Sadie Sink appeared on “The Tonight Show” several days after the “Stranger Things” finale dropped and shared with host Jimmy Fallon her belief that the Netflix show ended with Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven dead and gone. The show left Eleven’s fate purposefully ambiguous.
“What do I think? I think she’s dead,” Sink said. “Is that a hot take or something? Mike’s story is just one last story and then they say goodbye to childhood. That’s one final tale and that’s it. It’s just a coping thing. It’s stronger [that way], right?”
During one of the finale’s most climactic moments, Eleven sacrifices herself as the Upside Down is being destroyed in order to thwart the military’s continued efforts to weaponize her by using her blood to create new super-powered infants (and thus risk giving rise to a new Henry Creel/Vecna). However, Finn Wolfhard’s Mike has a different take on what happened. In the final moments of the finale, Mike tells his friends a story in which Eleven survived as footage plays of the character seeking refuge in a remote part of the world. Is that real life?
Gaten Matarazzo, who starred on “Stranger Things” as Dustin, told Variety that he has his own interpretation of Eleven’s fate that he does not intent to share publicly.
“I want to keep that private,” he said. “I don’t know if others will [say], but I think that whatever works for you and makes the show wrap up better for you is correct. You have the right to debate it, but whatever you want it to be for you is great. I think they teeter that line very well, because I’ve already noticed a kind of 50/50 split amongst fans about whether they believe.”
Hwoever, Matarazzo did have this to say about Eleven’s ending: “What’s so tragic about the end of Eleven’s story is normalcy would never be guaranteed for the people that she loves if she was there. She didn’t see it as fair, and I think it was a beautiful choice to end her story the way that they did.”
“Stranger Things” co-creator previously told Variety there was no version of the show’s ending where “Eleven was never going to be there” with her friends at the end.
“It was very early on in the writing process of this season that we figured out exactly how to tell that story and landed on the ‘I believe’ moment,” referring to one of the show’s final moments where the main characters choose to believe Mike’s story about Eleven’s survival. “Once we landed on ‘I believe,’ then that sort of cracked it wide open. That was in those first few weeks of the writers’ room, because we started at the end, at that basement scene, and wanted to make sure that we got it to a place where we felt was the right ending for the show. And then we built the season to that moment.”
Watch Sink’s full interview on “The Tonight Show” in the video below.