The end of the adventure is finally here, as Stranger Things season 5 has brought the long-running Netflix phenomenon to a close after almost 10 years.
The following will contain major spoilers for the finale, so turn back now if you're not up to date!
If you're still reading, then you'll know that Eleven heroically sacrifices herself in the finale – though there's some ambiguity about if she really survived and escaped to Iceland.
In the run up to the finale, though, fans were predicting multiple major deaths for season 5 (Steve Harrington in particular was a source of worry), but, as it turns out, aside from Vecna and Kali, only Eleven (seemingly, anyway) lost her life, and the Duffers have explained why.
"In the writers room, I think we talked through everything," Ross Duffer told Deadline of the possibility of other deaths. "You talk through everything, every possibility, and we knew from early on what we wanted to do with Eleven and her fate, and you talk through the other characters, but I think at the end of the day, for us, the show is an adventure story. It's a coming of age story.
"So for us, it was really talking about those last 30, 40 minutes and where we wanted our characters to be and what we wanted their growth to be and where we wanted to leave them behind," he continued. "Having those discussions is how we landed on [the idea] that we want our heroes, most of them, to make it out of there."
As for Eleven, her sacrifice was necessary for the show. "Eleven represents, in a lot of ways, the magic of childhood," Ross Duffer said in another interview.
"And we knew for our kids to be able to grow up, the magic had [to] leave Hawkins. There was never a version that we had written where it was Eleven down in that basement. It was never going to be that simple and that easy. It was finding a way to come up with an ending where it was not that simple, but also bittersweet, and that there was hope there," he added.
You can stream all of Stranger Things on Netflix now. For more, check out our Stranger Things season 5 finale review or our Stranger Things season 5 finale ending explained.
