The following contains spoilers for Season 4 of Stranger Things.
The long-awaited fourth season of Stranger Things has finally wrapped up, and in its wake, fans are already speculating about what might come in the fifth and final season. The finale of Season 4 was pretty intense, and the stakes of every season keep ramping up, so it's safe to assume that Season 5 will be a doozy. With every year that passes, as the main characters get older and the tone of the show gets even darker, Stranger Things seems to be getting more comfortable putting its main characters in danger and even potentially killing some of them off.
While the show is no stranger to killing off the occasional side character, Season 4 was the closest any of the main kids got to death (with Max's final Vecna possession). Even fan-favorite character Eddie Munson wasn't safe from the writers (though they had no way of knowing just how beloved he would become when they wrote in his death). Fans are starting to speculate about which main characters might be killed off in the last season. But does the show need to kill off a main character to raise the stakes?
Popular TV shows often get compared to Game of Thrones when fans start discussing potential character deaths. Game of Thrones was known for its character deaths, and not even main characters were safe from being offed at any point to either further the story or (more likely) provide an element of shock value. Because Game of Thrones was so notorious for this, and because it got so popular, other shows apparently started taking notes. It became more and common for main characters to get killed off, and for character deaths to happen in general.
Game of Thrones obviously wasn't the first show to do this, but it's one of the best-known current examples. It's an example of how a lot of modern TV writing doesn't seem to know how to raise the stakes of the story any other way than by threatening characters with mortal peril. While this is often effective, and works for many stories, audiences have started to expect character deaths in most shows, even when they're not entirely necessary.
Sometimes having a central character die is a way to fully impress upon the audience how dangerous the situation is, or even to add a bit of realism in that the main characters aren't magically protected from danger. They are as vulnerable as anyone else — and perhaps even more so, because they're usually the ones directly dealing with that danger. When it's done well, it can be a really emotional story beat and really add something to the show. But when it's not, it just feels like a poor decision that was made for shock value only.
So far, Stranger Things has only really killed off side characters. Bob, Billy, and Eddie all died at the end of their respective seasons, and it seems the writers were using those deaths as a way to lend some gravity and sadness to the story without having to sacrifice any of the main kids. This mainly works, but it becomes repetitive when viewers study the pattern. What's more, it makes deaths like Eddie's in Season 4 feel a little unnecessary.
In the finale, it almost seems like Max won't make it out, which would have been a huge choice since she would have been the first main character to be killed off. However, Eleven manages to save her through some unexplained resurrection power, but it seems like she'll have a lot of lingering effects from her near-death if and when she wakes up from the coma. In the Season 3 finale, it was also made to look like Hopper had died, but the show makes it known fairly quickly that that's not the case.
A lot of fans are wondering if a main character — that is, one of the core cast of kids — will die during Season 5. Judging by the patterns of shows like this, it's possible that the writers could kill off Eleven as a sort of final sacrifice to be rid of the Upside Down for good, or a main-but-still-sort-of-ancillary character like Steve could also be killed off. Obviously, this is all speculation, but at this point, fans sort of expect one of the characters to die, and that says a lot about how TV show structures currently operate.
Killing off main characters just because it feels like that's what needs to happen during a series finale is simply lazy writing. Character deaths need to mean something, and should add something to the story rather than just being for a quick shock factor. Fans don't appreciate deaths like that, and it's not a satisfying ending when it feels like a main character death comes out of nowhere.
Because of the ever-darkening tone, it seems like Stranger Things might feel that it needs to kill some of its characters off in order to give the proper gravity to the finale, but doing this might just end up being counter-productive. Obviously, there needs to be conflict and the characters have to be in some sort of danger for things to be exciting, but it might be a more satisfying ending for viewers if the main cast gets to make it out alive. At the very least, any deaths should feel meaningful and earned, and not just thrown in to subvert the viewer's expectation for no real reason. Stranger Things has been a trendsetter for media ever since it came on to the scene, and maybe it's time for the show to reverse the idea that characters need to die to make a finale exciting.