#’Stranger Things’ Season 4 Will Explore Hopper’s Backstory & ‘Darker’ Side

Like other TV shows, Stranger Things had to hit the pause button on production for its upcoming fourth season due to the pandemic. However, fans don’t have to wait for a few teases about what to expect beyond confirmation that David Harbour’s Hopper is alive.

Speaking of his presumed death at the end of Season 3 — he sacrificed himself while closing the door to the Upside Down — Harbour thought it capped off “a beautiful arc,” he told Deadline. “From the very beginning, I’ve had this idea of Hopper being a guy who has to die, who has to pay for” how he is when we meet him at the beginning of the series. (His daughter’s death, from cancer, changed him.)

“I thought they crafted something really beautiful where, in a sense, he does sacrifice himself and as we’ve seen from the teaser in Season 4, he’s resurrected,” the actor continued.

As that teaser confirmed, Hopper is “the American” mentioned at the very end of the Season 3 finale in a Russian prison. And he’s being forced to work on a railroad. Harbour described Season 4 as “very epic and very big in a Stranger Things way,” promising “monsters,” “scares,” and “Indiana Jones-type action.” Furthermore, it will delve into his character’s “really deep backstory,” which was previously “hinted at with the [‘Dad,’ ‘Vietnam,’ and ‘New York’] boxes [in the attic] in Season 2,” he teased.

While each season offers a look at a different side of Hopper, in the next one, “he’s painted in a bit of a darker palette and he’s able to express some of these really deep things which we haven’t really known yet,” Harbour shared.

Fans can also expect something new from Season 4 from the previous ones because that’s what they aim to do, showrunner and director Ross Duffer said. “We like to treat each season as its own movie, and so a lot of the discussion goes into what is the tone of the season going to be and how do we do something different,” he explained. “We don’t want to just repeat ourselves.”

Stranger Things, created by Matt and Ross Duffer, had already started production on its fourth season when everything shut down, and they’d filmed a couple weeks in Lithuania (the site of the teaser) and were up and running in Atlanta.

Stranger Things, Season 4, TBA, Netflix