Stranger Things: Eleven’s Heroic Journey

Hello. Welcome to Have Toga Will Travel, a podcast exploring the Mediterranean world, ancient and modern, through the eyes of two former classics professors. I'm Emily.

I'm Cam.

And we're your hosts.

Now, as we mentioned in our last episode, we're doing something a little bit different today. We're doing a little bit of comparative literature or reception, and we're looking at how ideas in a very modern television show, Stranger Things, connect to very ancient story patterns.

So last time we talked about heroes, the different meanings of the word hero in antiquity, and how modern scholars have attempted to articulate the narrative structure underlying stories across time and culture, commonly referred to as the hero's journey. We briefly discussed two models, Joseph Campbell's and David Leeming's.

Today, we're going to talk about how the show Stranger Things makes use of ideas about heroes and heroines to develop the character of Eleven, and how we can use these models to make some conjectures about what might happen in season five. Specifically, what we're going to do is explore the fit between Leeming's model and Eleven's narrative journey, and suggest that she is very much a hero in the model of Heracles, albeit with a female or a feminine twist, which will make sense in a couple of minutes.

Yeah. So just to recap some of the things we talked about last time with the hero's journey, the hero's journey has a sort of basic structure to it of three major parts: departure, initiation, and return. And so everyone who writes about the hero's journey is going to fit into this basic structure. And we talked about Joseph Campbell's model, and we refer to his model as kind of an every person model. In Campbell's model, a boy grows up in the ordinary world until a mysterious herald summons him to adventure. He may initially resist the call, but eventually he accepts and embarks on adventures aided by friends and companions until he wins a decisive victory and returns to the ordinary world with the treasure or knowledge he has won and can use to benefit others. The hero himself is transformed by the adventure and gains wisdom and or spiritual power. And that transformation allows him to live in the world in a new way.

We mentioned last time that this is the model that George Lucas relies on heavily in Star Wars. And when you phrase it, just like in that little capsule, you can really see that—

Yeah.

—if you think about it at all. Anyway, within this model, Campbell described 17 stages of the hero's journey, which fit into these three buckets, departure, initiation, and return. Now, not every story includes all 17 stages, and there's a lot of variation generally in what a particular story decides to include. A lot of tales will isolate and greatly enlarge upon one or two of these typical elements. Others string a number of independent cycles into a single series. Different characters or different episodes can become fused together, or a single element can reduplicate itself and reappear with many changes.

So one of the elements that is critical to Campbell's full cycle is that it ends with the hero's reintegration. And Campbell says, the returning hero to complete his adventure must survive the impact with the world. So he's got to go do this adventure and he's got to come back and get through that return. And Campbell points out that the first problem of the returning hero is "to accept as real after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys, sorrows, banalities, and noisy obscenities of life." So you've got to go off and have this incredible adventure, and then you have to come back home and live in the boring normal world again. And that is the real challenge.

Yeah, it's like going on vacation to a place like Greece and coming back, except multiplied by a thousand.

You wouldn't know anything about that.

Nothing at all. Now, the other model we discussed was the model of David Adams Leeming, what we called in the last episode the chosen one model.

And that is our term, not his term.

Right. Don't blame him for our poorly chosen words there. This is a more focused version of the hero's journey. Leeming breaks the departure, initiation, and return into eight stages, the supreme mythic events in the life of a hero. And I'm going to list those eight stages out for you. Number one is the hero's miraculous conception and birth. Number two is what Leeming calls the initiation of the hero child. Number three is the hero's withdrawal from family or community for meditation and preparation. Stage four is the trial and quest. Stage five is death. Six is the descent into the underworld. Seven is resurrection and rebirth. And the eighth and final stage is ascension, apotheosis, and atonement.

Now what's interesting here, to my mind—the beginning and the ending of Leeming Schema represent some really noticeable differences from Campbell's model. One, because the hero is marked from the very beginning of his life. And two, nowhere is there an idea that the hero is going to reintegrate into the ordinary world. And in fact, you could make the argument that the hero is never really part of the ordinary world. So the hero's adventure begins with a conception or birth, which is miraculous or unusual in the extreme. And the journey ends when the hero ascends to heaven, achieves atonement, or is made a god himself if he was not already one. And in his model, Leeming emphasizes the role of the hero as both a quester and as a scapegoat—that is, an individual who suffers for the larger group so that they don't have to suffer.

