In a little town in Indiana, on Netflix.
Stranger Things clearly draws from beloved coming-of-age narratives like Stand By Me and The Goonies. But the show is most generous in exploring the confusion and thrill of adolescence when it comes to the boys. Eleven herself doesn’t get to “grow up” herself; she’s there to help her new friends learn important life lessons. The best evidence for this comes in the climax for the series’ disappointing finale, “The Upside Down.” With the monster going on a rampage through the town, the group hides in a school classroom. Having just killed a horde of evil government agents, Eleven is almost unconscious. “We’ll be home soon and my mom … she’ll get you your own bed,” Mike tells her, clasping her hands. “Promise?” Eleven asks, crying. “Promise,” he replies. Moments later, the monster rushes in. The end seems near when an inexplicably revived Eleven slams the monster into the wall. Nose bleeding, she turns to the horrified boys behind her. “Goodbye, Mike,” she says. The monster explodes, and when the dust clears, Eleven is gone, too.
Later, Will has been recovered from the alternate dimension, and the boys visit him in the hospital. “We made a new friend,” Mike says. “She stopped [the monster]. She saved us. But she’s gone now.” Then, they begin excitedly regaling him with tales of how cool Eleven was, comparing her to Yoda, recounting how she made a bunch of government agents’ brains explode. It’s at this point the viewer realizes: The real Eleven has been erased and rewritten as just another action hero. Stranger Things spent several hours unspooling the visceral horrors Eleven encountered in her young life, trying to make her pain and sadness real. But in its final scenes, the show undid all of that. It made her into a bizarre martyr: the tragic, silent girl who suffered for abilities she never asked for, who seemed to only exist so she could nobly sacrifice herself at the end of the story.
No doubt, Eleven’s “death” was meant to be the sad-but-uplifting sort—but the casual treatment of her departure after so much buildup suggests that Stranger Things cared less about her than it initially implied. The show built Eleven to add more danger and excitement to an otherwise typical tale of boyhood adventure, only to conveniently dispatch her. (Oddly, Eleven’s story closely mirrors that of the female protagonist in last year’s pallid Goosebumps film.) In aping earlier cinematic glories, there’s always the risk of replicating more subtly retrograde tendencies.
Stranger Things is unwittingly guilty of this mistake, overwhelmingly privileging the happiness, desires, words, and lives of El’s friends over hers. Still one of Netflix’s better dramas, the show will continue to find avid fans, eager to relish its attention to period-specific detail and its compelling central mysteries. It’s also further proof that there’s no shortage of talent and creativity in the age of Peak TV. But there’s a higher bar for original stories—even homages—to clear when it comes to incorporating the lessons Hollywood has learned recently about depicting female characters who are as layered as their male counterparts. For all its charms, Stranger Things doesn’t quite meet that standard.