For a certain spate of Gen X’ers, watching Stranger Things is like traveling back in time for one last birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. Except now we’re adults and we can see it for the shambolic hall of animatronic horrors it truly was. Everything is slightly sticky and run-down, but it’s ours, and that’s gotta count for something, right?
For us, Eddie Munson was a particularly familiar character — the lovable freak who adored scaring the normies almost as much as he enjoyed recruiting fellow lost souls to the Hellfire Club, his Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The secret of high school in the ‘80s and ‘90s was that guys like Eddie were great friends and — for some of us — excellent boyfriends.
Played with aplomb by Joseph Quinn, Eddie might not have cared too much about getting good grades. (He’s repeated a few years and is a bit older than a lot of the Stranger Things gang). But he was smart and creative, and most of all, he was kind.
The late Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery) from Seasons 2-3 is like The Upside Down version of Eddie. A hard-rocking womanizer with a gross little mustache, Billy’s history of abuse at the hands of his dad turned him into an abusive bully to Max (Sadie Sink). While we don’t know too much about Eddie’s past, that hot-wiring remembrance makes clear his childhood was not great. Still, he treated Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who is arguably one of the nerdiest and thus most vulnerable characters on Stranger Things, as an equal and a comrade. And though Eddie was initially taken aback by Erica Sinclair (Priah Ferguson) as a substitute player, he quickly learned to respect her as Lady Applejack.
Credit: Netflix
Then came Chrissy, who couldn’t wake up. While running away was understandable, Eddie felt shame for abandoning the cheerleader, who was mutilated and murdered in his uncle’s trailer during a friendly drug deal. His ardent concern for her has led some fans to ship them in the afterlife. (It must be said Eddie was maybe not the best drug dealer. I question the wisdom of offering ketamine, an anesthetic with hallucinogenic and dissociative properties, to someone struggling with visions of Veca. But I digress.) And while some of the more meat-headed fans of the metal genre might have been extremely homophobic in the ’80s (and even one of the most metal dudes in the world felt safer in the closet), Eddie’s little flirt with Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) was just serious enough to get ‘shippers writing reams of smut on fansites. In interviews, Quinn is smart enough to play along. Eddie won hearts with every cry and quip.
Eddie’s death in the Upside Down was both heroic and extremely metal — even Metallica approves, which is no small feat. However, his passing leaves a big old metalhead-shaped hole in the hearts of viewers and Eddie’s loved ones. Shout out to his uncle Wayne (Joel Stoffer), who keeps putting up missing person posters for his nephew despite how they’re defaced with graffiti. The scene where Dustin tells Wayne of his nephew’s honorable and tragic demise had me in tears.
Credit: Netflix
Watching Eddie romp with his pals reminded me of my own time with an equally special and delightfully dorky gang of metalheads in high school; my incredibly hot, long-haired boyfriend and his pals eschewed the cafeteria for endless games of chess and allowed me to tag along with them during LAN parties, where Dr. Pepper flowed freely and Minotaur was the game of choice. While they were more likely to place out of all available math classes at our high school than spend time in detention with Eddie, they surely would have acknowledged each other as brothers in metal.
While some fans hope to see Eddie return in the fifth and last season, some things really are best left in the past — unlike, say, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cramps. Hey, maybe we can have a little Sisters of Mercy in season five, as a treat?
Stranger Things is now streaming on Netflix.