A savior figure of sorts.

Sort of, but different.

Last time, we talked about how Leeming's model fits particularly well with the stories of Heracles, who stands out among ancient heroes for being able to transcend death in some way and achieve divinity. As we discussed last episode, he has a miraculous conception. He is the child of Zeus. At a very young age, he proves that he has superhuman strength by strangling the snakes Zeus's jealous wife Hera sends to kill him in the crib, essentially. When he gets a little bit older, he accidentally kills his music tutor, Linus, when he gets angry at Linus and whacks him over the head with a lyre. He's then sent away from home. As an adult, after killing his wife and children in a fit of madness, he's again sent into exile and forced to serve his cousin Eurystheus almost as a slave. He completes a whole bunch of labors, the so-called 12 labors, although as we noted last episode, there are actually more than 12, depending on which story you're following, one of which is a trip to the underworld. And finally, at the end of his life, he chooses to be burned to death on a funeral pyre rather than to suffer the effects and torments of a poison he's exposed to, and he becomes a god in some mysterious way.

Now, one of the things that's interesting about Heracles is that exile is a repeated theme in his life. Heracles was never settled for very long in one place, and it's actually even hard to say that he even has a home, as we might call it. And one of the things that this does is it really highlights the idea that he will never be able to integrate into society. Heracles is just someone who can't exist in the world. And in the end, that part of Campbell's schema, the reintegration, is simply unavailable to him. And part of that is because his superhuman strength will always make him a danger to those around him. He can make the world safe from dangers for people, but the very ability that allows him to do that is also what makes him too dangerous to be part of human society. And this is where I think that he and El have extra points of commonality beyond just them both adhering to Leeming schema. And why I think Heracles is the model to look at for her. El is someone whose powers do actually present a danger, and she's also someone who is on some level of fundamental exile at the same time.

But as we'll see, the fact that El is a young woman and not a man makes her hero's journey a little bit different than Heracles' even though both of them conform pretty well to Leeming's model. And that takes us to the question of gender in the hero's journey. As we talked about last episode, Campbell's model has a very gendered aspect to it that makes it a little bit challenging 75 years on after Campbell first published his book. So just by way of example, Campbell sees one of the possible options for a hero's triumph as sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world. And there's all sorts of stuff that comes into that. But the point is that if you don't conceptualize a hero as male or masculine, Campbell's model becomes a little bit problematic.

Yeah, things are gonna have to work differently. But as a result of these problems, as we mentioned, others have attempted to articulate what a female hero's journey looks like. So there are a couple of important works to highlight here. One is Maureen Murdock's 1990 book, "The Heroine's Journey", and then Valerie EstEl Frankel's 2010 book, "From Girl to Goddess".

According to authors like this, The Heroine's Journey shares the basic overall structure that we see in Campbell and in Leeming, that structure of departure, initiation, and return. But a female hero experiences different challenges along the way than does a main hero. That was a Freudian slip if I've ever heard one. Than does a male hero. I think we're going to edit that in post, but I don't know, Emily might make me leave it in.

We can put it with all of our other outtakes.

I'll just leave it in. Anyway, here I'm going to quote Frankel, who sums up the similarity and differences. What she says is, quote, "the male hero quests to conquer the tyrant, the heroine quest to create a family. Heroes of both genders quest for sacred objects, for wisdom, for answers to riddles and inner growth. Both heroes are growing toward adulthood and balance," end quote. They go about it in a slightly different way. So for example, whereas Campbell argues that a male hero must often confront a woman as a temptress, in models of the heroine's journey, the heroine instead confronts a character we can call Bluebeard, the murderous husband figure. And Frankel elaborates by saying, quote, "the female journey is one of cleverness and intuition, birth and patience, destroying mountains and creating civilizations." End quote.

And throughout this work on the heroine's journey, there are some strong themes that come out. One is reconciling the feminine and the masculine. And then another one is the restoration of the family. And there's also a lot of emphasis in this scholarship on confronting what they call the dark goddess. The dark goddess has been described as "the dark sister buried in so many women must be faced and confronted in the underworld to which she's been banished." And we bring this up because this is actually going to be key to what we're going to talk about with Eleven later.

