Spoilers ahead forStranger Things3
The third season of Netflix’sStranger Thingsbrought back a few familiar monstrous faces, as the Upside-Down’s resident boogeyman the Mind-Flayer returned yet again to possess the residents of Hawkins, Indiana. The show remains a delight—Collider’s Adam Chitwood called thisthe best season yet—but after three years all these strange things don’t seem to be gettingthatmuch stranger.
That could change with a hypothetical fourth season, say showrunnersRossandMatt Duffer. Speaking toEW, the series creators noted that they plan the broad strokes of each chapter well in advance, and the plans they’re currently cooking up feel “very different” than season 3.
“We don’t want to write ourselves in a corner so we attempt to have these early discussions with the writers just to verify that we’re setting ourselves up to go in the right direction,” says Ross Duffer. “We don’t know a lot, but we do know a lot of the big broad strokes. At the end of season two, we knew about Billy. We knew that the Russians were going to come in. We didn’t know the mall and stuff, but again, we know these big broad strokes. That’s sort of where we are in season four. We have the big broad strokes. It’s just now about filling in those lines in the details. We’re pretty excited about where it’s potentially going to go. Again, like we said, it’s going to feel very different than this season. But I think that’s the right thing to do and I think it’ll be exciting.”
Matt Duffer added that a fourth season would “open up a little bit”, not just in terms of the largescale special effects and set pieces, but also “allowing portals into areas outside of Hawkins.”
A figure of speech or actual sci-fi-ass portals? Hard to say. Also, technically, hard to say whether this plan will ever come to fruition, as Netflix hasn’t officially greenlit a fourth season ofStranger Thingsquite yet. The numbers the streaming service have touted forStranger Things 3are astronomical, but Netflix’s top-secret numbers need to be taken with several grains of salt; they’ll never tell you when a show flops, but they’ll let you know when a show was streamed into eleventy-trillion households plus a couple on the moon.
ShouldStranger Thingsreturn—and, I mean, come on—executive producer and frequent directorShawn Levyconfirmed that they’ll face all the hanging threads left by season 3 dead on. This includes the apparent death ofDavid Harbour’s Sheriff Jim Hopper and the mid-credits scene set in a Russian military base, where an “American” is being kept prisoner and the military is feeding inmates to a Demogorgon.
“Certainly season three ends with several plot strands that are separate from each other,” Levy said. “And should there be a season 4, I think we’ll see them all explored.”
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