Stranger Things 4 Killed Off Major Character in Alternate Ending

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 2. One Vecna victim narrowly avoided an even worse fate in Stranger Things 4. Series creators Matt and Ross Duffer have revealed an alternate ending for the marked Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink), who escaped Vecna’s Mind Lair with the help of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” earlier in Season 4. But in the penultimate season’s finale, titled “Chapter Nine: The Piggyback,” Max falls victim to Vecna’s curse: the comatose Max’s mind is an empty black void after Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) climactic mind fight with Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower). 

“[Max’s death] was discussed as a possibility. For a while that is what was gonna happen,” Ross Duffer said on Netflix Geeked. “We wanted to end it in a little bit more of a question mark at the end of the season where it’s still really dark and we don’t know if Max is going to be OK… We don’t really know. We wanted to leave it up in the air moving forward into Season 5.”

Max is one of four Vecna victims whose death triggers the apocalypse, transforming Hawkins into a hellish landscape invaded by the Upside Down ahead of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things. Unlike Max, who was clinically dead for a minute before being revived by Eleven, Vecna’s other kills are permanently lost: cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham (Grace Van Dien), Hawkins High journalist Fred Benson (Logan Riley Bruner), and jock Patrick McKinney (Myles Truitt). 

“This season, we always wanted our [Star Wars] Empire Strikes Back season,” Matt Duffer explained. “We tried it a little bit with 3, but this is really doubling down on that idea of — at least 3 has a sad note, there’s a sacrifice, but they’ve defeated the evil, or at least pushed it back for a while. Whereas with this, we wanted them to actually lose. We wanted our characters to experience what that felt like.”

He continued, “That was the big idea coming into 4, that they were gonna lose and we’re gonna introduce Vecna, and they’re gonna lose to him. That would be setting our characters up for what is gonna be the ultimate final confrontation with Vecna, with the Upside Down, which is going to be Season 5.”

All nine episodes of Stranger Things 4 are now streaming on Netflix.

Stranger Things 4 stars Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers), David Harbour (Jim Hopper), Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven/Jane), Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair), Noah Schnapp (Will Byers), Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield), Natalia Dyer (Nancy Wheeler), Charlie Heaton (Jonathan Byers), Joe Keery (Steve Harrington), Maya Hawke (Robin Buckley), Priah Ferguson (Erica Sinclair), Brett Gelman (Murray), Matthew Modine (Dr. Brenner), Robert Englund (Victor Creel), and Jamie Campbell Bower (Vecna).