Kids, idiot grown-ups, let me let you in on a little life secret. You ready…
… NO ONE actually knows what they’re doing in this life.
We all (most of us) kind of bullshit our way through it day by day without any real plan. Take me for example (boss, stop reading!): I was heading into my 5th (!) year at Rutgers University and I was living at school over the summer. One night, after I got home from my job delivering pizzas, I got a little too baked and decided it was maybe, probably a good time to apply for some internships, so I did. And one of the first I heard back from was COED — it was in NYC, it stipended expenses, and it was right up my alley of writing — so it was perfect. Anyway, long story short, that was like over two years ago, and now here I am writing about 70% of the articles you see on this site.
Point being, there is absolutely no plan that led me here. The results were as excellent as I could have hoped for, but that has nothing to do with my planning and everything to do with my ability to get through life day by day.
And as it turns out, the Duffer brothers, the dudes who created Stranger Things, are the same way, as they had zero clue their show would turn into the cultural phenomenon that it has become, evidenced by the fact that they had originally planned to kill off Eleven (AKA the main reason everyone is obsessed with the show in the first place).
via CinemaBlend:
In an interview with CinemaBlend, Ross Duffer revealed that Eleven was originally supposed to stay dead when she sacrificed herself at the end of Season 1:
“Maybe I shouldn’t say this because I like to pretend that it was all planned out, but it was originally pitched as a limited series. So it was like, Eleven was gonna sacrifice herself and save the world and then that was gonna be it, because there was a moment where limited series were a big deal.”
What saved Eleven was that Netflix didn’t want Stranger Things to be a limited series. Duffer continued:
“This is where the business side comes in. When we started pitching it it was like ‘we don’t make money off of limited series.’ And I remember when we went into Netflix and we pitched this they were like ‘well, we like this but how could it keep going?’ And you’re just sort of riffing in the moment and we were like ‘well Will’s back from this other dimension and he’s not doing very well.’ And they were like ‘great!'”
So instead, Season 1 ends with a little tease about Eleven’s potential return, and Season 2 quickly reveals that Eleven didn’t stay in the Upside Down for long.
While it’s easy to understand the decision making behind killing off Eleven initially, the fact that the Duffer Brothers didn’t have an inkling that their show would be a massive hit is everything you need to know about the nature of life.
