The man who introduced Metallica to the world of the Upside Down sadly won’t be joining the rest of the Stranger Things gang in season 5 of the Netflix show. Spoiler: In the season 4 finale, fan-favorite Eddie Munson meets his demise — but not before completing the guitar solo to end all guitar solos.
According to show creators the Duffer Brothers, being mauled to death by demobats was just one of the bleak ways Eddie’s story would end. The character, introduced in season 2, was apparently destined to be “a tragic character.”
“In a way, we saw Eddie as a bit of a doomed character,” Matt Duffer said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “Even imagining the flip side of that where he does survive the battle is not a great life awaiting Eddie back in the right side up either. He was always really designed from the get-go as a doomed character.”
Ross Duffer added: “There was never any other arc for him and there was no ‘how do you survive this?'”
“At the very end, you see people still drawing devil horns on his head — no one in Hawkins is going to accept a supernatural explanation for this. He would have wound up in jail and this fantasy that he would have been able to walk and graduate sadly was not ever a realistic outcome for him.”
Will Eddie appear in season 5 of Stranger Things? “My suspicion is that Eddie has done what he needed to do for the Brothers,” Eddie actor Joseph Quinn told the LA Times.
