In the season 4 finale, fans’ favorite Eddie Munson sacrificed himself to save Hawkins. Now he won’t be joining the rest of the Stranger Things gang in season 5.

According to the Duffer Brothers, this was one of the bleak ways Eddie’s story would end. The fate of the character who was introduced in the latest season was destined to be tragic.

“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.”