Gaten Matarazzo has spoken out what he thinks happened to Dustin’s relationship with Suzie in Stranger Things in a brand-new interview.
The final season of Stranger Things has been plagued by mixed fan reactions, much of which was in reaction to storylines being dropped and hints from earlier seasons not being followed up on.
The Duffer Brothers have come forward to address a lot of these, explaining why the demogorgons weren’t in the finale, why Vicky ‘disappeared’ and what really happened, and even hitting out at rumours of a secret longer cut of Volume Two.
However, one major question amongst fans of the Netflix series that the creators are yet to address in their interviews is what happened to Dustin and Suzie’s relationship.
Advert
Suzie was introduced in season three as Dustin’s ‘girlfriend from camp’, revealed in the finale to actually be real when the pair end up singing Neverending Story together to help save the world.
She becomes more of a full-fledged character in season four though, beyond being Dustin’s beau, helping the group in California to find the NINA project via Ham Radio, and even making a brief physical appearance.
In season five, however, this storyline is dropped altogether, with the character not even being mentioned once.
Gaten Matarazzo was asked about this in a new interview with GQ, suggesting it was simply a result of the new season having ‘too much ground to cover’.
Matarazzo went on to add: “When we pick up in the beginning of season five, it's already been a long chunk of time of Dustin not being in a very good place.”
Much of the season for Dustin focuses on dealing with the grief of Eddie Munson’s (Joseph Quinn) tragic death at the end of season four, something that culminates in a blow-out argument with his best friend and spiritual older brother, Steve Harrington (Joe Keery).
He went on to add: “If he's not really interacting with his friends in town, I doubt he put much emphasis on interacting with his long-distance girlfriend, which is sh*tty of him.
“In the height of his grief, I imagine that he was probably in a place where he may have called it off.”
The explanation makes a lot of sense when you consider the life cycle of your average long-distance relationship at 16 years old, let alone one where one half has seen someone eaten alive by bat monsters.
Matarazzo also gave some interesting extra details about the scenes we see of what came next for Dustin at college.
Asked how much input the actors gave for the characters’ epilogues and endings, he said: “[The Duffer Brothers] heavily considered what we had in mind for our characters, even things that aren't scripted or specifically stated.
“We thought Dustin would go for engineering, maybe astrophysics, and he seemed like he’d definitely end up at NASA, working in theoretical physics.
“We looked up what great engineering schools he’d probably look at, and, weirdly enough, Georgia Tech happened to have a really good program for engineering in the '80s, so that’s a cool reference for us to have him go to Atlanta, where we filmed the show.”
Topics: Stranger Things, Netflix, TV and Film, TV
Michael Slavin