Netflix drops Stranger Things 4 teaser trailer

Netflix just made your Friday. They dropped a Stranger Things 4 teaser trailer that answers a major question from the season 3 finale. We’ve got details!

Wow. How many of us were just scrolling through Instagram this morning when we ran across David Harbour’s video? It’s captioned “For the faithful, Happy Valentine’s Day.” It’s clearly a trailer. The camera is swooping in from high above an overcast sky down towards a desolate forest. Based solely on my movie and TV knowledge, the Russian chanting we hear sounds like it’s Soviet Union era. Sure, Harbour is about to co-star in Black Widow as the Russian father of Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson). But this video had the Netflix logo in the corner and immediately made me think this was a Stranger Things 4 teaser.

As the camera continued its dive into the scenery, it swooped in on a bunch of prisoners hard at work. They’re hammering away at a railroad track. We clearly see a Soviet soldier stop in the middle of the screen before we start gliding through the prisoners. One guy starts to walk towards the camera. Is that who I think it is? No. Just some dude. Instead, we stop and make a sharp turn towards another prisoner who needs a breather.

He takes off his hat in the cold and there he is: Jim Hopper. His head is shaved. His beard is gone. He looks around him. Is this what life is? Damn, Jim. Just when you start to feel sorry for him, there’s an almost subliminal flash of the title card Stranger Things 4. And then we hear the purr of a demogorgon. Or was that a demodog? Or was that whatever the human looking demogorgon from season 3 sounds like?

So. Yeah. The Duffer Brothers are wasting zero time confirming what a lot of us speculated after the post credit scene at the end of “The Battle of Starcourt.” Hopper is alive. That question won’t hang overall discussion and cast interviews leading up to the premiere. We can only hope that Hopper isn’t used as a MacGuffin for the entire season.

I was not a fan of the way his character development was retconned in season 3. It was done for the plot. Like: “Hey! Let’s show Hopper slowly overcome his immature and reckless tendencies so that when we kill him off, it hurts more!” Except the first two seasons of Stranger Things had already done that incredibly well with a lot of emotional payoff. And I felt that getting a season of loving, adult Hopper would have made both the character and the audience more invested in the plot. Plus, they didn’t really kill him off. I liked Stranger Things 3, but it had issues.

You can watch the spoilerific Stranger Things 4 teaser trailer here. We started getting teasers for Stranger Things 3 months before the full trailer, which was released near midnight on December 31, 2018. The season hit Netflix on July 4, 2019. Should we expect Stranger Things 4 this year? I hope so. It’s looking like late Summer to early Fall. That would be similar to the release dates for the first two seasons. Or, should we take the snowy teaser to hint at a Winter release date? Only time will tell. For now, we know Stranger Things 4 is in the works. I can’t wait.

What did you think of the first Stranger Things 4 teaser trailer? Are you surprised that they spoiled Harbour’s fate so quickly? Let’s discuss in the comments!