I think his death was cheap. Really loved the character, didn't want him to die, but if he was going to die then he deserved to go out much more dramatically than he did. At this point the show has become formulaic with its manner of introducing characters, making them loveable, and then murdering them before the season is out. RIP Bob, Alexei, and Eddie - all three of you deserved a hell of a lot better than you got. Only reason we didn't have a dead "main" character in season 1 was because Joe Keery made a charisma saving throw and the Duffer Bros decided to keep Steve Harrington alive. Eddie deserved the same treatment - or at the very least to go out like a real BAMF - the energy of him playing Master of Puppets on that trailer needed to have been kept up to the bitter end, instead of the tortuous and purposeless death he got.

Yes, I said purposeless. Because it served no purpose. The moment tugs at your heartstrings and makes you emotional, sure, and theres a thin veneer of story there that if you don't think about makes it seem like he died a hero.

But the moment you do think about it critically, you realize he didn't really die as much of a hero. At best he died unnecessarily by making a foolish and short-sighted but well-intentioned decision, at worst he died for purposefully self-centered reasons. "I didn't run away this time, right?" he proudly says as he lays there dying. As though running or not running is a measure of his character and integrity and moral rectitude, or as though by running out and getting himself killed for no apparent reason he is suddenly a hero. Spoilers - he isn't. Self-sacrifice is not synonymous with herodom despite the modern American tendency to conflate the two, and there is a fine line between bravery and stupidity, Eddies actions falling on the "stupidity" end of the spectrum. I wouldn't consider what he did to be particularly good character development or evidence of his maturation - obviously some will say that he learned not to run away or whatever, but did he really mature if the apparent lesson learned is "never run away, always run towards danger", as opposed to "run when you must, fight when you can"?

The reality is that he would not have been "running away" - the plan from the beginning was for him and Dustin to bug out across the portal if their position in the trailer became untenable. It was a tactical retreat, a "live to fight another day", because they would be more useful and better able to contribute to the success of the mission if they were able to fall back and find a way to continue supporting the plan by staying alive than if they died trying to hold out in the trailer. They were a decoy meant to distract the bats while the hit squad broke into the house, and in that sense mission accomplished. The second part of that plan was for them to hold the bats attention for as long as possible so they didn't become an obstacle to the team killing Vecna, and that was what they were working on when they decided to cross back over. The bats would have continued swarming the trailer for some time until they realized it was abandoned and (probably) turned tail back towards the house, so Eddie and Dustins distraction still had some life left in it before the bats gave up... at which point Eddie and Dustin could have just crossed back over to the upside-down and done something else to draw the bats back in (or put another rooftop trailer-park concert on, Metallica had plenty of good material to work with in 1986). There apparently was no concern of the bats following them onto the other side of that portal, because there are two other portals out there in the wild that the bats were fully capable of crossing through at any time in the season (let alone the fact that getting the bats through the one in the trailer was never really an obstacle for Vecna either), and yet they didn't despite having the hive-mind knowledge of their exact location the entire time - so I don't think this was a factor in Eddies decision-making. If the bats did cross over, then even better - Eddie and Dustin are in a better position to survive in the real world than in the upside down and they would have been able to hold the bats attention for even longer if they were on the other side of that portal.

