SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the series finale of Netflix‘s Stranger Things.

Matt and Ross Duffer have officially closed the book on Stranger Things.

The supernatural Netflix series rang in 2026 with an epic and emotional two-hour finale that saw the Hawkins crew finally defeat Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) and destroy the Upside Down for good, bringing an end once and for all to the havoc the portal to an alternate dimension has caused for the last four years of their lives.

Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) also vanished with the collapse of the Upside Down, though the Duffers have given both their characters and the audience a powerful coping mechanism to grapple with the grief of her self-sacrifice. Earlier in the finale, it seems that Eleven has broken off from the pack to go back through the gate, ensuring she’ll go down with the wormhole and the government won’t be able to continue its experiments on other children. But, in the final moments of the episode, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) lets his friends in on a little theory he has about their mage, having realized at graduation that El was seemingly able to use her powers and enter the Void to say goodbye to him despite the fact that the military was using that piercing sound (“kryptonite,” as they call it) to debilitate her.

He relays his hypothesis through the lens of the D&D campaign they’ve just finished playing, which Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Max (Sadie Sink), Will (Noah Schnapp) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) win by using an eleventh hour Hail Mary to summon a mage they’d encountered earlier in their quest. As he’s orating the epilogues for all of their game characters, Mike says he chooses to believe that the mage isn’t actually dead. Instead, with the help of her sister, she was able to escape and start a peaceful life off the grid. As he says it, the episode flashes back to the moment the gate closes in the MAC-Z, and the audience sees Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) use her powers one last time before she dies to make everyone think they see El standing inside the gate so that she can actually slip away and escape for good.

Putting away their D&D books, the kids are an emotional wreck as they realize that the real world is knocking at the door and, in many ways, their lives are irrevocably different than they were just a few short years ago. Both for better and worse. Mike’s final moment of reverie is interrupted as Holly (Nell Fisher) and her friends come storming down the stairs to play their own D&D campaign in the basement, and Mike smiles as he closes the door, literally and figuratively, on that chapter of his life.

In the interview below, the Duffer brothers discuss crafting what they hope is a satisfying conclusion to the story that launched their careers and the careers of most of the show’s young cast into the stratosphere as well as saying goodbye to the beloved current and former residents of Hawkins, Indiana.

DEADLINE: First of all, how are you both feeling now that the finale is out in the world?

ROSS DUFFER: I mean, we definitely feel emotional. I think we’re still processing. We went to see it last night with fans, went to a screening in the Americana [at Brand in Glendale, California], and that was an incredible experience just being, not at a premiere, just being with fans on opening night and seeing them react in real time to what’s happening.

DEADLINE: You also both watched the finale with a lot of the cast just recently. What was that experience like for you?

ROSS: Oh, it was very emotional. I think for everyone, there were a lot of tears at the end, but, also, everyone was just so, so proud and just so supportive of one another. I don’t know. I just felt like everything had come full circle, and just to see how much they’ve grown up over the years… it was really the perfect way to end the whirlwind of press tour and filming and everything. It was quiet, but I thought it was beautiful.

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MATT DUFFER: It’s sort of how we feel now. I think everybody was processing it. Everybody was crying. We all went back to my apartment in New York. Some of the cast chose to walk, even though it was 30 minutes, I think because they needed time to process everything. Just having heard from a lot of them yesterday, I haven’t connected with them today, but, I think everyone’s still reeling a little bit. Everybody’s emotional.

DEADLINE: I mean, to be fair, I am feeling emotional about it, and I am only an audience member!

MATT: You have to remember, it’s been 10 years, right? So for the kids, it’s half their lives. I mean, Millie always says she doesn’t remember life or much of it before the show, so I don’t know. I think it was harder for everybody than they thought it was going to be saying farewell.

ROSS: So much of the final scenes that you see, I mean, yes, people are acting, but in a way, they’re not. Those are real emotions that they’re feeling, because those are all the last scenes that we captured with these actors. So, it’s a vulnerable thing to see that projected on the big screen and then put out in front of everyone.

MATT: I don’t want to say it’s meta, because it wasn’t, but some of it was a commentary on the experience of the show itself and what it felt like to say goodbye to it. So each of those individual scenes in the epilogue were very personal to all the cast, and I think that’s why each of those days were as emotional as they were. Everybody was crying the entire time.

The basement scene was two days, so the first day was okay. The first day it was just the fun D&D campaign. Then the second day, everyone was wrecked. I thought they were going to run out of tears, but they did not.

ROSS: They did not.

DEADLINE: You can feel a lot of that emotion very viscerally. It doesn’t fully feel like they’re acting in some of those final moments.

MATT: No, that’s not acting. When they’re breaking…when you see Maya [Hawke] break, or any of them break, they were just crying.

