The Duffer brothers have explained why a certain character *had* to die in season four

I’m still mad about it

| UPDATED

The second volume of Stranger Things ripped our hearts right out of our chests. Straight from the get-go in episode one, fans loved Eddie so seeing him die really hurt. But just like the Duffer brothers explained Chrissy’s death, they’ve said why Eddie was always written with the intention of only being around for one season. Here’s the official reason why Eddie had to die in Stranger Things four.

‘He was going to be a tragic character’

Stranger Things four deaths

via Netflix

The Duffer brothers explained Eddie was always written to have a one season arc. They explained: “In a way we saw Eddie as a bit of a doomed character. Even imagining the flip side of that where he does survive the battle is not a great life awiting Eddie back in the right side up either. He was always really designed from the get-go as a doomed character. Unlike someone like Bob who was ‘oh let’s make a loveable character so it’s a shock’. In this case Eddie was hurtling towards his doom this whole season.

“When you do a death in a show if you’re just killing someone that no one cares about then that has no impact so the goal of course was to make Eddie a very likeable character and have the audience fall in love with him. But to see the stint that they did make us go ‘Oh boy, we’re going to get a reaction’. The minute we came up with Eddie’s character he was going to be a tragic character. There was never any other arc for him and there was no ‘how do you survive this?’. At the very end you see people still drawing devil horns on his head – no one in Hawkins is going to accept a supernatural explanation for this. He would have wound up in jail and this fantasy that he would have been able to walk and graduate sadly was not ever a realistic outcome for him.”

Max and Eddie were ‘targeted’

via Netflix

So Max died for one minute in season four. Ross Duffer explained both Max and Eddie were “screwed” as a result of Vecna. He said they debated what they wanted to do with Max but it had to be her who ended up that way. He said: “She was targeted, and she never rid herself of his curse. She was just putting on a band-aid. She was using, effectively Kate Bush, her music as armour. So it was very early on. That was the plan that she was going to remove that armour and more or less sacrifice herself to back them in order to give them a chance to kill him.”

Feature image via Netflix.

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