Stranger Things Season 4 Teaser Drops A Major Bombshell
Hold onto your butts, Stranger Things fans.
Netflix has just dropped a teaser trailer for season 4 of the smash hit series, and the extremely brief and dialogue-free spot contains a major reveal that should have loyal viewers absolutely flipping their wigs. Obviously, there is a big, fat spoiler for the upcoming season of Stranger Things ahead — although we must point out that if the series' creatives intended to keep this plot point a secret, they probably wouldn't have dropped it into a trailer that the entire internet will soon be trumpeting about.
The trailer is titled "From Russia With Love," and if you're anything like us, you may already know where this is going. It opens on a huge, snow-covered clearing in a forest, and there's a pretty major operation going on here; a railroad track is under construction, while a bunch of very serious-looking dudes with guns look on. There are ferocious-looking dogs, snowmobile patrols, AK-47s, those big furry hats — it's all very Russian.
The camera swoops over the track as burly guys in winter gear hammer away at the railroad spikes, then pans up to focus on one of them in particular as he removes his hat and wipes the sweat from his brow. Who in the hell could it possibly be?!
In case you haven't guessed, it's none other than the former police chief of Hawkins, Indiana, Jim Hopper (David Harbour) — and he sure doesn't look too happy. He also doesn't look dead, though, so at least there's that.
Will Hopper return to action, or will the action come to him?
It's pretty safe to say that Hopper won't spend the entirety of Stranger Things season 4 laboring away on a railroad somewhere in Russia, but it's open to speculation how he'll manage to get home — or if he will. You'll recall that in Stranger Things season 3, it was revealed that the Russians had opened up their very own gateway to the Upside-Down, and even had a Demogorgon in captivity.
Not many are as intimately familiar with the Upside-Down as Hopper is, and we find it likely that while stranded in Russia, he'll find a way to use this familiarity to his advantage. Perhaps he'll use the Russian gateway as a sort of improvised means of teleportation, either to get himself to another location, or to bring someone else — like, oh, perhaps Eleven — to his.
For that matter, there's no telling just how much of Stranger Things' next season could actually take place in Russia. That first, enigmatic teaser which was released last year did promise us, after all, that "We're not in Hawkins anymore" — and while the Upside-Down-y nature of the spot appeared to imply that a lot of season 4's action would be taking place within that weird alternate dimension, it could also have been alluding to a major change in (real world) setting.
Heck, maybe this new spot's title is letting on more than we know, and Hopper will actually use the power of love to extricate himself from Russia. (Probably not.) We can only speculate, because the teaser doesn't tell us a heck of a lot, and for that we are thankful — but we now know that Hopper lives, and we're pretty psyched about that, too.