A thought about "Camazotz" and time travel this coming season: in A Wrinkle in Time, Camazotz is this highly conformist, hyper-idealized city/suburb. As a kid reading it in the late 1990s, I always pictured it as having a very 1950s American suburban aesthetic, like you'd see in something like Edward Scissorhands. This is perhaps not what Madeline L'Engle, writing in the early sixties, intended--I've seen Camazotz interpreted as a stand-in for imposed conformity in the Soviet Union--but, in the "real-world" portions of the book, heroine Meg (living in a small New England town) suffers from gendered expectations of how she should behave as well as spiteful gossip about her missing father and implicitly neuroatypical baby brother. So I think there is an implied critique of conformity in the US as well.

All this is to say...what if a character is offered a false vision of perfection and conformity to trap them or harness their energy? I think the most natural and intriguing option is Will being subjected to an evil It's a Wonderful Life, where Vecna capitalizes on his hopelessness and self-abnegation by showing him a (falsely) ideal world where he was never born. Mike and El are blissfully happy, and the rest of their friend group is harmonious heterosexual couples. There is no trace of Upside Down/Hawkins Lab/Soviet bullshit (except for El's very presence--watch this spot). Everyone who died over the course of the show is now alive (which is extremely personally meaningful to Will when that person is Bob, although of course he's also glad to people like Barb and Eddie and Benny because they mean a lot to people he cares about, and...hey, is that Billy? Maybe he's nicer in this world...huh, that guy looks like Brenner, but the lab is gone?). Joyce and Jonathan are no longer exhausted from having to look after them...in fact, they're part of a conventional nuclear family, because Lonnie never left. And this is an idealized Lonnie, not a deadbeat or an abuser, and maybe Will's always wondered if he was the source of all the tension in the family...but were things ever this good with him around? Didn't Joyce and Jonathan have grievances with him other than how he treated Will? And Joyce and Jonathan seem so different--more content and less tired, maybe, but also way more conventional and hard and shiny and close-minded. And that's how everyone seems. And El, his constant companion in California, seems less like herself and more like the popular girls she tried and failed to imitate. And how did she get here, anyway, if there's no UD and no lab? And the cracks begin to show.