Stranger Things producer Shawn Levy has promised more darkness and action the next time we return to Hawkins.
In an interview with ET Canada, one of the creative minds of the runaway hit addressed rumors of a more lighthearted season 3 before noting that while the good times will be good, they’ll still be tinged with some of the darkest material the show has yet to offer.
“There’s more comedy in Season 3 but make no mistake: Season 3 is probably the darkest and most action-packed season yet. That balance of the light and the darkness; that’s always been kind of at the heart of what we do in Stranger Things…”
We probably don’t need to tell you how exciting this is to hear. The second season of Stranger Things was very good and thoroughly entertaining, don’t get us wrong, but some were left disappointed as it played out like a standard second arc of any team-based comic book you’ve ever read.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. After the team overcomes their first major obstacle and solidifies their interpersonal dynamics, challenging circumstances force them to split up, deal with more introspective conflicts and traverse conveniently placed world-building avenues to ultimately defeat a villain clearly positioned to herald a more grave, ominously looming threat. And then there was that episode that had Eleven going to Chicago and meeting that weird, punk rock gang. Honestly, I expected more.
Season 2, again, was fun and enjoyable, but the thrill of the show was watching the whole gang bounce off of one another and it took a wrong turn when it split up the group for the sake of world-building. Levy’s comments here seem to be implying that season 3 will be more focused on challenging the group as a unit, which hopefully means they’ll be able to recapture that same magic we saw during the first run of Stranger Things.