It’s been months since Vecna was decapitated and the Stranger Things finale still crosses my mind every now and then. It took them four years and they decided on that finale? Not even giving her a happy ending with her family, but with a question. The question, is El alive or dead? A question that wasn’t even a question until Mike brought up an alternate ending. What we saw was that Eleven bravely sacrifices herself to save her friends and family (Joyce and Hopper were her family). That was a fine ending, but then Mike brings up an alternate ending where her sister, Kali, used her powers to trick everyone into thinking that she sacrificed herself, while she snuck away so she could finally be free.
Mike’s Alternate Ending
Mike deduced that El wouldn’t have been able to use her powers with the psychic-dampening sonic devices all around. Now this does have some merit. Besides her dampened powers, El was also missing some important things when she was sacrificing herself. Whenever Eleven uses her powers, she would get a nosebleed. Her nose wasn’t bleeding. Another thing she was missing was her signature 011 tattoo. The tattoo was given to her when she was a child in the lab.
Is Eleven Alive or Dead?
So which one is it? At first I was convinced that the story Mike told was a way for him to deal with losing her. Now, however? I don’t think El could have escaped the military clutches while being hit with the sonar to make it to the Upside Down to close it. The evidence mentioned before was also a factor, but in the alternate version where El is near the waterfalls, she didn’t have the tattoo there either. She could have removed the tattoo or they forgot to add the tattoo in both sequences. Another piece of evidence that convinced me was what Eleven said to Mike in the Void “From the day we met, you’ve always seen me… the real me”. Even after all that, I still wasn’t convinced, so you know what finally changed my mind? Hopper.
Hopper Is the Key
Hopper sees El as a child. He protects her for years. If she died, Hopper would be a mess. We already saw over five years how his daughter, Sara’s, death still affects him. Losing Sara absolutely destroyed him. He spent years with El and seeing her as a daughter. Losing another daughter would probably kill him, literally. This isn’t what happens though. Eighteen months after El’s “death” he is comforting Mike and telling him he has to move on? If he really thought El was dead he would still be a mess. Hopper knows if El is alive then the government would always be after her, but if she was on her own, he could protect her new life by having the government on him and the others while they have no contact.
My Verdict: Eleven is Alive
So that is what I believe, that Eleven is alive. Not because of one clean piece of proof, the dampened powers and the missing nosebleed and the tattoo all leave room to argue, but because Hopper is not a man who could fake his way through grief. He tells Mike to move on because he knows there is something on the other side of it.
And that is what finally made the finale sit right with me. For months I was annoyed with that ending and instead wanted her to have a home and a family at the dinner table. But that dinner table is exactly the ending that gets her found. A happy ending in Hawkins is a lab down the line. Being gone is the only version of free she was ever going to get, and the Duffers handing us a question instead of an answer is the only way she stays safe. So no, I do not think Eleven died closing the rift. I think she won the only way that she could.