So then, the only real rationale for Eddie doing what he did (other than his apparent self-loathing about running away - never mind the fact that he willingly albeit begrudgingly followed Robin and Nancy through the portal the first time to save Steve, and volunteered to be bait for a swarm of demonic bats, and any number of brave decisions he made to help fight the good fight earlier in the season) was to do something that he felt would buy more time for the hit squad. But heres the thing - he has no way of knowing if the squad needs 3 more minutes or 3 more hours to finish off Vecna, for all he knows Vecna may have already been defeated and the trio are on their way back already (keeping in mind there are two other portals and there was seemingly no part of the plan that apparently involved luring the bats away from the trailer so they could get back through, I think its safe to say that "clearing the trailer so they can escape" was not a consideration for Eddie). He sure as hell must have realized that he couldn't ride that bike forever and eventually he would tire out and the bats might catch up to him though - at which point he wasn't likely to survive for long by himself. So, if the team needed say another 30 minutes to finish up, but he only made it 5 minutes before dying (which seems generous based on how far from the trailer he actually was, as well as the fact that his fight with the bats didn't really last all that long) and maybe another 5 minutes for the bats to nom him up, he really didn't contribute all that much to the success of the assassination mission. The bats still would have ended up flying back to the house while the trio were inside all the same and likely kill them too... unless Dustin crosses back into the upside down and keeps the bats busy for lets say another 20 or so minutes... by himself... He has a much lower likelihood of success and survival on his own than he does as part of a team with Eddie compared to the probability of success and survival if Eddie and Dustin had both waited out the bats on the other side and crossed back into the upside-down together. And Eddie *had* to know that Dustin would cross back over, it would be naive and foolish to think otherwise. Him cutting the rope and pulling the mattress isn't really an obstacle - obviously it didn't take Dustin very long at all to cross back over (and surely, ladders had already been invented by 1986, yes? Its weird that they never thought to set up a ladder in the trailer for ease of access and stuck with old rope and mattress trick) and the chances of either of them surviving individually is much lower than their chances of survival if they stuck together. So it was a bad decision all around on Eddies part - in reality his decision put everyone at much greater risk. Dustin was at greater risk because he would have to fly solo to continue to support the mission (also no guarantee that some of the bats wouldn't chase Dustin through the portal while the rest went after Eddie), and Nancy/Robin/Steve were at greater risk because the decoy would be less effective once Eddie was dead and there was the potential that they might might still need that decoy for quite some time before they were able to put Vecna down. In a sense, Eddie is considered a hero here by luck, because his decision didn't get anyone else killed or interfere with the success of the mission - if things had gone a little bit differently however, his decision would have made the difference between success and failure. Thats recklessness, not heroism.

In more direct, less overthinking it big swirling galaxy brain terms, Eddie doing what he did was not a difference-maker in the context of the events as they occurred on screen. If you measure the impact of his decision in terms of whether or not it made a difference to the success of the strike on Vecna based on the timing of events depicted on screen, then we see that Eddies sacrifice likely played no role in it. He wasn't on the bike very long. In terms of screen time we see him for approx. 28 seconds (I counted) between the time he leaves the trailer and the time he gets knocked off the bike. While usually I would assume that stuff happens off-screen, this kind of jives with the amount of time you figure it would take Dustin to get the mattress out of the way, grab the chair, and hop through the portal, and based on how far away he was when Dustin gets out of the trailer and sees him what is, at most, a couple hundred feet away. After being knocked off the bike, I count about 83 seconds of screen-time for Eddie before the bats drop out of the sky, increasing to about 120 seconds if you assume the cuts to Dustin are happening sequentially rather than in parallel. Its a bit harder to judge how much time elapses off-screen here, but I figure it can't have been more than another 60-120 seconds based on how long it would have taken Dustin to get to Eddie on his hobbled leg - so in total Eddie kept the bats busy for not more than *maybe* 4 minutes total, at most. In terms of flight time from the house to the trailer, we hear Eddie shred out 120 seconds of Master of Puppets before Dustin gives him the 30 second countdown, though Eddie doesn't sound his last note until about 50 seconds of song-time later, after which it takes maybe another 5-10 seconds elapsed for the bats to reach the trailer, so we're looking at somewhere between a 2 minute 40 second and a 3 minute distance between the house and the trailer. So... assuming that the bats would have turned around the moment Eddie would have climbed through the portal, at most he would have bought the hit squad ~80 seconds, though in reality it was probably less than 60 seconds. If you figure it would have taken the bats another 30 seconds or so to break through the door, and another 30 seconds beyond that for them to realize the trailer was empty, then - effectively - you find that Eddie basically paid his life to buy zero additional time for the hit squad.

Don't even get me started on the fact that Vecna effectively succeeded anyway, as he got a technical kill on Max and was able to open the fourth portal and turn it into the mega-portal, etc despite getting a good beating, or that Max's pseudo-death just moments later eclipses Eddies own and robs his moment of the emotional impact it deserves, or that nobody knows anything about what he did and the entire town still thinks hes an evil villain, or that the only people evidently at all bothered by Eddies death are Dustin and Eddies uncle, as not a single other member of the party even bothers to mention him (and, presumably, they abandoned his body in the Upside-down as theres no mention whatsoever of them recovering it or holding a small private funeral for him, etc.). Its just a gakky way for him to go and doesn't give him any sort of real justice as a character. It feels like the conclusion for his arc was entirely phoned in and written only to evoke a cheap and easy emotional response from the audience rather than giving him an ending he actually deserved.

