for themselves. At the end of Season 3, it's revealed that Russian soldiers have obtained a Demogorgon and feed prisoners to it.
Season 3
- In the lab underneath Starcourt Mall, Erica briefly ponders about the size of the original Demogorgon after she catches sight of a large metal cage. In The Stinger, it's revealed that the Russian scientists running the lab have managed to either breed or capture a full-grown Demogorgon.
- The tidbit after the Mind Flayer's rampage in the Season 3 finale, which mainly focuses on Satanic Panic due to the Dungeons & Dragons plays a major role in the next season, with the leader of the local Dungeons and Dragons club targeted as the one behind the mishaps throughout the series, and one of the Hawkins students flaring it up and causing Apocalypse How in Hawkins due to mistaken belief on the above.
Season 4
- In the first episode, Eddie surprises the Hellfire Club with Vecna, who they believed they'd killed in an earlier session, as the final boss of the campaign. The same goes for the actual Vecna; Eleven thought she killed him when she threw him into the Upside Down, and Nancy believed she killed him when her group set him on fire and threw him through a window, but he's lived long enough to take the spot as the final boss of the show.
- In the aftermath of their party in "Vecna's Curse", Jason banters with a hungover Lucas with a nod to his upcoming gruesome death in the season finale:
- In a teaser
for Season 4, scenes of the Creel family moving into their new house and starting to experience the strange phenomena connected to the Upside-Down are shown before the party enter the abandoned house in the present, with Dustin quoting from Sherlock Holmes as to what kind of clues they're looking to discover that tie the family to the otherworldly realm. Said quote actually applies more to the viewers, as the Creel's son, Henry Creel, is revealed to eventually be the human form of Vecca, and his banishment into the Upside-Down by Eleven resulted in him warping it into the eldritch and terrifying realm it became, meaning that the teaser is showing the origins of the Greater Scope Villian of the show.Dustin: The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. - The teaser also ends with the glass pane on the clock cracking at four different spots, which intersect in the clock face's centre and cause the glass to violently shatter, which foreshadows Vecna's ultimately succeeding in his goals of sacrificing four different teenagers at different points around Hawkins, the site of their murders gaining 'cracks' that become portals into the upside down. Upon Max's (temporary) death, the cracks then split and flow together into the centre of Hawkins, and the season ends with the Upside-Down starting to merge with Earth, the barrier between both realms having been broken.
- Wayne Munson believes that Vecna's first victim was killed by Victor Creel, who was accused of brutally murdering his family in the same way. Turns out there is a connection between Victor and Vecna, but not in the way the characters expected: Victor was innocent, and the murder was done by his son Henry, Vecna's true identity.
- To those who know D&D lore, it might seem odd that what the kids call the Mind Flayer is the Big Bad, while what they call Vecna is seemingly unrelated threat or merely the Mind Flayer's general, since Vecna is a much bigger threat, even attaining godhood, than the average illthid. The Season 4 finale reveals that Vecna is not the Mind Flayer's servant, the Mind Flayer is Vecna's servant.
