Stranger Things fans always seem to be thinking about fatalities, no matter what season they’re currently watching. Each new chapter in the Duffer Brothers’ saga brings about new anxiety-riddled theories about who may or may not survive through the finale, but especially now as they approach the fifth and final run.
While Matt and Ross Duffer aren’t disclosing which characters might be in danger of getting unalived, they did disclose which two of the main characters came closest to death in past seasons.
“Hopper at the end of season 3. I think death grazed him,” Matt tells Entertainment Weekly. “There was a version where he perished at the end of 3. It’s been a while since we had those discussions, but I feel like he came the closest to dying.”
Netflix
David Harbour’s season 4 return was certainly a shocker for viewers. At the end of season 3, Jim Hopper seemingly died in the massive explosion that crumbled the hidden Russian lab in Starcourt Mall, but a teaser released months later revealed he was indeed alive (but not well) in a POW camp in Kamchatka. When season 4 debuted, we found out he simply leapt out of the way of the fiery blast and landed on a lower platform, where he was found and captured by Russian forces.
It “would’ve been very easy to kill him,” Ross comments, “but Hopper still had growing to do. We hadn’t finished his story. It’s important to us to be able to finish the stories we want to finish and not just be offing people for shock value.”
Matt also mentions Steve Harrington, Joe Keery’s character, got close to dying back in season 1. “That was close,” he says. “We just fell in love with Joe Keery, but had we not liked Joe Keery, Steve would’ve been gone.”
Courtesy of Netflix
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
Matt shares he, Ross, and the writers “always talk about it” (i.e. killing off main characters). “What often holds us back is you have to talk about the repercussions,” he explains. “This is a total hypothetical: You kill Mike. It just makes the show rather depressing and bleak, and it becomes entirely about that. Even these more supporting characters like Eddie [Joseph Quinn] or Bob [Sean Astin] or Barb [Shannon Purser], of course, have really long-lasting repercussions on our characters.”
He further points to Billy Hargrove, the brother of Max (Sadie Sink). “We try to be careful, if there is a death, that it has real repercussions. So we just wanna be careful about when and how frequently we do it.”
We’ll now see who survives til the bitter end when Stranger Things season 5 premieres the first four episodes on Nov. 26. The next batch of three will release on Christmas Day, followed by the series finale, which hits select theaters and Netflix on New Year’s Eve.
