A lot has changed in Hawkins, Indiana, in four and a half seasons of Stranger Things. At the start of the Netflix series’ first season, which was set in November 1983, the fictional town was a quiet and peaceful place, free of any major crimes or controversies. The show’s core group of kids—Mike Wheeler, Lucas Sinclair, Dustin Henderson, and Will Byers—could play Dungeons & Dragons in Mike’s basement for hours on end without a care in the world. All they had to fear at the time, if anything, was talking to girls and the prospect of puberty.
By the beginning of Season 5, the first four episodes of which were released last week, four years have passed in the show’s timeline, and Hawkins is almost unrecognizable. After a disturbing number of mysterious deaths and unexplained incidents, the town has gained a reputation for being cursed—and that was before the earth opened up and devoured parts of Hawkins (and some of its residents) in a seismic, interdimensional event that the government tried to cover up. There’s now a massive military presence and a quarantine in effect, preventing anyone from entering or exiting at will. That same group of kids has expanded to feature new members, including a waffle-loving superhero, and they’ve all experienced physical and emotional transformations that far exceed the standard nightmarish trials of being a teenager. Will, for one, has suffered the kind of trauma that will be passed down for generations—and he apparently has superpowers now, too.
But among these many changes, there has always quietly been at least one steady presence in Hawkins. So quiet, in fact, that even his own family sometimes seems to forget he exists. I’m talking about the unsung hero suburban dad of Stranger Things: Ted Wheeler.
In the second episode of Season 5, Mr. Wheeler—father to Mike, Nancy, and Holly—is nearly killed by a Demogorgon in an attack that almost claims the life of his wife, Karen, and strands Holly in the Upside Down. It’s the most shocking and noteworthy event to directly involve the patriarch of the Wheeler family, played by Joe Chrest, through the first 34 episodes of the Netflix series. Yet his two Hawkins-side children don’t seem to care that his life hangs in the balance. Hell, they don’t even bother to ask about his condition at the hospital as they channel all of their concerns toward their mother and their missing sister.
That’s where we come in. Mike and Nancy may have forgotten you, Ted, but The Ringer has not. With the first half of Stranger Things Season 5 in the books, the audience will now have to wait until the next batch of episodes is released on Christmas Day to find out whether Ted has already bitten the dust off-screen. Sure, there might be some more pressing matters in Hawkins than Mr. Wheeler’s well-being. But I don’t care about Vecna, Will’s new nosebleeds, or the return of Eight as much as I do about whether Ted will ever be able to get back to his simple life of blissful anonymity once our heroes inevitably save Hawkins once and for all.
Let’s take this midseason break to pour one out for the Wheelers’ neglected, neglectful dad and appreciate what he has given us (very little) over the nine years since Stranger Things made its streaming debut.
Simply put, Ted Wheeler is a running joke. He is a consistent source of humor in the series, the stereotypical TV father who is perpetually clueless or aggravated—and often both at once.
The first time Mr. Wheeler appears on-screen in the Stranger Things premiere, he’s fittingly in the background—adjusting the antenna on the living room TV—as Mrs. Wheeler does all the parenting in the foreground. In the midst of a 10-hour Dungeons & Dragons campaign, Mike begs his mom to let him and his friends finish as she orders him to call it a night. When Mike turns to his father for support, Mr. Wheeler’s response—and first line of the series—is fitting: “I think you should listen to your mother.”
Later in the episode, after Will has gone missing, the Wheelers sit down for a tense dinner, and Mrs. Wheeler struggles to balance the needs of her distraught son and horny teenage daughter, who’s less concerned about Will’s well-being than she is about making out with Steve Harrington. Aside from serving as the argument’s potty-mouth police, lightly reprimanding his children for any use of bad language in front of the younger Holly, Ted provides Karen with no parental support. Instead, he eats his chicken in silence. Nancy eventually storms off, and Mike follows suit, leading an angry and defeated Karen to take Holly and scold Ted on her way out of the dining room. Ted is left alone at the table, confused and unsure about his role in the chaos surrounding him, a microcosm for where he stands within the bigger picture of Stranger Things.
Ted typically doesn’t contribute much to any situation. In truth, it’s more likely that he isn’t aware there's a situation happening in the first place. (Although, in fairness, that could also describe just about any parent who’s raising their kids in Hawkins.) In the rare times when Mr. Wheeler actually has something to say, it quickly becomes apparent that everyone would be better off if he always kept his opinions to himself.
When the Wheelers receive a visit from shady government agents who are hunting Eleven later in Season 1, Ted talks Karen out of every one of her good instincts and convinces her to trust in the law:
More often than not, Ted doesn’t know where his children are. Apparently, keeping track of that sort of thing is another responsibility that falls to Karen. In the fifth episode of Season 2, Ted’s mortal enemy, Dustin, stops by their home to search for either Mike or Nancy, and he has to interrupt Karen’s phone call—twice—to find their whereabouts. But what Ted lacks in knowledge, he makes up for with some fatherly sarcasm:
Ted isn’t good for much beyond the occasional laugh, even if not a single soul in his universe seems to find him funny. He can sleep just about anywhere, no matter how dire the circumstances. Here he is at the end of Season 1, getting in a nap at the hospital after Will returns to his home dimension:
… and again, sleeping at home in his trusty La-Z-Boy, as his daughter cozies up with her boyfriend mere feet away:
By the beginning of Season 3, Karen has—understandably—grown tired of her life with Ted. After being seduced by the young, hot local lifeguard Billy Hargrove (may he rest in peace), she decides it’s finally time to leave the old goofball behind and enjoy herself for once. But when she’s about to leave the house for her secret affair, Karen finds Ted asleep in his trusty chair, holding Holly in his arms.
