Stranger Things Season 5 breaks Netflix records
Stranger Things Season 5 set a record for an English-language Netflix series with an astonishing 59.6 million views in its first five days.
cheddar
Spoiler alert! This story includes details about the final episode of “Stranger Things.”
Do you believe it?
Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) fate was left ambiguous in the series finale of Stranger Things, but the show’s creators revealed that she now knows the definitive answer to what happened to her.
In a spoiler interview on the podcast Happy Sad Confused on January 4, Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer admitted that they had decided what the “truth” was about whether Eleven lived or died, and shared it with Brown.
However, the Duffers have no plans to reveal this, and neither does the actress.
“She’s not going to tell you either,” Matt Duffer said on the podcast. “Don’t waste your time.”
He added: “Millie has been sworn to secrecy.”
Apparently, the rest of the cast of “Stranger Things” is also not allowed to know the truth. During the podcast, Duffer texted Brown to remind him not to tell co-star Noah Schnapp what he knew about Eleven’s fate, joking that he couldn’t trust Brown with his secrets. A few minutes later, she texted back, “Of course not.”
In the series finale of Stranger Things, released on New Year’s Eve, Eleven appears to allow herself to die, sacrificing her life when the Upside Down is destroyed, in order to ensure the safety of her friends. But in the final scene, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) develops a theory about how Eleven was able to fake her death and could still be alive somewhere.
Mike and his friends decide to believe in his theory that Eleven is alive, even though they will never know for sure, but the show leaves it up to the viewers to decide whether they believe too. It depicts Eleven arriving in a peaceful town, but it’s unclear whether this is real or just a visualization of Mike’s story.
On Happy Sad Confused, Matt Duffer revealed that the show’s writers considered whether they could have a “perfectly happy ending” where Eleven “marries Mike and lives a perfectly happy life,” but they “couldn’t find a way to make it work.” He also argued that telling the audience their interpretation “takes away the power of the ending.”
In other interviews after the final episode, the Duffers left Eleven’s fate ambiguous, saying that viewers, like the characters, would have to choose whether to believe Mike’s story.
“The characters and the audience don’t know because that would put Eleven in danger and her sacrifice was in vain,” Matt Duffer told The Hollywood Reporter. “So there’s a point in not knowing. The boys obviously chose to believe. I don’t know what the majority of people are thinking, but if you dip into social media a little bit, it seems like people are choosing to believe and trying to follow the path of Mike Wheeler.”
In a conversation with Netflix’s Chudom, Ross Duffer also argued that Eleven’s disappearance at the end of the series was thematically significant.
“She expresses magic and the magic of childhood in different ways,” he explained. “For our characters to move on and for the story of Hawkins and the Upside Down to end, Eleven had to go. We thought it would be beautiful if our characters continued to believe in that happy ending, even if we didn’t give them a clear answer as to whether it was true or not.”
Duffer added, “The fact that they believe in it, we just thought it was a really good way to end the story and a better way to express the end of this journey and the end of the journey from childhood to adulthood.”
Brown’s husband Jake Bongiovi seems to have decided on his interpretation of the ending. On Friday, he shared a photo on Instagram of Brown attending the finale screening and wrote, “I believe!”
