After ten years and five seasons, the immensely popular Stranger Things concluded on New Year’s Eve. The series about the adventures of a group of childhood friends in the 1980s premiered in 2016 and quickly became a marketing juggernaut for Netflix. Over the years, fans grew and changed along with the members of the “party”—a reference to the player characters in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign—as they confronted an otherworldly evil trying to destroy their hometown of Hawkins, Indiana, and the United States military intent on covering it up.
I’ll be honest: As a huge fan, I was disappointed with many of the decisions the show’s creators, the Duffer Brothers, made in the final season—especially in the bloated finale, which failed to wrap up important loose ends. Yet I delighted in one ending the writers left up for interpretation (SPOILER ALERT): Eleven, who with her telekinetic powers has always been the heart of the show, seemingly sacrifices herself to defeat the cosmic evil of the Upside Down, the alternate dimension that the Hawkins kids have been fighting. But in the end, we’re left to wonder if she may have survived. What intrigued me most about that decision is how it mirrors the Gospel stories of the immense grief that the disciples experienced at Jesus’ death, and what role this may have played in the emergent doctrine of the resurrection.
The show has been foreshadowing the eventuality of Eleven’s death for a few seasons. I remember wondering if it would be possible for her character to make it out of season two alive. Like Jesus’ forthright statements about the necessity of his death in Jerusalem (Matthew 16:21), season five’s arc includes Eleven wrestling with whether she should sacrifice herself to end the villain’s plans and foil the government agents who will never stop pursuing her. “I have to end the cycle,” Eleven says. Her friends, like the disciples, even say the equivalent of “never, Lord!” (Matthew 16:22).
