Warning! Major spoilers ahead for Stranger Things season 5, volumes 1 and 2.

Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer comment on Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) potential fate in the impending series finale. With Volume 2 revealing that Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) was using Kali’s (Linnea Berthelsen) blood to create a new batch of super-powered children, Eleven and Kali, aka Eight, seemed to have come to an unspoken agreement to sacrifice themselves to stop her if they must.

Though the Duffer Brothers won’t confirm whether Eleven and Kali follow through on their plan, they do tease to TV Insider that Kali’s sacrificial approach has a big impact on what’s to come. Check out Matt Duffer’s comment below:

“A lot of the question of Eleven and what life looks like and what her ultimate fate is going to be [was] something that we found really interesting to explore in the writers’ room. And that’s really one reason we wanted to bring Kali back… She’s coming from a very sort of pragmatic, realistic point of view.”

Kali’s pragmatism and willingness to sacrifice herself (and Eleven) to thwart Dr. Kay’s plan have understandably created friction between her and Hopper (David Harbour), even though Hopper has also been intent on sacrificing himself this season. “Hopper, of course, is right to not completely trust her,” Matt teases.

The sacrificial approach of characters like Kali and Hopper is, of course, in contrast to Finn Wolfhard’s Mike, who has tried to convince Eleven that a bright future awaits the two of them. It’s Mike, though, and the threat to his life that is a major factor in Eleven agreeing to Kali’s plan of self-sacrifice.

“Mike is the dreamer of the three, the optimist,” Ross Duffer says. Eleven, then, is right in the middle of all of these competing points of view.

Though the Duffers are careful not to reveal any specifics, they do tease that the Stranger Things season 5 finale was a huge undertaking. “I don’t want to say too much,” Matt says. “I mean, it’s massive. I will say… the thing I’m most excited about… for people to watch the finale is in terms of the scale, it’s the biggest thing we’ve ever had.”

Duffer’s teases about the scale of the finale follows the reveal in Volume 2 that the Upside Down is actually a wormhole between Earth and another dimension called The Abyss. Vecna’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) grand plan is to collide these two dimensions, which would mean death and destruction for Earth, setting up a blockbuster final episode.

The finale has a runtime of two hours and five minutes, making it the longest episode of season 5. This supersized finale will seemingly follow Eleven, the new super-powered Will, and the rest of the Stranger Things cast as they put their plan into motion to destroy the Upside Down, severing the bridge between these two dimensions.

Though there will be plenty of spectacle and action on display, Matt teases that the finale also “has the most character moments and the most emotion of any of the episodes, at least this season. So I like that it has both things in it.”

Ross adds that setting up this massive finale involves taking a new approach with episode 7. “One thing we really wanted to do was really set up the plan in the penultimate episode,” he explains, “Which is a bit different from our other finale episodes [that] slowly ramp up to a climax.”

Stranger Things season 5, episode 7, features a lot of table-setting and plan-devising, but don’t expect that to continue in the finale. “We’re at a sprint pretty much right away in Episode 8. So that’s something we’re really excited about.”

Many questions remain about exactly how everything will wrap up in the Stranger Things series finale, but Eleven is evidently poised to play a massive role. The final episode drops on Netflix at 8 p.m. ET on Wednesday, December 31.