So now that we've gotten the heavy conceptual stuff out of the way, let's talk a little bit about how these models can help us understand the story of Eleven so far in Stranger Things. As we suggested last episode and at the top of this episode, what we want to do here is argue that Eleven, like Heracles, seems to conform to the Chosen One model, that is to Leeming's model, but in a way that makes her story a distinctly female version of the hero's journey.

So for those of you who don't know the show, Stranger Things is a supernatural sci-fi show on Netflix set in the 1980s in a small town in Indiana called Hawkins.

No relation.

Yeah, I didn't think you were related to a fictional town in Indiana ever.

Just want to make it clear.

All right. The show revolves around a group of friends and their encounter with literal otherworldly dangers. Eleven in this show is a girl with telekinetic and telepathic powers who is central to the defeat of these otherworldly forces.

Now, this is a very rich show with a fantastic ensemble cast. And because it has an ensemble cast, it has multiple cross-cutting narratives, a lot of characters with story arcs of their own, maybe even multiple heroes' journeys. We can't touch on all of them, obviously, in what will hopefully be a relatively short podcast episode. So here we're going to focus on Eleven, whose story is especially interesting and seems pretty important to the overall arc of the show.

So we're going to get into the details of what has happened in the first four seasons of the show. If you haven't seen the show, just be warned that there are spoilers ahead.

All right, so let's get into the show and break this down a bit. And we'll start by talking a little bit about season one. Season one opens in the town of Hawkins, Indiana, with a couple of mysteries. The first is the discovery of a preteen girl with the numbers 011 tattooed on her wrist, who seems to be a runaway. She's taken in by the core group of characters in the show, four middle school boys who spend a lot of their time playing Dungeons and Dragons, and they hide her in the basement of one of the characters, Mike. Initially, they call her 11 because of the numerals tattooed on her wrist, although very shortly, they nickname her El. The second mystery is the disappearance of several people in the town, including Will Byers, one of the core group of characters.

Now, these mysteries turn out to be connected. As the audience and the boys discover, El has the psychic powers we mentioned, both telepathic and telekinetic. She has been held for years in a secret government facility in the town where a scientist named Brenner, who uses the nickname Papa—

That's not disturbing at all.

—where he has been studying her and other kids like her in the hopes of using their powers against the Soviets. In the process of these experiments, there was an accident in which El essentially opened up a rift into what seems to be a parallel universe, what gets called the Upside Down. The Upside Down is kind of a creepy, abandoned analog of our own world inhabited by some fairly nasty creatures.

Now, one of those creatures, which the boys come to call the Demogorgon in an homage to Dungeons & Dragons, has been slipping through into our own world and abducting people, either for food or possibly as hosts for its larva. And, it turns out, Will is one of these people who's been abducted.

As the season develops, it comes to revolve around two main plot points. One, an effort to rescue Will from the Upside Down, spearheaded by his mother and the local sheriff. And two, an effort on the part of the boys and some others, including El, to defeat the Demogorgon before it can take anyone else. And El plays a critical role in this second plot point, and she uses her powers in the final episode to help defeat the Demogorgon, but in the process seems to vanish herself, possibly into the Upside Down.

Now in this season, it seems at first like we have one narrative arc. A mysterious person with mysterious powers arrives out of nowhere—that is, El—helps defeat the monster, and dies in the process for all intents and purposes. Although, to be fair, we don't know exactly what happens to her at the end of the episode. She does have some agency. We see her learn how to use and control her powers independent of Papa and the lab environment, but otherwise she's still this sort of mysterious outsider.

But mostly she seems to function like a guide or aid for the boys. And the boys are like everyday, ordinary person heroes of the story. So you could make a comparison to someone like Obi-Wan Kenobi. And throughout the season, she remains relatively mysterious, and we actually don't know a lot about her.

Right, and that's where the season leaves her. In part, I think, because of course, there was no guarantee that season two was coming at the end of season one. So there was a need here to make the first season self-contained, while also laying the seeds for future seasons. And in fact, season two changes El's narrative, because this is when it becomes clear that she's going to get a distinctive narrative arc of her own. Both we, the audience, and El herself learn a great deal more about her in season two than we did in season one.

