Ahead of Stranger Things’ final season, fans were vocally worried about nearly everything, but few things inspired more impassioned theories than Steve’s fate. The creators kept fans stressing over Steve potentially dying in one heroic fashion or another, and the trailers for the split-apart season didn’t help matters. Of course, Joe Keery’s character survived the finale’s events, making the start of the 2026 TV schedule that much less depressing, and now Matt and Ross Duffer admit that they intentionally played into that widespread worry.
Beyond the general idea that major TV characters tend to become victim fodder in final seasons, the Steve-centric paranoia came to a head in the final episode as he was dangling from the radio tower, and his fingers let go before anyone reached down to grab him. And then a gobsmacking cut to black! The joke was on us, though, because Hawkins’ finest head of hair was indeed saved and went on to keep crushing at life.
Appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast (also streaming on YouTube), the Duffer brothers admitted that bit with Steve was the very rare instance where they pointedly and purposefully stoked fan fear just for the sh-ts and giggles of it all. Here’s how Matt Duffer addressed it:
So some things are surprising that whole like — the internet getting themselves into [a] frenzy over Joe dying — or Steve dying — I don't know if we normally would have done him almost falling off the tower. That was us f-cking with the audience, for sure. For sure. Which we don’t normally do, but I was like, ‘This is a golden opportunity.’
Matt Duffer
Elsewhere during the interview, Ross Duffer explained in more specific terms just how they f-cked with fans. As it turns out, the brothers were inspired to go a little further with that shot than what they'd originally filmed. As he put it:
What’s interesting, the Steve thing was actually – we did a half day of reshoots, which we've actually never done on Stranger Things before. It was just like little tiny miscellaneous things that we wanted to do. But the main reason we wanted to go back is ‘cause Steve's near-death just wasn't — it wasn't shot like that in a slow-motion way. It all happened really fast in the edit. It was just, it's so dark that it was just the moment wasn't going back.
Ross Duffer
While in the midst of filming the seemingly endless number of scenes that made up the finale, and the final season at large, it makes sense that certain visuals like Steve's radio tower dangle just didn't get enough coverage on the day. Would it have turned out fine if they'd just kept what they had to begin with? Maybe, maybe not. No reason to speculate, though, since they absolutely went back and beefed that part of the scene up a little.
Ross Duffer continued:
So then we went back with Joe Keery and we just built a tiny, like three-foot slab of the tower, because we didn't have money to rebuild it and we just did that moment where he just dropped and then we just milked it even more in the edit.
Ross Duffer
Surely they didn't have the cut-to-black moment in mind initially. I do wish there was some kind of measurement that clocked how many gasps happened during the moment when it seemed like he was a goner.
When it comes to the actor himself, Keery knows that Stranger Things provided him the role of a lifetime, and that for some people, he may always be known as Steve Harrington, which is just fine with him. He’s more into his music era now anyway.
The Duffer brothers’ efforts at Netflix aren’t yet extinguished, either. Fans can find their latest executive-produced series, the upcoming horror series The Boroughs, streaming via Netflix subscription starting on Thursday, May 21.
