Something that’s kinda bugging me: does time pass differently inside Henry’s mind palace?
I ask because, during Max’s explanation of how she found the cave, she talks about how she’d almost found her way out and it shows the scene from earlier in the season where Lucas is at the hospital with her and her heart rate starts speeding up.
The tape stops, the exit closes, Henry shows up, and Max runs. She reaches the cave, and Henry won’t follow. So she makes it her home.
OK fine but the hospital scene happened like 1 day ago in the real world, but Max has been in a coma for almost two years, and her setup in the cave makes it seem like she’s been living there for about that long. She can’t have gathered all that stuff in just one day. Besides, I feel like she would have said to Holly that she’d only just found the cave.
I wonder if the Duffers meant for the hospital exit scene to be a different one, not the one they’d just shown us, but didn’t make that clear enough.
If she’d almost found her way out of her coma early on but has then spent the majority of the almost two years in the cave, that would make a lot more sense.
EDIT: she did start off by saying she didn’t know how long she’d been “gone” for before suddenly finding herself in the rainbow room. Perhaps she was genuinely unconscious for most of the almost two years and only recently started to revive. Even so, it still feels like she’s been in the cave for too long. Unless maybe most of that stuff was meant to have been there already?