So the plot of season two builds on some of the unresolved issues from season one: what happened to El, and the continuing threat that the Upside Down poses to the regular world. Now, we learn at the start of the season that El has survived, and she has been sheltered by the sheriff, Hopper. Now, in an effort to understand more about her past, she decides to track down her mother, and then ultimately goes to Chicago to find another girl, an older girl, Kali, who was, like El, the subject of experiments in Brenner's lab. Kali teaches El more about her powers and how to control them.

Meanwhile, back in Hawkins, Will suffers from breaks with reality, which, we learn, are caused by an entity in the Upside Down essentially possessing him. This is sort of an aspect of trauma which he carries out of Season 1. The entity possessing him is an entity which the kids, in another nod to Dungeons & Dragons, dub the Mind Flayer. And at the same time, creatures much like the Demogorgon from season one once again enter our world and start causing some problems.

Season two culminates when the characters in Hawkins realize that they need to try to close the rift between the worlds to free Will from the influence of the Mind Flayer. And when El, who is tempted briefly to remain with Kali in Chicago and to take revenge on the people involved with taking her away from her mother, decides instead to return to help her friends.

And at the end of the season, El and the others enter the lab, and El is able to use her powers to close the rift as the others hold off the creatures from the upside down. But once again, not everything is resolved, even though El seems to have closed the rift. The final scene of the season suggests that the Mind Flayer is still alive and well, lurking in the upside down, looking for a way to break through once again.

Now, Leeming's model here is particularly useful, I think, in understanding what is happening in Eleven's narrative arc this season. This season actually caught a lot of flack, and people really hated her whole trip to Chicago, meeting Kali and all that stuff. But some of the things that we learn in the process of her journey tie in really nicely to Leeming's model. So one, when she meets her mother, we learn that she has something of a miraculous birth and conception. Her mother does not know who her father is, not because she slept with so many men, but because she hadn't slept with any. So there's a strong implication that Eleven is the product of a virgin birth, possibly. And at the same time, the mother had also been experimented on by scientists herself, and so there's a question of like how does that affect El's abilities—you know, is that part of the reason. And then as a child she is taken from her mother and hidden away in this lab, and this is one of the like details in Leeming's schema of the hiding of the special child after birth.

Elora Danan being spirited away in Willow and put into the hands of the Warwick Davis character.

Yeah.

Many many examples.

Yeah.

In season two El also experiences a withdrawal from family and community. This again is one of the stages in Leeming's model in which the hero withdraws for meditation or preparation. There are really two withdrawals here. One is imposed by the sheriff, who it turns out has been harboring El since the end of season one and won't let her reconnect with her friends.

To protect her.

To protect her, to be fair, yes. The other is self-imposed, and that's this quest to find out who she is, to look for her mother, the quest which ultimately results in her finding Kali. In the process, she even learns her original name, Jane. But like the hero in Leeming's model, after this phase of withdrawal, El reappears in society after her search for herself to save the day, basically. She's trained up and is now ready—

For the peak of her labors.

—ready for the peak of her labors to meet the challenges.

Yeah, she learns a lot with Kali about the true extent of her powers and how to control them, more importantly.

Right.

We also, in this season, see elements of Frankel's outline of the heroine's journey. Now, it's worth noting that the heroine's journey is not like a chosen one model of any sort. And here, I think we can say that these elements of Frankel's model that show up give El's journey a distinctly female hero overtone or heroine overtone. So some of the things that Frankel talks about in her model is that the heroine is going to have problematic parent figures. And that's very much true for El. Her mother is more or less catatonic and was never really able to or allowed to take care of her. And even at this point when El finds her, she has trouble communicating with her mother. And of course, her father or father figure is this scientist Brenner. We've mentioned goes by the name Papa. Yeah, he's problematic. He's doing experiments on these children and posing as a father figure for them. Like, it's definitely a problem. And we mentioned that the theme of restoration of home and family is important, right? And we can really see Eleven searching for that in this season. She's finding her mother. She thinks of Kali as a sister, and she's trying to see if she can put this together somehow.

