Stranger Things season 4 could go “outside of Hawkins”

Warning: If you have yet to watch the newest season of Stranger Things, then turn away now, because we’re about to get into so SPOILERS for season 3. You’ve been warned.

Still here? Bitchin, let’s get into it.

In the season 3 finale, Joyce Byers decides to pack up and move her family — including the newly orphaned Eleven — away from the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. It was probably the best parenting decision we’ve seen Joyce make in three seasons. And seeing as how Jim Hopper was disintegrated when the Russian laser underneath Starcourt Mall exploded, purportedly sealing the rift between our reality and the sinister Upside Down, there’s no romantic reason for Joyce to stay in the town where her family has suffered so much over the past couple years.

In other news, Eleven lost her powers in the battle with the Mindflayer, and she’ll now be trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with Mike. Oh, and Dustin’s girlfriend Suzie is real and they bond by singing the theme to The Neverending Story. So now that’ll be in my head for a while; thanks, guys.

So with part of the gang now residing outside Hawkins, how will the show manage things going forward? Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, creators Matt and Ross Duffer teased what might lay ahead. “We don’t want to write ourselves in a corner so we try to have these early discussions with the writers just to make sure that we’re setting ourselves up to go in the right direction,” said Ross. “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."

Seeing his brother flailing, Matt weighed in with the closest thing we’re going to get in terms of a concrete hint: “I think the biggest thing that’s going to happen is it’s going to open up a little bit, not necessarily in terms of scale, in terms of special effects, but open up in terms of allowing plotlines into areas outside of Hawkins.”

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“Outside of Hawkins” could mean literally anywhere. The show already stopped by Chicago in season 2’s “The Lost Sister” (although plenty of fans wish it hadn’t), and in the mid-credits sequence after season 3, we see that the Russians are still trying to break into the Upside Down back in their homeland…and that they’ve had some success. They even have a Demogorgon, and have an unnamed “American” locked in a cell. “Assuming there’s a season 4, obviously the question of who that American is in that cell and then also what they’re doing with the Demogorgon, is a tease,” said Ross Duffer. “That’s obviously going to play a huge role in a potential season four.”

Who does Ross think he’s kidding talking a “potential” season 4? This is Netflix’s biggest show. If they want another season, they’ll get one, but whatever.

Anyway, many fans have assumed that Hopper somehow survived the explosion and is the American in that cell in the Russian gulag, but what if it’s someone else entirely? What if it’s actually the chief antagonist of season 1 and Eleven’s “papa,” Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine)?

True, Brenner was attacked by a Demogorgon in season 1, but in season 2, Ray Caroll (Pruitt Taylor Vince) told Eleven that Brenner was still alive, and that he knew where he was. What if Brenner and the Demogorgon that attacked him were somehow scooped up by the Russians, who then extracted the information that led them to build their base under the Starcourt Mall? And then Brenner has been chilling in Siberia ever since?

Of course, this is just conjecture on my part, but if it does play out that way, it would explain how the Russians knew to build a top-secret base and lab underneath the rural town of Hawkins.

So what say you, executive producer Shawn Levy? Will this stuff happen? “Certainly season three ends with several plot strands that are separate from each other,” he said. “And should there be a season 4, I think we’ll see them all explored.”

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