Updated:

Jan 2, 2026 11:07 am

Posted:

Jan 2, 2026 11:06 am

Stranger Things creators the Duffer brothers have explained the Season 5 finale and its ending, which has sparked much debate among fans.

Warning! Spoilers for Stranger Things Season 5 Episode 8, The Rightside Up, follow:

Stranger Things ends with a definitive wave goodbye to all the central characters except Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, who appears to sacrifice herself to ensure she cannot be used to create super weapons, another Vecna / Henry, or another bridge between our world and The Abyss.

18 months after that traumatic event, we see the central characters meet up for graduation and say their goodbyes. It’s at this point that Mike Wheeler, played by Finn Wolfhard, has a thought: what if Kali Prasad, also known as Eight (Linnea Berthelsen), used her dying breath to create the illusion of Eleven’s death, and an invisibility spell on Eleven herself, leaving her free to escape unseen?

Finn teases this revelation to the Dungeons & Dragons group as their final campaign comes to an end, suggesting Eleven cooked up a plan with Kali to fake her own death, then traveled to a far away small village — bordered by three waterfalls — to live out her days in peace. But this ending is unconfirmed. Finn and the others choose to believe it, and it’s left up to the audience to decide what they choose to believe as Stranger Things finally comes to an end.

So, why did Matt and Ross Duffer decide to leave Eleven’s ending on such an ambiguous note? Netflix published a Q&A with the brothers to accompany the season finale, and in it they explained what they were going for here.

“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,” Matt Duffer said. “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 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.”