STRANGER THINGS Finale Alternate Ending Seems to Have Been Much More Definitive
Fans have been debating about the Stranger Things finale for the last two weeks, and with viewers split on the fate of the main character, I am sure we will forever be on one side or the other, but The Duffer Brothers seem to have veered in the direction of the choose-your-own-adventure ending late in the game.
The show ended with its fifth season, which the creators had been building toward over the last nine years. But not every detail was set in stone going into the final season’s production.
In the new documentary, One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5, which dropped on Netflix this week, an eagle-eyed fan spotted a whiteboard in the background of one of the behind-the-scenes office shots, and it detailed the plot points of an early version of the final episode.
In this version, many of the same events occur, except Hopper is in on the plan that Mike described happening in the final moments of the episode. This plan makes it clear that El faked her death and made it out alive.
Stranger Things co-creator Ross Duffer previously said of how to interpret the show's ending, "I don’t know if we want to say. Obviously, we’ve had these conversations with Millie too, and we all have our own interpretations. I worry if I say it, it might take away. We really want the audience to take from it what they want."
Matt Duffer added, "You can’t write with a sense of ambiguity. You’re writing from a specific point of view, because the character doesn’t know; Max [Sadie Sink] doesn’t know, right? The characters can’t know and the audience can’t know because then it puts Eleven in danger and her sacrifice was for nothing. So there’s a point in not knowing. The boys obviously choose to believe."
I get both sides of it. I can certainly agree that we all like firm conclusions and no ambiguity when it comes to the closing of an important chapter… however, I also like that we were let in on the group’s hopes. We can believe with them while not getting confirmation, because that’s the only way El’s sacrifice was worth it.
Check out the board below and let us know which way you would have preferred to see the story end: