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Film & TV 2016

Stranger Things has a heroine called Eleven

Millie Bobby Brown, a girl with short dark hair in a white studded shirt, speaking into a microphone at a panel table
Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven, at Phoenix Comicon in October 2016, three months after the first season came out. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In the first episode of Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016), a girl with a shaved head walks out of the woods near Hawkins, Indiana. She hardly speaks, gets nosebleeds when she uses her powers, and has a number tattooed on her forearm: 011. The boys who find her take it for her name, Eleven, and Mike shortens it to El.

The number comes from the laboratory where she grew up, where children had numbers instead of names. Much later we learn that she was born Jane. But to the boys, and to the audience, she stayed Eleven.

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