And a third important element of Frankel's outline is the heroine's encounter with a dark mentor who teaches the heroine, but also simultaneously tests her and pushes her to make some kind of a crucial choice about her future. And in this episode, this plays out clearly in El's relationship with Kali. Kali is on a mission of her own. She's roaming around killing people who had been involved at the Hawkins lab, which also experimented on her. And El's choice is really to stay and help Kali with this mission, or to learn more about herself and move on. It's no coincidence here that the dark goddess in this particular episode is named Kali. The name clearly is meant to evoke the Hindu goddess, who is both a creative and a destructive force. She is simultaneously the mother of the universe and a great protector, but also somebody who embodies the power of destruction. And it seems that both of these ideas are operating in the show and arguably in both El and in Kali.

Yeah. Yeah. And El has to sort of make that choice to go the path of the dark goddess or to take her own path. And in that way, in the heroine's journey, the dark goddess serves as an important role in the heroine's development and in her self-understanding. Now, we mentioned earlier the idea, right, that the dark goddess is the dark sister who must be faced and confronted in the underworld to which she has been banished. And I will say in season two, Chicago, all the scenes in Chicago are at night. They're really dark. They're really gritty. Having lived in Chicago, that is not what Chicago is like.

Well, at least not all of it. Not all the time.

But they really do, I think, bring that underworld effect into play. And another sort of idea about the dark goddess, this is another quote from Demetra George: "She forces us to look at ourselves with utter naked honesty and to see ourselves stripped of our illusions and false pretensions." And you can see Kali causing El to see things about herself she didn't know and allows El to see this very dark path she could take. And as Frankl says, right, "there is a great need to contain this dark side to keep it in, but there's an even greater need to seek it and to discover it and to learn its vital lessons. Those who suppress their dark side are vulnerable to its impulses and desires, yet unable to accept them. It is the people who do not know enough about their own shadow and their own dark side who are most likely to fall victim to evil influences." End quote. So it's actually really critical for El to have this experience so that she understands what the alternative is, and she has a really clear conception of the choices that she will have to make.

The next season, season three, continues to follow El's trials as she tries to fight the Mind Flayer. In this season, the Mind Flayer itself is able to manifest itself physically in our world. What gets us there is a plot development that pays homage to classic villains of Cold War cinema, the Russians. Depending on the day, I sometimes feel like the show kind of jumps the shark a little bit at this point, because the premise is itself kind of goofy.

I mean, it's positing an alternate reality and monsters. And yet it's the Russians that make you feel like it's jumped the shark.

It's this Russian plot that makes me think, this is totally ridiculous. Yes. Anyway, somehow the Russians have gotten wind of what the US government has been doing in the Hawkins lab. And they've been working to open a rift of their own into the Upside Down. And in fact, in this season, we've learned that they've infiltrated the Hawkins lab, which was shuttered at the end of season two. And they've basically built a secret facility, which extends under a new suburban mall, in order to reopen the original rift. And their efforts have opened it just enough to let the Mind Flayer start trying to influence our world again.

So the Mind Flayer takes the opportunity to do so, and he starts possessing animals and people and Hawkins, much like it had influenced Will in season two. And eventually, it's actually able to build itself a body with which it goes on a rampage and attempts to destroy El, whom it recognizes as its greatest opponent.

Unsurprisingly, our protagonists are forced to combat the Mind Flayer in our world and once again to try to deal with the Rift. Now, in the process of fighting against the Mind Flayer, El again plays a starring role, but this time she's wounded, and a fragment of the Mind Flayer actually implants itself inside of her. El uses her telekinetic powers to get the fragment out, but in removing it, we come to understand, she somehow manages to remove her own powers as well. Meanwhile, in the secret Russian lab, some of the other characters once again seal the rift by destroying the Soviet machine meant to open it. Unfortunately, however, it seems like one of those characters, the Sheriff Hopper, is killed in the blast.

Now, at this point in the show at the end of season three, the overall shape of El's narrative still has a lot of possible directions. However, I'm going to argue that one way we can read her loss of powers at the end of the season is that that is a metaphorical death and thus could be seen as step five in Leeming's schema, death. But to be fair, it could also fit into Campbell's model as the moment where she, as the hero, is compEld to return to the human world, right? By losing her powers, she doesn't really have much of a choice anymore but to kind of join the larger world.

Right. And the ending sort of hints at the possibility that that sort of reintegration story is what's going on. It suggests that she's building a restored family for herself. She leaves Hawkins with Will Byers and his family for a new life in California.

