The Void in Stranger Things: the black where Eleven looks for the missing
Universe, Eleven, Season 1
The Void is the black space Eleven enters when she is cut off from her senses. At the middle school, in a makeshift pool, she finds Will alive and Barb dead. The Nina project, later, is a physical tank: another tool, not the same place.
A black with no edges, its floor covered with a thin layer of water. Eleven walks there barefoot, and the people she looks for appear as islets of voice. The first pool is the one at the lab. At the middle school, the group rigs up a second one, in the chapter « The Bathtub ». That black is not a room of the lab, and it is not the desert tank either.
The essentials
- Nature: a mental space, black, with no fixed set
- Condition: to be cut off from sight and from outside noise, first in the water, later with a simple blindfold
- First dive outside the lab: the chapter « The Bathtub », at the middle school
- What she sees there: Will alive in his fort, Barb dead
- Do not confuse: the tank of the Nina project, in 1986
Contents
A place that has no address
The Void is not in Hawkins and it is not on the other side. It is the black in which Eleven moves when nothing distracts her anymore: no voice, no light, sometimes the body floating. The people she looks for appear there, far off, as if mental distance had a floor.
For a long time, she takes no one there. The others see her from outside, sometimes with a bleeding nose. The sharing stops at the edge. What happens in the black, only she can tell, and only when she comes back.
The name matters less than the rule. As long as she is cut off from what surrounds her, she can search. The Void is therefore not a realm. It is a method.
The gown of the sessions: the clothing from before the pool, when she was already asked to see without looking.
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The middle-school pool
The idea comes from Eleven. At the Byers' house, she cannot reach Will or Barb. She sees the bathtub and suggests « the bath ». Dustin calls Mr. Clarke at home one evening to find out how to build a tank. The group sets up a pool at the middle school, water, salt, and Joyce covers Eleven's eyes with tape-covered goggles.
Joyce and Hopper are there, with Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Nancy and Jonathan. It is no longer a hidden experiment in a lab. It is the chapter « The Bathtub ». Eleven floats. The black opens. Joyce has asked her to look for Will, Nancy to look for Barb. It is Barb she finds first.
Barb is already dead. Eleven sees her in the black water of the other side, the body left there. The news is awful and clear: the search does not bring the absent back, it says where they stand. Will, for his part, still answers.
The fort, the radio, the creature
Will is in his fort, on the other side, alive. Eleven passes on to him the message from his mother, still at the edge of the pool: she is coming. Through the radio, Joyce then hears her son whisper for her to hurry.
Then a growl rises in the black. The contact cuts out, and Will disappears. The link is fragile. Eleven comes out. The pool has given two pieces of information and one warning: Will is alive, Barb is not, and the creature is not far from him.
This scene fixes the use for what follows. Each time Eleven makes the black again, it will be known what she risks: seeing a dead person, hearing a living one, and losing contact all at once.
The same black, later
She does not give up the method. When someone far away has to be found, or a mind entered, she cuts herself off again. Often without water: a blindfold, and the static of a TV. That is how she reaches her mother and looks for Kali in 1984, then enters Billy's mind the following summer. The blood at the nose comes back. The set changes. The black does not.
In the spring of 1986, the group no longer has the middle school or the lab. It has a pizzeria kitchen and a freezer that gets filled with water and salt. The makeshift work is rough. The rule is the same as in « The Bathtub ». Eleven finds the black again and, from there, reaches Max at the moment Vecna attacks her.
This return says the Void did not belong to the middle-school pool. The pool was only a door. A clean enough cutoff, with or without water, reopens the same expanse.
Eleven in a gown, to put together, as she comes out of the lab.
In the shopBuildable mini figure Eleven in a hospital gown14,90 €See the product
Why this is not the Nina project
Nina is a tank, in a building, with screens and tapes from 1979. Eleven is put back under there into her memories of the lab, up to the massacre, to give her back her lost powers. She is watched. Brenner is beside her. The aim is not to look for a missing person. The aim is to reopen a memory to awaken a power.
The Void, for its part, does not replay her own past. It leads her toward people as they are at the moment she looks for them, and sometimes into their heads. Will in the fort, Barb already dead. A day of 1979 is not watched again there. You walk there toward a voice.
Mixing the two up erases the show's choice. It gave Eleven two black tools: a mental space to find the living, and a machine to reopen a locked day. The pizzeria freezer belongs to the first. The desert tank belongs to the second.
Seeing without being there
The Void is Eleven's most solitary power. The others run, drive, dig. She closes her eyes and she leaves. The price is visible: the blood, the exhaustion, the creature that can turn. The gain is too: a sentence from Will, a body of Barb, a direction.
Hawkins has no map for this place. It depends on her. When she is far away, or weakened, the group goes blind again. When she accepts the black, the town gets eyes again.
It is the heart of the bathtub chapter, and it still holds years later. The black is not the other world. It is the corridor through which a girl cut off from everything goes to see those who are already there.
The pool also fixes a physical limit. Eleven comes out breathless, in tears, and Joyce takes her in her arms. The black, for its part, belongs to the one who agrees to walk in it.
A double portrait of Eleven, with a shaved head, in a red halo: the little girl Brenner used to plunge into the black.
In the shopPoster portrait of Eleven24,90 €See the product
To rememberThe Void is the black where Eleven walks when she is cut off from her senses. At the middle school, she finds Will alive and Barb dead. Nina's tank is another machine, for another day.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Void the other world?
No. It is Eleven's mental space. The other world appears there when she comes close to someone who is in it.
When is it really seen for the first time?
At the lab, in flashbacks, in the chapters « The Flea and the Acrobat » and « The Monster ». Eleven spies on a man there, then touches the creature. The chapter « The Bathtub » afterwards reopens the Void at the middle school: a makeshift pool, salt, tape-covered goggles, Joyce and Hopper at the edge.
Whom does she find there?
At the middle school: Will, alive, in his fort, and Barb, dead. Earlier, at the lab, she had found the creature there, which had turned toward her.
Can the others go in?
For a long time, no. At the middle school, they stay at the edge of the water. They sometimes hear a voice, through the radio or through her.
What is the link with Nina?
They are two different tools. Nina is a tank that makes her relive her memories of 1979, up to September 8. The Void is for looking for people in the present.
Why a freezer in 1986?
To remake the conditions of the pool: the water, the silence. The black that opens afterward is the same.
