4 TV Shows Foreshadowing Major Twists (According To Fans)
Not unlike a carton of milk or a small child, TV shows are best when not spoiled. But some series can't help but plant tiny clues which hint at events that have yet to make it to the air. And because many of us spend a staggering amount of time overanalyzing the lives of non-existent people, observant fans have seemingly picked on some potential narrative indicators that may telegraph the futures of popular series.
Potential SPOILERS for shows such as …
The First Episode of Stranger Things 4 Predicts The Climax
No one knows exactly what lies in store for the protagonists of Stranger Things – beyond the musical output of Pearl Jam, leopard print scrunchies, and whatever else it was that happened in the 1990s, we can't quite remember. But as we wait for the conclusion of season four, which has been split into two chunks (conveniently spanning multiple subscription periods), some fans noticed that the show may have given us a taste of what happens in the finale back in episode one.
Of course, the Stranger Things gang has long had the habit of naming the demonic denizens of the Upside Down after monsters they're familiar with from playing Dungeons & Dragons, which is both period-appropriate and presumably a lot easier for Netflix's legal department to clear than if they'd named them after, say, Disney characters or tenets of Scientology. This season, the big bad is Vecna, a Freddy Krueger-like presence who looks like Swamp Thing's gothy stunt double.
How wilHow will the kids defeat Vecna? As Reddit user ZombieColor points out, back in the first episode of season four, we see the Hellfire Club playing Dungeons & Dragons, battling Vecna's fictional namesake. Dustin attempts to take out the lich but fails after rolling an 11. Good for Spinal Tap amps, bad for this D&D campaign.
They only succeed once Erica rolls a 20 – but in the larger context of a show in which one of the characters is literally named Eleven, this seems pretty significant. Especially because the season is teeing up a final confrontation between her and Vecna. So perhaps this scene indicates that Eleven's powers alone won't be enough to save Hawkins, and she will need some help – because friendship is the real superpower that can defeat monsters and/or communism.
There are only a handful of episodes of Better Call Saul left, prompting fans to wonder A) will the finale involve every major character getting intensive plastic surgery, thus smoothing over the transition to the Breaking Bad timeline? And B) what's going to happen to Kim Wexler? It's no secret that Kim is a fan-favorite character, and a lot of folks are concerned about her future since, barring any retroactive George Lucas-style CGI tinkering, she's not in a single episode of Breaking Bad.
Theories range from "Kim gets murdered" to "Kim gets a new identity from the vacuum guy" to "Kim falls in love, and runs away with, with Lalo Salamanca." Or she could be in jail. According to one fan, Kim's future may have been subtly suggested by one of this season's seemingly inconsequential scenes. The episode "Axe and Grind" opens with a flashback to Kim's childhood. She gets caught shoplifting at a mall and reamed out by her mother in front of the store manager – but then her mom, who was faking the parental outrage, uses the opportunity to steal another pair of earrings herself. And considering what show we're watching, maybe Kim should just be glad that her mom never went full meth kingpin.
While this shades in her backstory and helps explain Kim's moral flexibility, it could also foreshadow her future with Jimmy. Lil Kim took the rap so her mom could commit a crime – similarly, Kim and Jimmy's not-so-legal transgressions could end with her ultimately being found culpable while her husband gets away scot-free. This might also mean that, during the events of Breaking Bad, Kim's not around because she's busy making license plates somewhere upstate.
The Mandalorian - An Obi-Wan Kenobi Character Saved Baby Yoda
After two seasons of The Mandalorian (and several episodes of an entirely different show), there's still a lot we don't know about Grogu, AKA Baby Yoda, AKA the puppet you love more than some blood relatives. Like where did he come from? Who brought him to the Jedi Academy? Was Yoda at least making child support payments? Come on, it's not like we need Maury Povich to solve that genetic mystery …
But one of the biggest unanswered questions concerns how Grogu survived Order 66, Palpatine's secret plan that turned his army of Clone Troopers against the Jedi. One theory posits that Grogu's savior may be a character from an entirely different Star Wars series because … synergy?
Reva, the Third Sister, is the Inquisitor tasked with hunting down Jedi survivors in Obi-Wan Kenobi – which still somehow doesn't convince Obi-Wan to come up with a better alias than Ben, plus his original last name.
It's been heavily suggested that Reva, like other Inquisitors, was originally a Jedi youngling before being scooped up by the Empire. So since we now have two potential Jedi youngling characters in the same place and time, it only makes sense that they probably knew each other. And, storywise, if Star Wars ends up redeeming Reva's character, eventually revealing that she's the one who saved the adorable critter we know and love from TV and breakfast cereal boxes, seems like a good way to win over an audience.
Squid Game Will Have a Star Wars-esque Twist
Squid Game is, of course, the South Korean smash-hit series about the cruelest organized sporting competition outside of the Olympics. Because producing several episodes of television is a much easier way to make money than schoolyard fights to the death, Netflix is not surprisingly making a second season of the successful show. While we don't know exactly what it will entail, the internet has a pretty compelling theory …
In a shocking twist at the end of the first season, we find out that the elderly player 001, Il-nam, is really one of the game's creepy ringleaders. But some fans suspect that this character may yield yet more twists. Specifically, people think that he may secretly be the father of the show's protagonist Seong Gi-hun. No? That's impossible, you say?
Well, for starters, the old man tells Seong Gi-hun: "As a kid, I'm willing to bet you got spanked a lot." And when Gi-hun asks how he knows this, Il-nam replies: "My son did too. He was just like you, friend." Plus, both men also remark that they grew up in neighborhoods that look like the set built for the marble game.
Perhaps most sneakily, we know that Gi-hun's birthday is April 26, after his failed attempt to crack his mother's debit card, and pointedly, Il-nam later remarks that his son has a birthday close to the 24th. But of course, it was easy to miss a lot of these details, what with all the innocent people being gunned down by goons in candy-colored jumpsuits.
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Top Image: Netflix/Lucasfilm