After nearly three years, Stranger Things is finally returning for its fourth season next week. The new season is expected to have some extra long episodes and will be split into two parts before the upcoming fifth season, which will mark the show’s last. The show’s creators have previously teased that the final season is already outlined, and one of the show’s stars already knows how it ends. David Harbour, who plays Chief Jim Hopper on the Netflix series, recently spoke to Variety and teased what’s to come in the show’s final season.
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“I think it varies from person to person, from character to character, and I’m such a harassment specialist that I think I’ve gotten it out of them. It’s been back and forth about like, ‘What happens to Hopper? Is he a character that’s able to survive Hawkins or does he die?’” Harbour shared. “I know what happens and it’s quite moving and quite beautiful.”
Harbour added, “I think that I needed to know as we were shooting early on because I needed to know where he ends up and for what reason he ends up there. I think there is going to be somewhat of a morality – or at least responsible storytelling – to what the Duffers are doing … There’s a reason in Season 2 why Bob [Sean Astin] dies. He’s too innocent. You can’t go up to that monster and say, like, ‘Get away from me, get away!’ You just can’t be that person in this world. That person dies. So I think there’s a responsibility in terms of how Hopper ends up that I’m eager for people to see, and I had to know that going in so I knew where to arc it.”
At the end of the show’s third season, it was thought that Hopper had died by disintegration, but a promo released in February of 2020 revealed he survived his apparent death and is now the American imprisoned in the snowy wasteland of Kamchatka, Russia. Six months after the Battle of Starcourt, Hopper will work through past traumas as he attempts to survive his harsh new reality, while Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and journalist-turned-conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman) go on an Indiana Jones-style adventure to spring Hopper from the Russian prison.
“Hopper has the Indiana Jones quality to a lot of what he does, but he is at his lowest point in Russia,” Harbour told IGN. “It is sort of the Dark Night of the Soul where he needs to go through this really dark passage to get out to the other side. So yeah, it’s some of the most brutal things he’s ever been through, physically, and also mentally.”
Stranger Things 4 Volume 1 premieres May 27th and Volume 2 premieres July 1st on Netflix.
