Though Stranger Things 4 is primarily set in 1986, the season’s premiere — “Chapter One: The Hellfire Club” — takes place a few years earlier, when Hawkins National Laboratories was still in operation and conducting experiments on Eleven and other children with enhanced abilities. The Hawkins lab is framed as both a prison and a learning environment for Eleven and her peers in “The Hellfire Club,” and the episode details how their time there culminated in a horrific attack that killed the majority of the children and staff. The Hawkins lab massacre, both in and out of the larger context revealed as the rest of Stranger Things’ latest season unfolds, plays very much like the show’s take on a school shooting due to its focus on helpless children losing their lives in classrooms.
