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'Stranger Things 4' Creators Reveal Eddie Munson Alternative Ending

Spoiler: It's also pretty bleak.

Jennifer Bisset Former Senior Editor / Culture
Jennifer Bisset was a senior editor for CNET. She covered film and TV news and reviews. The movie that inspired her to want a career in film is Lost in Translation. She won Best New Journalist in 2019 at the Australian IT Journalism Awards.
Expertise Film and TV Credentials
  • Best New Journalist 2019 Australian IT Journalism Awards
Jennifer Bisset
2 min read
Dustin, Erica and Eddie looking concerned.

Eddie Munson is a new fan-favorite character. So obviously he doesn't make it to the next season.

Netflix

The man who introduced Metallica to the world of the Upside Down sadly won't be joining the rest of the Stranger Things gang in season 5 of the Netflix show. Spoiler: In the season 4 finale, fan-favorite Eddie Munson meets his demise -- but not before completing the guitar solo to end all guitar solos.

According to show creators the Duffer Brothers, being mauled to death by demobats was just one of the bleak ways Eddie's story would end. The character, introduced in the latest season, was apparently destined to be "tragic."

"In a way, we saw Eddie as a bit of a doomed character," Matt Duffer said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. "Even imagining the flip side of that where he does survive the battle is not a great life awaiting Eddie back in the right side up either. He was always really designed from the get-go as a doomed character."

Ross Duffer added: "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."

Will Eddie appear in season 5 of Stranger Things? Actor Joseph Quinn isn't too optimistic. "My suspicion is that Eddie has done what he needed to do for the Brothers," Quinn told the LA Times.

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