Paul Reiser Can’t Confirm if He’s Returning for Stranger Things: “There’s Somebody Watching Us at All Times”

Paul Reiser is no stranger to science fiction. The actor played Carter Burke in Aliens back in 1986, and currently plays Dr. Sam Owens on Stranger Things. Now, he’s returning to the world of Alien with the new comic, Aliens: What If…? Reiser and his son Leon recently teamed with Adam F. Goldberg (The Goldbergs), Brian Volk-Weiss (The Toys That Made Us), and Hans Rodionoff (Marvel’s Damage Control) to write a five-issue Aliens limited series similar to Marvel’s What If…? stories. “What If… Carter Burke Had Lived?” imagines a version of James Cameron’s Aliens if Reiser’s character survived the Xenomorph invasion of LV-426. The issue was released today, so ComicBook.com spoke with Reiser about his involvement with the comic and his history with the beloved franchise. During the chat, we also asked Reiser about the upcoming fifth and final season of Stranger Things.

“No, I cannot,” Reiser replied when we jokingly asked who dies in the final season of Stranger Things. “I cannot because I don’t know. You’ve got to watch,” he added when asked if he’s in the upcoming season. “If I tell you, a bullet… You see a little red light on me here? There’s somebody watching us at all times.” 

Paul Reiser Talks Aliens: What If…?

“For years, people have asked me about Burke, what it was like to play such a ‘bad guy,’ to which my response was always ‘You say ‘bad,’ I say ‘misunderstood,’” Reiser said in a statement when the new comic was announced. “Now the world will find out!”

“We don’t shoot a scene knowing it’s going to cut, so he ‘died,’” Reiser said in an interview for Aliens: What If…?. “But then when Cameron didn’t include the scene, I went, well, maybe I didn’t die. And because the fact of that world is Xenomorphs don’t kill you, they just cocoon so they can replicate inside you – which by the way, you’ll probably die from – but that’s not the goal. So Ripley was chasing Newt to go and… She’s still alive. They don’t kill you, they just cocoon you. So if the kid could be alive, it’s very plausible that Burke could be alive.”

How Will Stranger Things End?

“I’m gonna just make a bold statement,” David Harbour told ComicBook.com last year. “Each year, it feels like the show’s getting bigger and bigger and more exciting. And we have a real responsibility to knock it out of the park in the final season. So if we don’t, give me all of your fan rage. Write the petitions. Go ahead, do it. Because I’m going down there next week to start and I’m going to pour my whole heart into this thing. I’ve read some of the scripts and in my mind, they’re stunningly beautiful. It’s time. We’re going to knock it out of the park. We’re going to deliver you the finale that you need, that you want, that I want.”

Stranger Things creators, Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer, recently revealed that their pitch for the fifth season was a tear-jerker. 

“Listen. It’s our process but it’s just like, we really just try to focus on one season at a time,” Ross Duffer previously told The Wrap. “We do have an outline for season 5 and we pitched it to Netflix and they really responded well to it. I mean, it was hard. It’s the end of the story. I saw executives crying who I’ve never seen cry before and it was wild. And it’s not just to do with the story, just the fact that it’s like, Oh my God, this thing that has defined so many of our lives, these Netflix people who has been with us from the beginning, seven years now, and it’s hard to imagine the journey coming to an end.”

Stranger Things is expected to return for its final season next year. Aliens: What If…? is now out.