Stranger Things: Eleven’s Powers Explained

Contains spoilers for “Stranger Things” Season 5

This holiday season, fans of “Stranger Things” won’t be thinking about peace, love and goodwill to men — they’ll be thinking about Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and how on Earth the show will wrap up its sprawling storylines over the course of its final set of episodes. Fans got a sneak peek of those last few outings via a new teaser trailer, and it looks like El’s picked up a whole new skill set — she can now fly. 

While that’s not a shocking twist considering what other people and creatures in touch with the Upside Down can do, it’s something entirely new for El. And it’s a fortuitous turn, because she’s going to need every ounce of strength she can muster to save her friends.

Considering how mighty the young miss is already, adding the ability to fly to her stacked list of powers makes her one of the most formidable beings the town of Hawkins has ever seen. Here’s a rundown of all the abilities she’s displayed over the years on “Stranger Things” — and what her new capacity for flight might mean.

Fans of “Stranger Things” are well aware that creatures who live in the Upside Down can fly, such as the Demobats. The humans who visit that plane of reality generally cannot do so on their own, unless they’re manipulated by a telekinetic like Eleven or Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower). But thanks to her well-established powers, it’s quite believable that El can take wing. There’s definitely a sort of precedent for people with mind-control-related abilities being able to do what El does in the trailer, but this is definitely a super-advanced case of her using her levitation skills to a whole new advantage.

Usually, if a human being levitates in the “Stranger Things” world, it’s bad news. It tends to mean that they’re being mind-controlled by Vecna and that they’re about to die in a violent, horrible way. Think of Chrissy (Grace Van Dien) or Max (Sadie Sink), one of whom survived Vecna’s grasp and one of whom didn’t. But even though they had their strings pulled, puppet-like, this shows a definite history of humans being able to take flight in that universe. El’s abilities stretch much further than that, making her a well-rounded powerhouse of a character who manages to make her enemies blanche in fear.

Chief among Eleven’s talents is her telekinetic gift, honed by her time in Hawkins Lab. It allows her to levitate objects — including monsters, people, and even herself, as when she fought the Demogorgon during Season 4. She can also use her mind to lift cars and hurl them as weapons, destroy monsters, and even squeeze the bladders of bullies to make them pee their pants. She manages to slaughter Demodogs simply by flicking them through the air with her mind. This results in her having an extremely high kill count – though she doesn’t murder as many people as Henry Creel does.

She can pull whole train carts toward herself, and she can even break the bones of her enemies. Her ultimate power move? She can crush the brains of those who oppose her, as she did with several agents who were working in Hawkins Lab during her escape.

Her abilities are so advanced that she can enter the minds of her foes and physically manipulate them, making them walk or move or act on her behalf. She can also use her psionic talents to stop her foes from moving and successfully rooting them in a single place. And at least once, El has shown mastery over life itself. She resurrects Max after her heart stops during her fight with Vecna in Season 3. Interestingly El’s powers are limited in this respect — she can help Max survive but cannot help heal what Vecna has done to her.

El isn’t just a telekinetic, she’s also an empath who has the ability to view things that are happening far outside of her line of sight, including things that are happening in a totally different dimension. Her ability to tell what’s going on far away from her means she’s gifted with foresight — which means she can change events that are taking place a long way away from her. 

This includes mindwalking — literally entering the psyche of a target to confront or speak to them. But she can also soothe her subjects, using her ability to enter the minds of others to show she cares for them and wants them to be safe. This is how El protects Max when Vecna’s curse threatens her life; this is also how she manages to get the upper hand on Vecna once and for all. It’s all a form of astral projection which El has begun to master over the course of Seasons 3 and 4.

El’s powers are connected to how she’s doing emotionally and bursts of anger in particular affect them. They can also take a great physical toll on her and those around her. She sprouts a nosebleed whenever she does something intense with her powers, and can cause electrical currents to jump in reaction to her fury or sadness. When she battled with Henry Creel in Hawkins Lab when she was younger, the effect of the battle was so violent that she ended up going into a coma, something that ended up affecting her speech throughout her youth. Like many other teenagers, El only has occasional mastery over herself and thus her raw talents and power.

Another gift that El possesses is the ability to open up gates from the real world that lead to the Upside Down. This is how she gets rid of The One, Henry Creel, when he attacks her at Hawkins Lab before becoming Vecna. She also opens the Mothergate after creating a mental link with the Demogorgon in Season 4. Neither of these incidents occur intentionally, with El being under great emotional strain when they happen. 

As a matter of fact, El has yet to open a gate of her own volition. The notion that she might be able to do so is a promising and yet frightening notion. She is also able to teleport from one place to another — that last happening when she defeats the Demogorgon. But she cannot seem to do this of her own volition and, as with other powers — like her ability to shatter electric lights — it seems to be something she does without thinking about it. Imagine how powerful she would be if she could harness and direct that ability.

El can also manipulate the portals created by others to let her pass through to other worlds, as when she used a gate created by the Demogorgon to get back to Hawkins. She has gradually been able to close those opened portals, though it puts a great physical strain on her to manage that. In the end she’s strong enough to make these otherworldly connections — but it’s a huge struggle for her to keep them going.

Besides her ability to use psychic projection, El has been granted the power of extra sensory perception, or ESP. She has a way of knowing things she’s never witnessed without having to enter the mind of another person — like who the people in various photos taken in the Upside Down are.

Her ESP surfaces in various ways across the series. She reads the memories of several characters — including her biological mom Terry (Aimee Mullins) and Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery) — which she tries to use to help them. She performs acts of psychometry and can figure out which person has touched, held, or owned an object simply by putting her own hands on it. Unsurprisingly, she’s able to look at the boys’ Dungeons and Dragons game and figure out which token belongs to Mike.

El can even harness the power of electronics, though in a haphazard way that doesn’t always work. She can use various speakers and sound systems to project noises, voices and other sounds through them. This definitely helps her up her spy game during Season 3, and even helps her defend innocents along the way.

The most interesting and underexplored aspect of El’s character is that she has the ability to commune with those caught between worlds — those who have functionally passed and those who dwell in places like the Upside Down, such as Will (Noah Schnapp). She could communicate with Max when she was in a coma and could speak to Henry Creel when he was lurking in the Upside Down. She could also amplify Will’s distressed calls as he looks for a way out of the Upside Down. This power points up El’s strong, innate connection to the Upside Down — a place she is a part of, which is a part of her, but which she has been trying to escape from her entire life.

El’s ability to straddle all planes of reality is a fascinating fact of life for her, something that hints at her metaphysical capabilities, which are always growing and changing as she herself ages. It wouldn’t be a surprise if she manages to blow up an entire planet by the time the finale of “Stranger Things” airs — but audiences will have to wait until the end of 2025 to find out whether she ends up saving Hawkins or destroying it. The final season of “Stranger Things” will be released in chunks — one part on Thanksgiving, the final part on Christmas Day, and the finale on New Year’s Eve. Let’s see if this powerful being sends 2025 out with a bang.