And then we get to season four. Season four is, I think, where it becomes particularly clear that Leeming's model is more fitting. Season four revolves around three main plot elements. One, a fragment of the Mind Flayer has survived, along with the Sheriff Hopper, who had seemed to die in season three. And both of these are now hidden away by the Soviets in Eastern Russia. Second plot point, there is a series of bizarre murders at Hawkins, which turns out to be the work of another entity from the Upside Down. This one is named Vecna by the boys, and yet another D&D homage. And Vecna quickly turns his sights on Max, a young woman who's part of the group of friends who's introduced in season two. And the third plot point revolves around El, who has had a really difficult time trying to fit in as a normal teenager. And she realizes that she can regain her powers if she cooperates with Brenner, aka Papa, who we thought at one point was dead, but is not— and, right, this is the man who is responsible for experimenting on her in the first place.

Now gradually over the course of this season, we learn that Vecna has a history with El. Like her, he was one of the children originally experimented upon by Papa in the Hawkins lab. And in an incident that she has essentially blocked out of her memory, El used her powers to drive him out of our world into the upside down. There he nurtured a grudge, learned how to control his new environment, and has basically been working ever since to come back and get revenge.

So season four ends when the protagonists—including El, who has begun to have her powers come back— when they prevent Vecna from returning to our world, at least for the moment. It's clear, though, at the end that the danger is far from over. And significantly, when Max, who had been possessed by Vecna— Max dies and El is somehow able to bring her back from the dead. Or at least that's what the show implies.

So with that scene, with El essentially bringing Max back from the dead, El seems more powerful than ever. And arguably, Leeming's model coincides a lot more closely with key movements in her narrative for this season than does Campbell's model. There are a handful of key points that really make us think that way. First of all, as we've already noted, her attempt to integrate herself into society fails. She's living in California with the Byers family, trying to go to high school, And just really having a tough time creating relationships with other teenage girls. And of course, she also misses her other friends back in Hawkins.

Yeah, she's lying about things that are happening and to make her life look better to her friends back home. But she's kind of an outcast.

Yeah. Now, the second thing that happens that really makes us think that Leeming's model is appropriate here is the way she regains her powers. If the loss of her powers in season three was a metaphorical death of some sort, her attempt to regain them in this season really is a descent into the underworld, a katabasis, because it involves basically going into an underground bunker in an effort to fix the situation.

Yeah. Yeah. Not only that, an underground bunker with the person who tormented her in childhood having to face all that again. And this all coincides with Leeming's step six, the descent to the underworld. And one of the things that he says in describing this step is that it's only by facing all of ourselves, both good and bad, that we can become whole. And that is what El is really seeking here. Interestingly enough, the scene also kind of allows for like a key moment in the heroine's journey, which is her reconciliation with the father, in this case, Brenner. He dies for real towards the end of the season. And he and El get to have sort of a moment at the end together where they connect as people in a way that they haven't. And you can see her kind of coming to terms with who he is as a person and also who he is in her life. And I think it's also worth pointing out here that her whole journey in this season to go and recover her powers really, I think, could be read as a choice to reject reintegration into society. That it's not working for her.

Yeah, realization that integration is not an option.

Yeah.

And finally, it's worth pointing out that the restoration of El's powers can be read as step seven in Leeming's model. That is the rebirth of the hero, especially given the apparent magnitude of those powers. She's able to bring people back from the dead.

That was not something she could do before.

No, it definitely wasn't. And as we close out season four, it becomes clearer than the next season, season five, which will premiere in, well, as you're listening to this episode, probably two weeks since this will drop on November 15th.

Yeah, not even two weeks.

It's clear that she will need to defeat Vecna and close the gates permanently in the next few episodes.

Yeah, and I think if you've watched any of the trailers for season five, that's clearly where we're going. So just to recap, here's how we think Eleven's narrative fits into Leeming's schema. So, one, we have the miraculous conception and birth. Within this, we have the unknown or non-existent father. Maybe there's some sort of divine or superhuman power at work. There are medical experiments around her conception and birth. And so her birth is really marked as special.

Leeming's second stage is the initiation of the hero-child. Arguably, this happens for El in season one in two ways. First, she's trained to use her powers as a very small child in the Hawkins lab. And she's tested in a sense when she has to have the fight with the Demogorgon at the end of the season.

And learn to use her powers independently.

Yes.

