Everyone who’s caught up with season 3 of Stranger Things is probably still scratching their heads over where the story will go next. And the season 4 teaser that showed Jim Hopper being forced to work on railroad tracks in Russia only raised more questions than it answered. But that doesn’t mean the Duffer Brothers are winging it. In fact, they’ve already envisioned how the story will progress, and also how it will end.
In a recent interview with Deadline, Matt and Ross Duffer revealed that each season is designed to unravel a small segment of the mythology that they’ve created for the world of the show. They mean that in the literal sense, too, having created a small booklet of lore which has only been seen by a few people.
“We like to look at each season as kind of its own complete story. We do have a pretty large mythology,” Matt said. “I think when we were developing Season 1 — and to Netflix’s credit, they sort of pressured us to make sure we had this mythology really hammered out — we had like a 25-page sort of Stranger Things mythology that only maybe a small handful of people have seen. So season by season, we’re kind of turning the page and revealing a little bit more and more.”
With each season being treated as a self-contained story, the show is still moving toward a specific conclusion. The duo even said that they’ve known how the series will end for a while now.
“We do have a general sense of where we’re going,” Matt said in the interview. “We’ve known the ending of the show for quite a while.” This could mean that the finale of the show isn’t far away, which is rather heartbreaking – but it sure is better to quit while you’re ahead.
The Stranger Things writers Twitter account – yes, that’s a thing – recently teased season 4 with a shot of a complete stack of episode scripts. There were no obvious secrets to glean from the image due to the angle of the picture, but that doesn’t mean fans aren’t already coming up with their theories. Including one that suggests Hopper is a clone.
In any case, it may be a while before we learn more, as production of the fourth season of the Netflix show has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. After the intense, action-heavy finale of the last outing though, we’re being promised that an even scarier season of Stranger Things is set to follow and we can’t wait to see what’s in store.