This moment wasn’t pivotal just because it stopped Mrs. Wheeler from hooking up with an 18-year-old lifeguard who happened to be the older stepbrother of one of her son’s best friends. It was a key reminder that, no matter how oblivious Ted may be, you can always count on him being there (even if he is likely asleep).
Is Ted the best husband or father? Absolutely not; he’s likely a big reason why Mrs. Wheeler has slowly developed a drinking problem over the show’s five seasons.
Is he cheap? Some might say he’s frugal, but yeah, he sure is.
Did he once advise the police to threaten his son’s friends with jail time to “loosen their lips” while in the presence of said friends and their parents? Yes, he did, and it caused quite the commotion.
Did he also manage to be the one person to take the doughnuts at a town hall where his son was essentially accused of being in a cult responsible for a string of recent deaths? Yep, that very specific scenario from Season 4 was top-tier Ted content; even Holly seemed to be judging him for the snacks piled onto his lap:
But none of these shortcomings are enough to justify the way Mike, Nancy, and even Stranger Things at large treat my guy Ted in Season 5.
At the end of “Chapter One: The Crawl,” Ted is blowing off steam by driving golf balls into the darkness. It’s hard to blame him given the fight he’d just had with Karen and the sorry scene at his home earlier that morning, when he couldn’t get a single slice of bacon at breakfast thanks to the three extra mouths the Wheelers have had to feed with the Byers staying at their house. Just look at the sheer disgust on Ted’s face as he off-loads the last scraps of bacon onto his plate:
However, just as Ted is teeing his negative emotions into the night, a Demogorgon invades Holly’s room and tries to capture her. When Ted finally notices something’s wrong at the start of Episode 2, as the lights in the house flicker and Holly clings to her mother for dear life in the bathroom, he walks inside—really slowly—with his golf club in hand. He nervously whispers things to himself like “Heavens to Betsy” before asking Karen whether everything’s all right, even as he spots overturned furniture amid the continuous light show that clearly signals that everything is not all right.
When the moment of truth arrives, Ted doesn’t shy away from it. He raises his hand and says, “Hey, stay back,” while the Demogorgon approaches him, as if he were dealing with a bear. It might not be an overly impressive attempt to scare away the beast, but Ted still goes toe to toe with the toothy monster and sneaks in one good swing before getting hit so hard that his hurtling body creates a new door to Mike’s room. I mean, just look at Ted fly:
It’s a noble act of bravery: one man standing up in the face of sure death to protect his family. Yet Karen and Holly don’t even stop to glance at his motionless, bloodied body as they skate past it to retreat downstairs. Moments later, Karen naturally outdoes Ted, going above and beyond to defend Holly in a heroic last stand. She repeatedly stabs the Demogorgon with a broken wine bottle, doing some serious damage to it, before she gets slashed across the neck and stomach.
Netflix released a 12-minute clip over the weekend that shows the making of the extended action sequence, titling the scene “Karen vs. Demogorgon.” If you can believe it, Ted’s part in the incident is hardly mentioned, and—unlike the other Wheeler actors featured in the scene—Chrest apparently didn’t get the invite for an interview.
Everything that follows in “The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler” is a blur, but blink and you might miss Ted ever being acknowledged again. When Nancy and Eleven arrive at the Wheeler residence, Nancy stays by her mother’s side, slowing the blood gushing out of her neck as Eleven hops into the Upside Down to find Holly—all while Mr. Wheeler continues to bleed out upstairs. It’s a miracle his body was even found.
When Karen and Ted are being wheeled into the hospital, the doctors declare that they have a “female, 46 years old.” With Ted, they simply say “male, late 40s,” which suggests that his kids don’t know their father’s exact age, the doctors are less concerned with the specifics when it comes to Ted, or the Stranger Things writers simply don’t care how old he is. But the one-second shot of Ted getting wheeled into the emergency room is the last time we see him in this season’s first four installments.
Nancy, Mike, and Lucas stay by Karen’s side as she and Ted are carted through the halls of the hospital. The Wheeler kids then fret about seeing their mother and even go so far as to pose as a nurse and a patient to sneak into her room after her surgery. Along with checking on her condition, they hope to inquire about Holly’s imaginary friend so that they can locate her in the Upside Down; the thought that Ted would have any information to offer never occurs to them. (Can’t really blame them on that one, though; Ted probably learned about Holly’s imaginary friend only after she got in trouble at school earlier that day.) For good reason, they prioritize locating their lost sister. However, they leave the hospital without so much as wondering aloud whether Ted is going to make it. “The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler” depicts the vanishing of Ted, too.
Granted, there is one update on Ted’s status that Jonathan Byers delivers to Steve: “Dad’s in an induced coma, and Mom’s in surgery. They’re not gonna know anything for a couple hours.” I’m guessing that unlike Max Mayfield, comatose Ted won’t have anyone sitting by his side.
Stranger Things has left plenty of loose ends to be resolved in its final four episodes, including whether a certain kidnapped family ever woke up and made it out of the barn they were tossed into. Ted’s survival will surely be clarified, but the disrespect that he’s faced through the opening half of the Netflix series’ final season might be impossible to amend. After Mike and Nancy complete their more pressing task of reuniting with Holly on Christmas, they’d better have a gift waiting for their unappreciated father. Something tells me that he could use a new La-Z-Boy after the Demogorgon redesigned his home.
