It looks like they, in fact, did save “the American.”
Netflix dropped the first teaser for season 4 of Stranger Things on Friday, February 14, and confirmed that David Harbour‘s Hopper is alive — but definitely isn’t in a great place. The teaser, titled “From Russia with love” shows that the beloved former Hawkins police chief is now working in a very snowy Russia — and he’s shaved his head.
Season 3 ended with Joyce (Winona Ryder) saving the entire town by blowing up the entryway — which Hopper was standing in. However, in the post-credits scene that took place three months later, men in Kamchatka, Russia, were shown feeding other people to a demogorgon but one said, “Not the American,” which led fans to believe that Hopper was who they were referencing.
Since the finale, many questions have been floating around the internet: How could Hopper have survived? How was he not found after the fact? Did the Russians grab him at the final second and run? The last seems to be what happened.
“We’re excited to officially confirm that production on Stranger Things 4 is now underway — and even more excited to announce the return of Hopper,” creators Matt and Ross Duffer said in a statement on Friday. “Although it’s not all good news for our ‘American’; he is imprisoned far from home in the snowy wasteland of Kamchatka, where he will face dangers both human … and other.”
The statement also gave a hint at what’s coming for the group of our favorite kids. “Meanwhile, back in the states, a new horror is beginning to surface, something long-buried, something that connects everything,” the Duffer Brothers continued. “Season 4 is shaping up to be the biggest and most frightening season yet, and we cannot wait for everyone to see more. In the meantime, pray for the American.”
Ahead of the season 4 renewal, the creators teased a bit of what would come next — and how different it would feel since everything changed at the end of the third.
“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,” Ross told Entertainment Weekly in July. “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.”
A season 4 premiere date has not yet been announced.
