The Stranger Things Ending Reminds Fans Of Wicked: For Good

Spoilers ahead for Stranger Things Season 5 and Wicked: For Good. A young woman with mysterious powers makes an enormous personal sacrifice — hoping that her decision will effect positive change in the community she leaves behind. In a tearful goodbye, she thanks her closest companion for changing her life and promises they’ll always be with each other. But in the end, what the world thinks happens to her might not tell the full story.

Is it Eleven from Stranger Things or another “El” — that is, Elphaba from Wicked: For Good? As fans of 2025’s biggest pop culture moments are pointing out online, their respective fates have quite a lot in common.

The Surprising Parall-Els

If you rang in 2026 with the Stranger Things series finale, you know that Eleven makes the decision to stay in the Upside Down as her friends destroy it. She hopes that by doing so, she will put Dr. Kay and the military’s experimentation to an end — saying goodbye to Mike and promising that one day, he’ll understand her choice.

But later, while playing Dungeons & Dragons with his friends, Mike speculates that Eleven’s death was an illusion. “I’d like to imagine that she’s in a beautiful land somewhere far away,” he says. “She finds a small town to call home, safe from the danger of the Black Hand. And it is here, at last, that she finds peace. That she finally finds happiness.”

Indeed, Eleven can be seen exploring a beautiful and remote landscape (filmed in Iceland, for the curious!). Meanwhile, Elphaba in Wicked: For Good explores similarly wide-open terrain with Fiyero after faking her death by being “melted” by Dorothy. Like Eleven, she believes that it’s the only way to stop a cycle of persecution — and hopes that real change can be fostered in her absence.

“The ELphabaism,” one user on X (formerly Twitter) wrote in a viral tweet, comparing scenes of both characters hiding under a trap door to fake their demise.

One fan wrote that they were “crying” over both titles having the same ending, sharing side-by-side images of Eleven and #Fiyeraba looking out at the horizon before them. “Eleven and Elphaba got the same ending,” wrote another user, while fans on TikTok wasted no time editing devastating Stranger Things clips to the finale song from Wicked: For Good.

The Stranger Things Ending, Explained

Of course, one key difference between the Els’ outcomes is that viewers know Elphaba’s “death” is a trick — while Eleven’s fate is more ambiguous, with her friends agreeing to believe in Mike’s hopeful theory but not knowing for sure.

“We thought it would be beautiful if our characters continued to believe in that happier ending even if we didn’t give them a clear answer to whether that’s true or not,” Ross Duffer — who created Stranger Things with his brother, Matt Duffer — told Netflix’s Tudum. “The fact that they’re believing in it, we just thought it was such a better way to end the story and a better way to represent the closure of this journey and their journey from children to adults.”