DEADLINE: Well, there’s a lot to unpack from the finale, but let’s start there. You said that the basement scene is something you’ve pretty much always envisioned for the finale, but when did this idea of weaving in some ambiguity about Eleven’s death crystallize for you? Why did that feel like the right way to end that story?

MATT: It’s been something on our mind for a really long time. That was the original ending of the show when it was designed as a limited series, that El has to sacrifice herself in some way. I mean, the first thing we did when we were working on Season 5 was to talk about the ending and specifically talk about Eleven and, it was hard.

This is a character we’ve been with for 10 years. We’ve been with Millie for 10 years. So it was a really hard and emotional decision to make, but at the end of the day, it just felt right to us. It felt like, given the circumstances, it was the only way to actually end, permanently, everything that had been going on, and it’s such a selfless act from her to protect anyone from going through what she went through, if that makes sense.

ROSS: It was always going to end with the kids in the basement. That’s been planned for eight years. Once we figured out this, ‘I believe,’ line from Mike, that’s when everything sort of crystallized. And of course, that was very early on, like week two or three of the writers room this [season]. Once Holly became a bigger figure, sort of the passing of the torch, those were some of the first ideas we had when we were talking about what we wanted this basement scene to be, before we even started writing the season. So it was always headed towards that goal post.

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MATT: At the end of the day, we see it as a big coming of age story. This scene is about one last moment of being kids before they leave that childhood behind. Them going up the stairs is them leaving it, and then Holly and her friends are the new generation who are going to live that out. So, that’s why that last shot of Mike, you see him go from feeling sad about leaving his childhood behind to feeling happy and knowing the happy memories he had with his friends are going to be with him forever.

And El, in so many ways to us, represents the magic of childhood, like when you’re growing up, and anything feels possible, and that goes away in some ways as you get older, but it stays with you forever. So the memories of Eleven are always going to be with Mike, and they don’t vanish, right? I mean, she’s going to be a part of Mike and her friends for the rest of time, and they choose to believe she’s still out there, which is powerful.

So, it’s not saying goodbye. She’s with them forever, and their childhood and the memories of everything they went through, as scary and traumatic as it was at times, as Dustin said, there was so much good that came out of it. Eleven and everything they went through shaped who they are today.

DEADLINE: Did you consider any other deaths?

ROSS: In the writers room, I think we talked through everything. You talk through everything, every possibility, and we knew from early on what we wanted to do with Eleven and her fate, and you talk through the other characters, but I think at the end of the day, for us, the show is an adventure story. It’s a coming of age story.

So for us, it was really talking about those last 30, 40 minutes and where we wanted our characters to be and what we wanted their growth to be and where we wanted to leave them behind. Having those discussions is how we landed on [the idea] that we want our heroes, most of them, to make it out of there.

DEADLINE: I have to say, ‘When Doves Cry’ to ‘Purple Rain’ to ‘Landslide’ is one of the craziest strings of sequential needle drops I’ve ever heard in a show. I need to know how you landed on those songs.

MATT: It was cheap, too, I can tell you. [Laughs]. We spent a long time trying to figure out what was going to be playing on the bomb vinyl. I don’t think we talked more about what song we should use than we did for that particular song, because it was really, really challenging, because the first song needed to be upbeat and hopeful on the vinyl. Then the final song had to work for Eleven’s farewell. So not only are you looking for an iconic song, you need the beginning song and the end song to both work and convey completely different emotions.

We asked everybody in the cast, all of our friends. Everybody weighed in. Everyone had different ideas. Eventually we landed on ‘Purple Rain,’ but the concern with that was whether or not we were going to be able to get the rights. I mean, aside from Michael Jackson, it’s the hardest thing to do, to get Prince rights. I don’t think we would have got them had it not been for Kate Bush, to be honest. Because of the Kate Bush effect, I think that ultimately persuaded the Prince estate. I don’t know how they feel about the scene, but hopefully they’re happy with it. I guess they approved it, right Ross?

ROSS: They did approve it [in the scene]. Then ‘Landslide,’ we love that song, as I think everyone does, and we’ve always wanted to find a place for it. We’re so glad that we finally did. Maya loves that song, and actually, for her final stint as a DJ, we had earplugs, and so she was listening to that song while delivering her last squawk.

DEADLINE: In some ways, Henry gets a redemption in the end, but he isn’t let off the hook. He says he ultimately chose to align himself with the Mind Flayer and is still choosing to do so, and Joyce actually does the honors of killing him. Can you tell me about settling on that ending and why it felt satisfying to you?

ROSS: We discussed having a redemption moment for him, as we did with, say, Billy in Season 3, but ultimately, it felt like Henry has gone too far now — and how much of that is him in there versus how much is the Mind Flayer, how much of it is just him unwilling to admit this, we want to leave that a little bit for the audience [to decide].

