Stranger Things Characters Whose Fates Remain Unknown After The Series Finale

I'd advise that you don't run up that hill if you haven't seen "The Rightside Up," the series finale of "Stranger Things." Spoilers ahead!

After a decade of dithering and increasingly convoluted fan theories, "Stranger Things," the hit Netflix series created by the Duffer Brothers, is over. When the two-plus-hour, feature film-length series finale aired on the evening of December 31, fans gathered 'round to see what happened to their favorite characters. Would Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) be able to save everyone from Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), aided by Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) and his newfound powers? Would Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers (David Harbour and Winona Ryder) finally get their happy ending? What about all the other kids, like Nancy and Mike Wheeler (Natalia Dyer and Finn Wolfhard), Will's brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke), Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo), Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink), and Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin)?

In a frankly interminably long epilogue that follows Vecna's defeat, we got some answers. Nancy dropped out of Emerson College to pursue a journalism career, Steve is a coach and sex-ed teacher in Hawkins, Robin is enjoying her time at Smith College, and Jonathan is making (probably terrible) student films at New York University. The younger kids are graduating and heading off to college. Joyce and Hopper are engaged, and Eleven sacrificed herself to stop the military takeover of Hawkins. Still, because this is "Stranger Things" and the Duffers sort of bit off more than they can chew when it comes to this show's overall mythos and narrative, some character threads were left frayed and hanging. So what happened to these pretty important characters at the end of "Stranger Things?" We might never know.

Personally, I found Brett Gelman's long-running "Stranger Things" character, conspiracy nut and dubious private investigator Murray Bauman, to be really exhausting and more irritating than anyone else, so I don't necessarily care if he got a happy ending or not. Still, it's weird and really noticeable that, after Murray is a major part of the central gang's plan to blow up the Upside Down to cut off access from the Abyss to Hawkins, he just ... vanishes. 

Murray was sort of a gopher for the group in season 5 of "Stranger Things," getting them much-needed supplies and even transport as they conspired to defeat Vecna once and for all, and again, he's deemed important enough, as a character, to be a part of the final push against Vecna in the Upside Down. We know he left the Upside Down safely with everybody else before the detonation happened that presumably killed Eleven (more on that shortly), but it's unbelievably bizarre that we never see him again. You would think that, after everything they'd all been through, maybe Murray would join other non-parents like Steve and Robin at the class of 1989's high school graduation, where Max, Lucas, Dustin, Mike, and Will all matriculate. Nope! I guess he's in a dark room somewhere surrounded by piles of newspapers or something.

What is the point of casting a perfect Molly Ringwald doppelganger on your nostalgic series (Amybeth McNulty, with her swoop of red hair and charming smile, absolutely evokes the 1980s star) if you're just going to ditch her by the time the show is over with no explanation whatsoever? McNulty's Vickie Dunne first appeared in "Stranger Things" during the show's fourth season as the object of Robin's affection; by the time we catch up with Robin in season 5, she and Vickie are dating, and she keeps promising to take Vickie on a romantic date to the Hawkins eatery Enzo's.

Not only do they never get to go to Enzo's — that's reserved for Joyce and Hopper, who get engaged there during the epilogue — but after Vickie, whose job was to look after an unconscious Max while her fellow redhead was helping Eleven infiltrate Vecna's mind, is apprehended by the military, we never see her again. What happened here?! When we catch up with Robin in that same epilogue, she makes a comment about "overbearing significant others" when she, Jonathan, Nancy, and Steve promise to remain friends forever despite any obstacles. What does that mean? At no point did we see Vickie act overbearing or interfere in any way with Robin's friendships. She seemed like a nice girl. I hope she found a much better girlfriend, honestly — and if we're all being honest with ourselves, Vickie was basically just a character whose own queer identity served as a plot device to help Will reckon with his own sexuality.

Everybody's favorite wisecracker Erica Sinclair, Lucas's younger sister played by Priah Ferguson, plays a pretty huge role in the final season of "Stranger Things," all things considered. Erica has been a fairly consistent presence on "Stranger Things" since the show's second season, and Ferguson has been reliably delightful on-screen, so it was great to see Erica flex her mental muscles and help her brother and play a huge role in the final plan. In fact, Erica is the one who ends up drugging Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly) and his family to try and use the young boy to figure out what Vecna, née Henry Creel, is up to with all of these kidnapped children, and she's the one who enlists local science teacher Scott Clarke (Randy Havens) to help them destroy Vecna.

With all of that in mind, it's weird at best and infuriating at worst that Erica doesn't appear in that epilogue. She doesn't attend her own brother's graduation, apparently, and when we see Mike observe his younger sister Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) and Derek start playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons in the Wheeler family basement, Erica, who's their same age, is nowhere to be seen. Did she move away on her own? Get recruited by the CIA? For fans of Erica, I'm sorry to say that we probably won't get an answer to this one.

Sorry, but it's incredibly bizarre to cast "Terminator" star Linda Hamilton in the final season of your 1980s-set show and not only give her nothing of substance to do, but never even tell us what happened to her. Hamilton's Major General Dr. Kay, who also never gets the honor of a real first name, shows up in season 5 basically out of nowhere to serve as the final outing's main villain. As we're told time and time again, Dr. Kay is hunting tirelessly for Eleven, because she's aware of the work the young superpowered girl did with Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) and wants to use Eleven's blood for more experiments. Pretty much every time Dr. Kay shows up on screen, she's menacing Eleven and the gang and demanding they deliver the girl unto her, which they obviously refuse to do.

We do see Dr. Kay in the series finale. After our heroes successfully plant bombs in the Upside Down and recover the children captured by a now-dead Vecna, Dr. Kay and her military goons are all waiting to arrest them and take Eleven, who opts to head back into the doorway of the Upside Down and go down with the proverbial ship (again, we're going to circle back to that whole mess in just a second). So does the military just ... leave, even after some of these kids and a few of the adults, including Nancy and Hopper, straight-up killed a bunch of members of the armed forces? Where does Dr. Kay go? Does anyone face any consequences for anything, and is Dr. Kay still hunting for Eleven in any way? Dr. Kay was far from a perfect character, but this ending is really a disgrace.

Let's talk about the Eleven "death scene." Throughout season 5 of "Stranger Things," Eleven appears to be concocting a plan to sacrifice her own life to save her loved ones — a plan she makes with her "sister" Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), also known as Eight, and a plan that makes Eleven's adopted father Hopper absolutely panic. Despite her own wishes to give her life to protect everybody, Hopper seems to convince Eleven that she should leave the Upside Down and seek a happier fate in a peaceful Hawkins. But when Dr. Kay surrounds the whole gang and starts searching for her, Eleven apparently vanishes before appearing in the makeshift doorway to the Upside Down (which, as a reminder, is about to violently explode). With everyone watching, Eleven seems to die as the Upside Down erupts in flames behind her.

Or does she?! At the end of the epilogue, a grief-stricken Mike puts forward a pretty convoluted theory that, as Kali lay dying from a gunshot wound, she used her own powers to send a vision of Eleven to pretend to sacrifice herself. This seems to be a manifestation of Mike's enduring love for Eleven more than a thing that actually happened, but still, the show clearly wants it to be ambiguous considering that we're treated to a vision of Eleven hiking through the mountains to see waterfalls in some distant location. Again, we could chalk this up as simply part of Mike's fantasy, but I think the show does want us to wonder, which is, frankly, pretty irritating at the end of the day. Still, we don't definitively know Eleven's fate on "Stranger Things," so she had to be included here.

All of "Stranger Things" is streaming on Netflix now.