Step three is the withdrawal from family or community for meditation and preparation. This is quite clearly the trip to Chicago and her meeting with Kali, as we've already talked about at great length.

Leeming's step number four is the trial and the quest. This occupies, we think, most of season two and season three. These are the episodes that feature El working to close the gate in season two, albeit imperfectly, and her conflict with the Mind Flayer in season three.

Stage five is death. As we've mentioned, this seems to be both her loss of powers and her fight with the Mind Flayer in season three, and also arguably her failed attempts to integrate at the start of season four.

Step number six in Leeming's model is the descent to the underworld, the Katabasis. We think that this clearly happens in season four when El works to restore her powers, which, again, entails a literal descent into an underground bunker where she has to confront Brenner, the man who experimented on her as a child.

And then step seven is resurrection and rebirth. So part of this for sure is the restoration of her powers at the end of season four. There may be more to this step coming in season five. We will find out.

Very shortly. And that leads us to the eighth step in Leeming's model. Ascension, apotheosis, and or atonement. Now this we think has not happened yet.

No.

We think this will probably happen in season five. And we'll get to that in a bit more detail in a few minutes when we detail our predictions for the coming season based on these models.

Now there are a few unanswered questions that season five might also engage with that might throw wrenches into things. So one, we're assuming that Vecna is the ultimate power in the upside down, but maybe he's not. Maybe there's some other big bad, probably not, but it's a possibility.

I think he has to be the ultimate power unless they're planning a season six, which I don't think they are. So he's going to be the final power.

But I still think it's worth posing that question. The other thing that I'm looking for in season five to see what and if it happens, just because this comes up in literature on the heroine's journey, is the reconciliation with the mother or the feminine. Just because this comes up in literature on the heroine's journey, right, that you have to reconcile with both the mother and the father. And we had the reconciliation with the father. And I mean, it's not a critical part of Leeming's schema. It may not happen. But it could introduce something into the story that we don't see. And at one point, I had thought like maybe her mother or Kali was going to return somehow. I don't think that's likely at this point, but it may be that another female character is going to stand in as some representative of the mother or the feminine for El to have some sort of interaction with.

And I guess the other major unresolved issue is the precise nature of El's new powers. We've gotten a hint of what these might be. We've seen her resurrect Max. Is that the limit? Are there other things that she can do? How are those going to factor into the end of her story and really the end of everybody's story in season five. And I guess that takes us to your predictions.

Yeah. So now that we've talked about what has happened, how might Leeming's model help us understand what might happen in season five? Now, I will say that this is a set of predictions, for lack of a better word, that I originally made about seven years ago, and it was based on only the first two seasons. And partly it was a response to the the fact that so many people didn't like season two. It's like, no, no, I think I know what's going on here. So obviously, whatever happens, it's clear that Eleven will be the one that needs to defeat whatever the ultimate power of the upside down is. And I think there are three possible directions for her story to take. And we're going to go in order of least to most likely, in my belief.

All right. So the least probable outcome is what Emily calls the superhero route. This is a situation in which El just keeps having adventures and saving the world day after day. Now, this doesn't seem particularly likely. You know, we know the story is ending. But also, it really does strike us both, I think, as a really unsatisfying way to end the story. It would be a bit of a cop-out, I think, for the creators of the show to go this route. Especially after the setup work that they've done so far.

Yeah, I mean, the whole point of sort of the superhero narrative is that you never have to end the story. Like, it's a way to write comic books for decades and decades and decades about a character. The second option is basically the Campbell schema, the reintegration of the hero, the everyday person route. However, for this to work for El, something has to happen to her powers, right? We've mentioned that her powers are dangerous. They're beneficial, but dangerous. So either she's going to have to lose her powers again, or maybe make the choice consciously to reject them. And it's possible that this is still the direction things could go in. But so far, she has failed in her attempts to integrate into the larger world. And that seems to point away from this. If this is the route she takes, then we would also expect with this some sort of restoration of family for El, whatever that looks like. Whether that's living with the Byers again, or Hopper. But we would expect that as well.

And the final option is that El will follow the model of Leeming's Hero's Journey—or, of Heracles—and undergo some kind of transition that takes her away from our world. She could, for example, die defeating creatures in the Upside Down.

Yeah, it'd have to be defeating Vecna at this point, yeah.

