Today, Netflix made it official. Stranger Things will return for season two, continuing the stories of Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas, and their adult counterparts. Now, the show’s creators, the Duffer Brothers, have revealed a few additional details about the second season.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly after the announcement, Ross and Matt Duffer explained that though the old characters will return and be the focus, new ones will be added, new towns may be explored and the genius sequels of the 1980s will be a big influence.
To start, season two will have four new major characters in addition to everyone else returning. One character they wouldn’t talk about, however, is Eleven. You have to imagine, after seeing the season one finale, that she’d be back in some way, but the Duffers wouldn’t spill. “We don’t know about Eleven,” says Ross Duffer. “We leave that up in the air.” (Probably because it’s a reveal and they don’t want to spoil it. I’d bet anything she’ll be back.)
The entirety of season one took place in Hawkins, Indiana but that won’t be the case for season two. “We will venture a little bit outside of Hawkins,” says Matt Duffer.“I will say the opening scene [of the premiere] does not take place in Hawkins.”
One setting that will return and play a major role, though, is the Upside Down. Said the Duffers:
We kinda just peeled back the curtain and revealed a tiny bit of the Upside Down. So we definitely want to explore a little bit more.
There’s a lot we don’t know about the Upside Down at the end of season 1. We obviously have this gate to another dimension, which is still very much open in the town of Hawkins. And a lot of questions there in terms of, if the Monster is dead, was it a singular monster? What else could be out there? We really don’t go in there much until they go in to find Will at the end. So we’ve opened up this doorway, and to us it’s exciting to talk about, like, what else is behind there? There’s a lot more mystery there to be solved.
Finally, the Duffers cited sequels like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Aliens, and Terminator 2 as influences on the second season. And there’s no coincidence James Cameron directed two of those films.
“I think one of the reasons his sequels are as successful as they are is he makes them feel very different without losing what we loved about the original,” said Matt Duffer. “So I think we kinda looked to him and what he does and tried to capture a little bit of the magic of his work.”
UPDATE 1:30 pm EST: Current cast member David Harbor revealed on Twitter that one of those new characters will be played by none other than Patton Oswalt, who will have his own dedicated episode called “The Pollywog.”
UPDATE 2 pm EST: We’ve been trolled. Oswalt posted on Twitter than he and Harbor were just messing around and he is not on the show.
Stranger Things season two will return in 2017. Here’s the teaser, which reveals the episode titles of all nine episodes. Yes, season two will also be an episode longer than season one.