‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 saw Sadie Sink’s Max Mayfield suffer at the hands of Vecna as the monster from Upside Down broke her bones, blinded her, and left her in a coma. Max technically dies for an entire minute in the finale before Eleven revives her, but it isn’t enough to bring Max back to life completely. In the ‘Stranger Things’ aftershow, creators Matt and Ross Duffer said that Max’s fate was cemented and wouldn’t be good for fans. 

“It was discussed as a possibility”, Ross Duffer said recently about killing Max off permanently. He added, “For a while that is what was going to happen. But we ended up in this… we wanted to end it with a little more of a question at the end of the season. It’s still really dark and if Max is going to be okay, we just don’t really know. We wanted to leave it up in the air moving forward into Season 5.” 

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Matt, meanwhile, described Season 4 as the ‘Empire Strikes Back’ season of the Netflix show because “we wanted them to actually lose. We wanted our characters to experience what that felt like. That was the big idea coming into Season 4, that they were going to lose. We were going to introduce Vecna and they were going to lose to him. That sets our characters up for what will be the ultimate final confrontation with Vecna and with the Upside Down in Season 5.” 

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While Max’s fate was ambiguous, there was never really any doubt about what’d happen to Joseph Quinn’s Eddie Munson. “We fell in love with Eddie. We fell in love with Joe”, Matt said, adding, “I think everybody in the cast fell in love with him. We knew he had to die…that’s part of me that wishes he [was] still around for Season 5. That’s ultimately how you want to feel.”