Stranger Things' Duffer Brothers Have The Perfect Response To Millie Bobby Brown's Notes

"Stranger Things" has reached lofty new heights with its shocker of a fourth season, which ends with every character's fate hanging in the balance as the Upside Down slowly takes over Hawkins. Taking the series in a more overtly horror-themed direction, the latest batch of episodes sees the series going darker than ever, with influences like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" at its forefront.

In addition to upping the ante visually and narratively, "Stranger Things 4" continued its tradition of killing off beloved characters before we really got to know them. The Netflix hit memorably kills off the character of Barbara Holland (Shannon Purser) early in its first season, giving way to a number of notable deaths in the ensuing seasons. While Bob Newby (Sean Astin) dies at the end of Season 2 and the villainous Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery) is killed off at the tail end of Season 3, characters rarely seem to die on the show outside of season finales. Following this pattern, Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) also dies in the Season 4 finale, "The Piggyback."

Millie Bobby Brown and Noah Schnapp, the actors behind key characters Eleven and Will Byers, respectively, sat down with The Wrap (via YouTube) in May to discuss the then-forthcoming "Stranger Things 4 Vol. 1." At one point, Schnapp said, "They need to kill some people off; it's way too big." Brown doubled down, remarking, "Like yeah, you need to start killing people." The actress went further, going on to invoke the mindset of a signature HBO series. "We need to be 'Game of Thrones,'" she said definitively.

It's easy to see where Noah Schnapp and Millie Bobby Brown are coming from here as, despite the huge, occasionally apocalyptic stakes of "Stranger Things," the only characters who ever seem to die are side characters. One of those deaths — Martin Brenner, played by Matthew Modine — was even walked back when he was revealed to be alive in the Season 4 opener. 

For their part, "Stranger Things" creators and showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer had their own response to Brown's criticism. "This is Hawkins; it's not Westeros," said Matt Duffer on the July 4 episode of the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast (also via TVLine). "When Barb dies, it's two seasons' worth of grappling with that," he continued. Duffer also responded to Brown's comment that he and his brother were a couple of "sensitive Sallies." He suggested, "As we're moving into the final season, more of that is on the table. There is logic behind it, and it has nothing to do with my sensitivity." 

To be fair to Brown, earlier in her talk with The Wrap, she worried about her words being used to cause precisely this kind of conflict. "I'm scared about vocalizing anything that I want because it always gets turned into 'Millie Bobby Brown demands this storyline,'" she said. "I trust the Duffer brothers and their creative process," she declared at the time.

While some strong remarks have been tossed between the performers and creators of "Stranger Things" before (via The Daily Beast), they have never derailed Netflix's hit from telling precisely the story that its creators intended. With that in mind, it's likely that fans have little to worry about the direction the final season will go in with regard to addressing the end of this story.