Millie Bobby Brown Addresses Eleven’s Controversial Stranger Things Finale Ending

This article contains major spoilers for the Stranger Things finale.

Millie Bobby Brown has shared her take on how things turned out for her Stranger Things character as fans of the show continue their heated debates about the ending.

The Stranger Things finale arrived on Netflix on New Year’s Day, with Millie’s character Eleven sacrificing herself by staying behind in the Upside Down as it imploded in order to save her friends.

However, in an epilogue sequence, Mike Wheeler (played by Finn Wolfhard) speculated that Eleven had faked her own death, leaving viewers divided over whether or not there was any truth to what he said.

Speaking to the Netflix outlet Tudum in an interview published earlier this week, Millie insisted that she “loves” the way things played out in the Stranger Things finale.

Describing Eleven’s choice as “beautiful”, “cathartic” and something she’d wanted for a “very long time”, the British actor said: “I just think it’s incredibly important that it all ends for her, and the suffering and the pain end.”

On that epilogue sequence, which would have seen Eleven’s sister Kali casting an illusion to allow the character to fake her death, Millie added: “I kinda love that ending, that there is just such a bigger purpose to Kali’s powers. Everything has a purpose, and everything is there for a reason.”

Stranger Things creators The Duffer Brothers have maintained that they’ll never reveal whether or not there’s any truth to Mike’s theory about Eleven’s fate, with Mike Duffer claiming recently: “The only thing I’ll debunk is that Eleven does not communicate with Mike in any way.”

“We like that it’s up to the audience,” he continued. “We thought there was something really cool about not knowing for sure, and having our characters choose to believe. We just thought that was more powerful than providing a definitive answer, one way or the other.”

During Tudum’s piece, Ross Duffer explained: “There was never a version of the story where Eleven was hanging out with the gang at the end. For us and our writers, we didn’t want to take her powers away. She represents magic in a lot of ways and the magic of childhood.

“For our characters to move on and for the story of Hawkins and the Upside Down to come to a close, Eleven had to go away. We thought it would be beautiful if our characters continued to believe in that happier ending even if we didn’t give them a clear answer to whether that’s true or not.

“The fact that they’re believing in it, we just thought it was such a better way to end the story and a better way to represent the closure of this journey and their journey from children to adults.”

Meanwhile, a widely-shared fan theory suggesting that the whole epilogue was a fake illusion created by Vecna, and that the story’s real ending would be revealed in a surprise bonus episode released on 7 January, eventually emerged to not be true.

All five seasons of Stranger Things are now streaming on Netflix, with a behind-the-scenes documentary about the creation of the final run coming to the platform next week.