Stranger Things characters whose fate remains unknown after the series finale

I advise you not to climb this hill if you haven’t seen “The Rightside Up”, the series finale of “Stranger Things”. Spoilers ahead!

After a decade of hand-wringing and increasingly convoluted fan theories, “Stranger Things,” the hit Netflix series created by the Duffer Brothers, is over. When the two-hour-plus feature-length series finale aired on the evening of December 31, fans flocked to see what happened to their favorite characters. Would Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) be able to save everyone from Vecna ​​​​(Jamie Campbell Bower), helped by Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) and his new powers? Would Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers (David Harbor and Winona Ryder) finally get their happy ending? What about all the other kids, like Nancy and Mike Wheeler (Natalia Dyer and Finn Wolfhard), Will’s brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke), Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo), Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink), and Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin)?

In a frankly interminable epilogue which follows the defeat of Vecnawe got answers. Nancy dropped out of Emerson College to pursue a career in journalism, Steve is a sex education coach and teacher at Hawkins, Robin is enjoying her time at Smith College, and Jonathan is making (probably terrible) student films at New York University. The younger ones graduate and go off to college. Joyce and Hopper are engaged and Eleven sacrificed herself to stop the military takeover of Hawkins. Yet because this is “Stranger Things” and the Duffers are somehow a little bit more than they can chew when it comes to the mythos and overall narrative of this series, some character threads have been left frayed and dangling. So what happened to these pretty important characters at the end of “Stranger Things?” We may never know.

Personally, I found Brett Gelman’s long-running “Stranger Things” character, conspiracy nut and shady private detective Murray Bauman, really exhausting and more irritating than anyone else, so I don’t necessarily do it. care whether he had a happy ending or not. Still, it’s strange and truly remarkable that after Murray is a major part of the central gang’s plan to blow up the Upside Down to cut off the Abyss’s access to Hawkins, he simply disappears.

Murray was something of a gopher for the group in Season 5 of “Stranger Things,” providing them with much-needed supplies and even transportation as they plotted to defeat Vecna ​​once and for all, and again, he is deemed important enough, as a character, to be part of the group. final push against Vecna ​​in Upside Down. We know he left the Upside Down safely with everyone before the detonation occurred that presumably killed Eleven (more on that shortly), but it’s incredibly weird that we never see him again. You’d think that after everything they’ve been through, Murray would perhaps join other non-parents like Steve and Robin in the high school graduating class of 1989, where Max, Lucas, Dustin, Mike and Will are all enrolled. No! I guess he’s in a dark room somewhere, surrounded by piles of newspapers or something.

What’s the point of casting a perfect Molly Ringwald lookalike in your nostalgic series (Amybeth McNulty, with her red hair and charming smile, absolutely evokes the 1980s star) if you’re just going to abandon her at the end of the series without any explanation? McNulty’s Vickie Dunne first appeared on “Stranger Things” during the show’s fourth season as the object of Robin’s affection; By the time we catch up with Robin in Season 5, she and Vickie are dating, and she keeps promising to take Vickie on a romantic date at Hawkins restaurant Enzo’s.

Not only do they never get to go to Enzo’s house – it’s reserved for Joyce and Hopper, who get engaged there during the epilogue – but after Vickie, whose job was to care for an unconscious Max while her fellow redhead helped Eleven infiltrate Vecna’s mind, is apprehended by the military, we never see her again. What happened here?! When we meet Robin again in this same epilogue, she makes a comment about “overbearing significant others” when she, Jonathan, Nancy, and Steve promise to remain friends forever despite all obstacles. What is that mean? At no point did we see Vickie act bossy or interfere in any way with Robin’s friendships. She seemed like a nice girl. I hope she found a much better girlfriend, honestly – and if we’re all honest with ourselves, Vickie was basically just a character whose own queer identity served as a plot device to help Will come to terms with his own sexuality.

Everyone’s favorite witch Erica Sinclair, Lucas’ younger sister played by Priah Ferguson, plays a pretty big role in the final season of “Stranger Things,” all things considered. Erica has been a fairly constant presence on “Stranger Things” since the show’s second season, and Ferguson has been as charming as ever on screen. So it was great to see Erica flex her mental muscles, help her brother, and play a huge role in the final plan. In fact, Erica is the one who ends up drugging Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly) and his family to try to use the young boy to figure out what Vecna, née Henry Creel, is doing with all these kidnapped children, and she’s the one who enlists local science teacher Scott Clarke (Randy Havens) to help them destroy Vecna.

With all of this in mind, it’s odd at best and infuriating at worst that Erica doesn’t appear in this epilogue. Apparently, she doesn’t attend her own brother’s graduation, and when we see Mike watching his younger sister Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) and Derek start playing Dungeons & Dragons in the Wheeler family basement, Erica, who is the same age, is nowhere to be found. Did she move on her own? Getting recruited by the CIA? For Erica fans, I’m sorry to say we probably won’t get an answer to this question.

Sorry, but it’s incredibly weird to play “Terminator” star Linda Hamilton in the final season of your 1980s series and not just give her Nothing of substance to do, but never even tell us what happened to him. Hamilton’s Major General Dr. Kay, who also never gets the honor of a real first name, shows up in Season 5 essentially out of nowhere to serve as the final outing’s main villain. As we’re told time and time again, Dr. Kay is relentlessly searching for Eleven because she’s aware of the work the super-powered girl has been doing with Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) and wants to use Eleven’s blood for further experiments. Almost every time Dr. Kay appears on screen, she threatens Eleven and the gang and demands that they hand the girl over to her, which they obviously refuse to do.

We see Dr. Kay in the series finale. After our heroes successfully plant bombs in the Upside Down and recover the children captured by a now-dead Vecna, Dr. Kay and his military henchmen are all waiting to arrest them and take away Eleven, who chooses to go back through the door to the Upside Down and go down with the proverbial ship (again, we’ll get back to this whole mess in just a second). So, did the military just… leave, even after some of these kids and a few adults, including Nancy and Hopper, directly killed a group of service members? Where is Dr. Kay going? Is anyone facing consequences for anything, and is Dr. Kay still looking for Eleven somehow? Dr. Kay was far from a perfect character, but this ending is truly a shame.

Let’s talk about Eleven’s “death scene.” Throughout season 5 of “Stranger Things”, Eleven appears to concoct a plan to sacrifice his own life to save his loved ones. – a plan she hatches with her “sister” Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), also known as Eight, and one that absolutely freaks out Eleven’s adoptive father, Hopper. Despite his own wish to give his life to protect everyone, Hopper appears to convince Eleven that she should leave the Upside Down and seek a happier destiny in peaceful Hawkins. But when Dr. Kay surrounds the entire gang and begins searching for her, Eleven seemingly disappears before appearing in the makeshift doorway of the Upside Down (which, as a reminder, is about to explode violently). Before everyone’s eyes, Eleven appears to die as the Upside Down ignites behind her.

Or isn’t it?! At the end of the epilogue, a distressed Mike puts forward a rather convoluted theory that, as Kali was dying from a gunshot wound, she used her own powers to send a message. vision of Eleven to pretend to sacrifice himself. This seems to be a manifestation of Mike’s enduring love for Eleven more than a thing that actually happened, but the show still clearly wants it to be ambiguous given that we’re treated to a vision of Eleven walking through the mountains to see waterfalls in a remote location. Again, we could view this as simply part of Mike’s fantasy, but I think the show do we want to ask ourselves questions, which is honestly quite irritating in the end. Still, we don’t know for sure Eleven’s fate in “Stranger Things,” so she had to be included here.

The entirety of “Stranger Things” is now streaming on Netflix.