Stranger Things‘ Creators Just Clarified if Eleven Really Died After the Show’s ‘Ambiguous’ Finale: ‘There Was Never a Version That…’
The main story of the sci-fi phenomenon has finally come to an end. However, there’s been one thing that’s been looming over Stranger Things fans’ heads as the Hawkins gang finally live their happily ever after. Is Eleven dead?
Eleven sacrifices herself to “end the cycle” of the government trying to experiment on mothers and their babies. She stands at the doorway of the Upside Down before Hopper (David Harbour) detonates a bomb to destroy the place once and for all. Before that, she contacts Mike (Finn Wolfhard) telepathically, who refuses to let her do it. She responds, “None of this will ever end if I’m still here.” She later says, “I need you to help them understand my choice.” In the last glimpses we see of Eleven, she shares one message to her boyfriend, “I will always be with you. I love you.”
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In the final scenes of the beloved Netflix series, Mike, Dustin (Gaten Matazarro), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Will (Noah Schnapp), and Max (Sadie Sink) play their Dungeons and Dragons campaign after graduating high school. Mike tells a story that could convince people that she’s still alive. In the campaign, he explains that Kali made an invisibility spell to make people believe she died in the bomb detonation. “She had to make everyone, including her friends, believe she was dead,” Mike says.
When Will asks if it was true, Mike responds, “No one will ever know, but I like to imagine she’s in a beautiful land.”
Did Eleven Really Die in Stranger Things?
We won’t get a definite answer since the Duffer Brothers purposefully made the ending “ambiguous” for the audience. Matt Duffer told Variety that the show is told from the point of view of Mike and his friends. “They don’t know, and the audience can’t know,” he clarified. “If you knew that she was out there and you knew she existed, then she’s very much at risk. So we thought there was something really cool about not knowing for sure and having our characters choose to believe.
It’s been a deliberate decision that’s been in the works for a while. “We just thought that was more powerful than providing a definitive answer, one way or the other,” he said. “And I like that the audiences are in Mike, Max, Lucas, and Dustin’s shoes, in the sense that they get to choose or not choose. I mean, I’m definitely seeing the majority choosing to believe and side with the kids.”
“If Eleven is out there, the most that they could hope for is a belief that it’s true because they can’t be in contact with her. Everything falls apart if that were the case. So if that’s the narrative, this is really the best way to keep her alive. And it’s about Mike and everyone finding a way to move past what’s happened,” Matt told Tudum.
“She lives on in their hearts, whether that’s real or not,” Ross Duffer told the site.
As for whether there was another version where Eleven was in the basement with the kids, the Duffer Brothers said that it was a hard no, saying that the character represented “the magic of childhood.” Matt told Variety, “We knew for our kids to be able to grow up, the magic had leave Hawkins. There was never a version that we had written where it was Eleven down in that basement. It was never going to be that simple and that easy. It was finding a way to come up with an ending where it was not that simple, but also bittersweet, and that there was hope there.”