Obviously, Jamie did an incredible job conveying the complexity of emotions here, but ultimately, yeah, he’s gone too far to let go of this, and as a result of all this trauma that he’s caused, that’s why we wanted to give that moment to Joyce. The headshot moment was always in there, but it was in editorial where we ended up putting in these flashbacks as we wanted to make that moment a cathartic moment, as opposed to a stand up and cheer moment.

It’s a little more complicated than that, in that our heroes have suffered as a result of this evil and as a result of Henry, so even if there was still good inside of him, it’s almost a cleansing of all that evil that he’s done.

MATT: Right. It was kind of f*ck you, and then she chops his head off. We said [in the edit], ‘Well, let’s try a more emotional route and see if we can make this the most emotional decapitation ever.’

DEADLINE: It is pretty symbolic, since Joyce has that axe in Season 1.

MATT: Exactly. She had to use that axe.

ROSS: We went through every character going, ‘Who gets the final blow on Vecna?’ Then once we landed on Joyce with that axe, us and the writers were like ‘She’s got to be the one.’ It just feels right.

DEADLINE: It’s funny, because in Season 1, I remember thinking ‘What the hell is she going to do with an axe?’

MATT: [Laughs]. Well, she chopped through a wall at Season 1, but it didn’t accomplish anything. She swung at a demo this year, but then she finally put it to real, proper good use.

DEADLINE: How long did it take you to get the finale to 2 hours and 8 minutes? Was there a lot you had to cut?

MATT: Actually, not that long. I don’t remember how long the first draft was. I think it was pretty normal in that they’re usually, like, 10 or 15 pages too fat, and then you just trim it down. We spent so long outlining it that the structure was pretty much intact. Our goal was to keep it around two hours and avoid a two and a half hour ‘Piggyback’ [Season 4, Episode 9]. I mean, two hours is pretty luxurious for a TV episode. We didn’t want there to be any filler in there. So it always landed around two hours. There’s not footage missing.

DEADLINE: You said there’s a hint in the finale about the spinoff you guys are working on. Can you give any hints about what the hint might be?

ROSS: I know. We were just talking about this. I don’t know if I want to, but I will say, though, it’s not Hopper mentioning Montauk. There’s no Montauk spinoff. That was more of a wink to the fans, deep-cut fans that know that the show started as Montauk.

It’s obviously not Holly and the kids or anything like that. It’s something much smaller than that. We’ve said this before, the spinoff idea we have, it is early days, but it is an entirely new mythology. So, it is connected, and it is going to answer some questions that people have, and there’s some lingering questions that weren’t answered in the finale that will be answered in the spinoff. But at the end of the day, it’s got its own story and its own mythology.

DEADLINE: My last question for you is about the end credits. They’re awesome. Can you tell me about creating them?

MATT: I don’t remember where that came in the process. I think, actually, we were editing Season 5. We were in post production when we came up with the idea. We thought about [The Lord of the Rings] Return of the King a lot, just in terms of the length of the epilogue. I always defend the Return of the King epilogue, but I’m one of those hardcore Lord of the Rings fans, to the point where I’ve watched all extended editions in a row on a single day. If you do that, the epilogue feels absolutely perfect and not long at all. In fact, if it felt shorter, it would feel absolutely distressing.

I think, Stranger Things, if you watch Season 5 all the way through, it’s going to feel great. You just want to spend extra time with these characters. Anyway, that was sort of the reference for the epilogue. Then we love the credits at the end of Return of the King. So that was the initial idea, and they were these very simple illustrations.

Then we started to talk with Imaginary Forces, which is the title company that did the main title sequence for the show, who we absolutely love and adore. We pitched that maybe it was Will’s notebook of drawings, and then they came back like a week later and suggested, ‘What if it was done actually in the style of a real D&D manual?’

What’s cool about these D&D manuals is there’s color images, and, also, over the years, the style of illustration changes. They brought back illustrators from the actual 1980s who drew in the manuals all the way back then. So it really came full circle, and, mainly, we wanted it to feel finite, right? I mean, that was really the key. We wanted to feel like ‘The End.’

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ROSS: We wanted to pay tribute, I think, to all of our actors, and even the ones where we can’t list their names contractually, whether it’s Joe Quinn or Shannon Purser, who passed away sadly in the show.

MATT: Well, Shannon didn’t pass away, Ross, let’s be clear. It was Barb.

ROSS: Barb, yes.

MATT: Shannon’s fine.

ROSS: Shannon’s fine. [Chuckles]. We wanted to be able to pay tribute to our cast and how much they’ve grown through the years. Obviously, it’s not to say the whole show was a D&D campaign. It was just a way to pay tribute to everyone and also let the audience, hopefully, take in this journey that they’ve been on for nine years.