Ok, it’s been a whole month and regretfully, I am not over the ending of Stranger Things. You can call me chronically online, but no, I don’t mean that I’m nostalgic or sad about it ‘symbolising my childhood ending’, or mad that conformity gate wasn’t true, I’m just so disappointed in the finale – mostly as a woman and a feminist who is angry with how the Duffer brothers treated El’s ending and final moments. Eleven deserved better than her misogynistic ending, and I am hoping to (begin to) outline why.
The number of plot holes, unfinished narratives and frankly cringey dialogue have been pointed out to no end on social media, which was only fuelled by the ‘One Last Adventure’ documentary about ‘The Making of Stranger Things 5’, where keen eyed fans saw Chat GPT tabs open on the Duffers’ computers, and were gobsmacked to find that filming for the final season began before the script for the finale had been finished. However, what stuck out to me in this documentary was the discussion around El’s fate in the writers’ room, where Ross Duffer says at the outset of the documentary that “the whole episode has to be building towards ‘Eleven is going to kill herself’”. This is possibly one of the most disappointing things he could have said; viewers of the show got to witness El develop from a small, vulnerable child, experimented on and abused for as long as she can remember, into a young woman who has grown into her power – both her supernatural ones, but also her power and autonomy as a young woman. We watch her experience so many different types of love, and become independent and strong minded, building a life for herself aside from her powers and her connection to the Upside Down, yet the Duffers in their documentary revealed that they had built her character up over 5 seasons for 10 years, only for her to be used as a plot device to close the story of the Upside Down in the easiest way, reducing and erasing the depth and development of her character to nothing more than a neat ending to tie off the show for the benefit of other characters.
It was such a disappointing way to deal with the final moments of her character, a strong, emotionally developed female lead, who dies feeling that there is no other option for her, and that to end the cycle of abuse that has dictated most of her life for her, she has to take her own life. The Duffers showed her gaining autonomy and agency, only to make her use this to decide that she needs to kill herself in order to end the cycle of abuse that she fights so strongly to be free from throughout the whole show.
The second issue that I have with the way that the show dealt with El’s death is how – in her final moments – they reduced her entire identity to Mike’s girlfriend, and her death became about him and his grief, rather than her, her life, and her sacrifice. In the aforementioned documentary, Millie Bobby Brown reflects on the experience of playing Eleven, and how El grows through the seasons from a child “so vulnerable and scared” who “didn’t know what love was [and] didn’t know friendships”, to someone who “knows who she is” and “has many friendships and many loves”, and has learned to live rather than just survive. Millie’s deliberate choice to outline the plurality of El’s loves forefronts the importance that love in all of its forms had in shaping El’s life and personality, and that romantic love should not take precedence over familial love and friendships, which were just as (if not more) important to El’s development. Her relationship with Mike was problematic to begin with, where he kisses her before she can even form proper sentences, and doesn’t even know her own name, and yet she spends her final moments with him. An important part to El’s character arc in season 3 was that she is more than just the men in her life; we have a beautiful 80s themed montage of her and Max at Starcourt Mall simply enjoying being teenage girls, shopping and laughing and celebrating their friendship, and throughout the entire show, Hopper’s kindness and unwavering patience prevails, despite what the world throws at them. These are the moments that should have played in her final montage, yet her final speech entirely undermines these important relationships, claiming that Mike is the only one who understands her, which not only contradicts the writing in season 4, where we watch conflict and tension arise in her relationship with Mike, where she realises that he will never truly understand her or love her in the way that she needs, but demeans all of her other relationships which have made her feel safe and loved and helped to shape the young woman that she becomes. Instead, after a life of being controlled by men, her death became about one too.
El is yet another victim to misogynistic, male-centred writing. Media – no matter how fictional – sends a message to its audience, and for the Duffer brothers to reduce El to her (rocky) relationship with her boyfriend, or describe her as a concept to “represent the magic of childhood … that goes away”, is deeply unsettling and rooted in misogyny. To make a traumatised 16 year old believe that death is the only way to gain freedom from her abuse and trauma is an incredibly harmful message to make the entire crux of the finale, and an image that is more dangerous than we might realise on the surface.
She never got the happy ending that she so truly deserved, and yes, it was always that deep. El I will forever mourn who you should have been; she – and all other women who saw parts of themselves in her – deserved better than her misogynistic ending.