Right. Maybe she won't actually die, but she will still be separated somehow from our own reality. And if the show is really following Leeming's scheme, which I think we are inclined to believe that it is, this ought to entail some sort of apotheosis, right? She becomes more powerful than we could ever possibly imagine or whatever, perhaps by gaining control of the upside down, which would allow her to act as some kind of almost protective spirit over that reality and ours.

Yeah. It's also possible that they leave her fate ambiguous, much like they did at the end of season one.

Yeah, I mean, you could imagine other ways that this could end, right? She could get the Frodo ending where she retains her powers, saves the day, but still has to exit our world in some way—

Yeah.

—that doesn't seem too horrible, but nevertheless satisfies that condition of Leeming's model.

Yeah, I think that people who were hoping for like her and Mike, her love interest, to get the happy ending are going to be let down.

Yeah, I think that's probably true, too. And I remember you telling me that when you would give this talk in front of a bunch of...

High school students. High school

students at Latin convention, it ended with lots of upset teenagers in the room.

There weren't a lot. There was one girl who was particularly crushed at my prediction.

Yeah.

And I was like, I'm really sorry. I don't think it's going to happen. I could be wrong here, but I think it's unlikely. Because it does seem that El's arc is adhering to Leeming's schema pretty clearly. And it definitely seems more likely now than it did seven years ago when I first started thinking about this. And like I said, for her to reintegrate something significant needs to change in her. Not only about her powers, but also she needs to learn new skills or gain new knowledge so that she can reintegrate into society. Because it's clear in season four that she does not function well in the world as a normal person.

So let's wrap this up by trying to ground this back in the ancient world, which is sort of where we started from, and of course, what we know best. Let's think about Heracles and El. Both Heracles and El are people of extraordinary strength and power who are capable of saving the world from extraordinary monsters, and indeed, arguably the only ones capable of saving the world. But at the same time, they both seem incapable of existing in the world as normal people. They just don't fit in, and or they remain dangerous to others. Both Heracles and El have been marked some way from the moment of their conception as different, perhaps superhuman. And those abilities, those superhuman abilities manifest themselves at a young age, which endangers the people around them. Again, it's Heracles accidentally killing his music teacher, Linus. It's El using her powers as a child to push Vecna into the upside down and starting off this cycle in the first place. Both constantly stay on the fringes of society. In the case of Heracles, he's both too strong to die, but not strong enough to overcome the poison to which he's exposed. So he consciously chooses death through burning and somehow achieves divinity. We don't yet know what's going to happen to El in the last season of Stranger Things, but we think it's not going to be surprising at all if her journey continues to echo that of Heracles and she attains some kind of apotheosis or transition into a new state of being.

Yeah. And I wouldn't even be surprised if it came through some form of self-sacrifice.

Yeah. Well, that's a bleak ending.

Have you seen the trailer for the new season?

Okay, fair enough.

You have, I know, because we watched it today. I mean, that said, I will say, like, I'm very excited to see how the show ends. I really enjoyed what they have done with Eleven. I think if I'm right that she is a sort of chosen one model, while there are examples of female characters in that role, we actually don't get a lot of female characters in that role. And I appreciate that there's been clear heroine's journey elements in that narrative. So we're not just writing the man's role for a female character. We're making it very much a woman's story in this kind of special chosen one role.

Heraclea, not Heracles.

Yeah. So I am really excited actually to see how season five goes.

And we should reiterate that the show really is rich and complex. And we've just been plucking at a couple of threads here. So even if you feel like we've spoiled a lot of it, that's actually not the case. You can go and watch this series and there's a lot more going on there that you'll really, really enjoy. There are a lot of other characters whose stories are worth talking about too.

Yeah, it's definitely not just her show. So that's all for today. Our next episode, we're going to move from tragedy to comedy. And we're going to talk about the 1966 film, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", which is an adaptation of the Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim. It is a classic. We figured it would be a fun way to kick off December.

And we should say that the musical is itself an adaptation of Roman comedy.

Yes, the musical, yes.

Getting us back to something more like our roots.

Yes. I've been Emily.

I'm Cam.

And this has been Have Toga Will Travel. Find us wherever you get your favorite podcasts or at havetogawilltravel.com. And you can follow us on all the socials. And if you have questions or topics you'd like us to cover, please feel free to reach out.

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