Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Stranger Things finale.
The creators of Stranger Things have addressed the unresolved ending of Eleven as the series concluded after nearly a decade.
Whether you’re a fan of the series or not, it’s likely you’re familiar with Stranger Things, which recently wrapped up on Netflix.
The show ended with a two-hour finale that aired on December 31, or in the early hours of January 1 in different parts of the globe.
Many fans hoped for a neatly wrapped conclusion to Stranger Things, but show creators Ross and Matt Duffer had different ideas.
In the controversial finale, Millie Bobby Brown’s character Eleven, affectionately known as El by her friends in Hawkins, appears to perish when the Upside Down is obliterated.
However, in the show’s final scenes, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) offers another theory about El’s fate.
Mike proposes that El and her sister Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) devised an alternate plan to their original one, in which they would both die together. Before Kali succumbed to gunshot wounds, she created an illusion of El at the Upside Down’s gate, allowing her younger sibling to escape unnoticed.
The finale then reveals Eleven alive and well, climbing a mountain.
Max, Dustin, Will, and Lucas express their belief in Mike’s hopeful version of events for their friend.
No, you cried.
Discussing their decision to leave Eleven’s fate open to interpretation, Matt Duffer explained to Tudum: “What we wanted to do was confront the reality of what her situation was after all of this and how could she live a normal life. These are the questions that we’ve been posing this season that Hopper just doesn’t even want to think or talk about.
“Mike’s obviously talked about it a lot, but it’s sort of this fantasy version that would never work. There are two roads that Eleven could take. There’s this darker, more pessimistic one or the optimistic, hopeful one. Mike is the optimist of the group and has chosen to believe in that story.”
Ross Duffer further added: “There was never a version of the story where Eleven was hanging out with the gang at the end.
“For us and our writers, we didn’t want to take her powers away. She represents magic in a lot of ways and the magic of childhood. For our characters to move on and for the story of Hawkins and the Upside Down to come to a close, Eleven had to go away.
“We thought it would be beautiful if our characters continued to believe in that happier ending even if we didn’t give them a clear answer to whether that’s true or not. The fact that they’re believing in it, we just thought it was such a better way to end the story and a better way to represent the closure of this journey and their journey from children to adults.”