#11 STRANGER THINGS FREE#

Ironically, given that the heartbreaking ending takes Hopper away from her, she is at last allowed to be what he wanted his daughter to be: a girl free from the baggage of Upside Down shenanigans. Just as connecting with another girl deepens Eleven’s social skills and her ability to evaluate herself beyond how boys or a father sees her, now being able to live without her powers frees her from being the hero everyone has come to rely on. But in Stranger Things 3, she is, at last, discovering who she is. She is trying to find out what she is and why she is this way. Hence why Stranger Things 2 became about El rebelling against being a kept thing, be it first by Mike or then by Hopper, and demanding to find her own voice when she runs away to connect with her biological mother and then her half-sister in Chicago. Still, the only thing that was hers for those first two seasons was a sense of stolen identity and a love for Eggo Waffles. Hopper in season 2 is much more aware that he is making Eleven in his image by keeping her in his cabin and forcing her to live like him, albeit he is doing it for her safety, whereas the boys were unintentionally using her to save Will Byers. Treating her like a doll, Mike and the boys were playing at making an Amblin Pygmalion with the pretty dress and blonde hair, just as they defined for her the meaning of her superpowers to them-she was their superhero and therefore ours. It honestly is not that different from how Mike and the gang also dressed Eleven up as their new “cousin” for school. But even when she was doing that for them, the boys were just as much digesting the majesty of her power through the stories they knew, be it X-Men, Carrie, or Firestarter. So too would Mike and the gang come to be in awe of Eleven’s powers, which helped them defeat bullies, circumvent ominous government vans like their own Steven Spielberg adventure, and ultimately defeat a scary monster from the Upside Down. That issue was the introduction of Jean Grey’s new Dark Phoenix alter-ego, a being of such incomprehensible power that she made all other mutants quake in awe. In the very first episode of the series-which ended with Mike, Dustin, and Lucas discovering Eleven cowering in the woods-Mike had told Dustin if he beat him in a bicycle race home, he’d take Dustin’s copy of Uncanny X-Men #134. Since the beginning, Eleven has been partially defined through pop culture knowledge shorthand, both by us and the characters within Stranger Things. A hero losing their gifts is a common trope in superhero narratives, and Eleven of course springs just as readily from that as Stephen King archetypes, but it’s also an opportunity for El to fully become her own person away from the way the men in her life have shaped it up until now… and away from the binary construct of the ass-kicking waif viewers have placed her in. This is a good thing for the character and for Hawkins. Without her powers, she is still strong enough to connect with a very lonely boy, which in turn hints at things to come for an El who is not tossing cars. Read more: Stranger Things 3 Easter Egg and Reference Guide

Instead Mike, Lucas, Max, and everyone else must protect her one fireworks launch at a time, and she is able to reason with Billy. Afterward, she has lost the ability to offer any sort of psychic protection to her friends when the Mind Flayer arrives at the Starcourt Mall for a final showdown. While Eleven herself is able to remove the creature before it does too much damage, it left its mark. After being briefly host to to a Mind Flayer parasite in her leg, Eleven is suddenly stripped of one of the defining qualities with which we think about her. The ease with which the characters, and thereby we the audience, rely on Eleven is what gives Stranger Things 3 its real surprise in the end: they take Eleven’s powers away.

11 stranger things