Personally, if it was me doing the writing, and I wasn't going to commit to giving him a continuation of his story next season, I would have changed up his death a bit. Imagine, if you will, that instead of the bats breaking into the trailer, they instead get recalled by Vecna. Remember, Vecna knows that they are a decoy and that the entire thing is a trap to kill him, so theres no real reason for him to want to kill those two then and there other than his own sadism, really - if he were successful in opening his portal, they probably would be dead in the near future anyway, right? So Vecna recalls them, and Eddie (and probably also Dustin, lets be real) make the immediate decision to run towards danger to save their friends who are now going to be trapped in the house with Vecna and an angry bat swarm rather than sticking to the plan and staying put. This sets up an immediate and obvious parallel to the boat scene when Nancy dives into the water to save Steve, which is a moment that I think was a sort of an epiphany/revelation to Eddie and definitely something he would have remembered. So he (plus Dustin) hop on the bike and start chasing the bats back to the house as fast as they can. For the most part the rest of the narrative proceeds as it did on screen, but rather than the trio molotoving and shotgunning Vecna through the attic window, they find that they only succeed in wounding and weakening him while also really pissing him off. They get embroiled in a more direct and visceral close quarters fight with Vecna, mirroring the fight that Lucas is having with Jason in the same attic in the real world. The bats arrive causing chaos as they struggle to protect themselves and eachother from the bats while avoiding Vecnas claws and mind bullets and swinging at him with various weapons (improvised and otherwise), etc. Just when all hope seems lost - the bats have the trio wrapped up again and Vecna is gloating and about to end them - Eddie comes in swinging his guitar (i.e. an "axe" in musicians parlance, especially the style used by Eddie) like a literal fething battle-axe - clobbering Vecna repeatedly, beating him back from the group and keeping him off balance long enough for Dustin to free them from the bats (mirroring Nancy's rescue of Steve earlier in the season), and ultimately taking one final epic swing (either embedding itself into Vecnas body or maybe smashing in the side of his head, etc.), shattering the guitar sending Vecna flying through the window - but not before Vecna gets a nice deep savage mortal wound of a claw-swipe into Eddie. Eddie collapses moments after, Dustin runs to him and cradles him in his arms, he dies like he did on screen, Vecna escapes like he did and the rest of the story continues on from there unedited.

A much more satisfyingly metal ending for Eddie, and one which better suits the narrative. Remember that it was Eddie that RP'ed Vecna earlier in the season as the DM - thus its poetically fitting for Eddie to fight Vecna directly (though only Erica can truly slay him - as was the case in the game... PS - spoilers for next season), a sort of duel of the fates between the two versions of the character. Likewise, Eddie has a personal score to settle with Vecna, as its Vecna's fault that Eddie was labeled a criminal, and likewise Vecna was the one that killed Chrissy in front of Eddies eyes - him beating the gak out of Vecna is a better way to avenge her than putting on a metal concert.

I'm banking on the idea that whatever El did coupled with the trauma of basically going through Inception with Vecna inside her unlocked some sort of psychic ability in Max. But anyway, I'm ambivalent to how this was handled. I didn't want her to die, I'm fine with her being in a coma and having suffered as a result of the events, etc.... but did they really need to break all her limbs and make her go blind? Like, I think they could have just... stopped short of that part. I think actually it would have been a bit more interesting if instead of Vecna doing his voodoo gak, Jason accidentally shoots her instead before Lucas knocks him out. She still dies in Lucas's arms, Vecna doesn't have to break her like he did and is able to open the portal through her death because hes inside her head when she dies, even though he didn't cause it or something. El still psychically resuscitates her, etc. It changes up the dynamic a bit - that way the team didn't really directly "fail" so much as they had their plan fall apart entirely, and it gives them a way to maybe clear Eddies name as they can point to Jason as a symptom of irrational mass-hysteria (or maybe just say that he was the satanic cult leader all along, who cares).

Its been obvious that Will is gay since last season at least, if not season 2 (maybe even season 1). I'm pretty sure a "Mike, I love you" moment is coming before Season 5 is finished... yknow, for those few people who are so dense they still haven't figured it out.