Netflix wants to remind us that it’s working on a fourth season of its hit supernatural horror series Stranger Things, and released an all-too-brief teaser for the upcoming season featuring our favorite numerological character, Eleven.
The teaser looks as though it’s taking us back to the research facility at Hawkins where Eleven grew up as a ward of the US Government, and we see a couple of shots of children in a very sterile, 1980s facility. The tracking shot moves down a hallway past several doorways marked with numbers—8, 9, and 10—before arriving at door #11. We get a quick glimpse of Eleven staring into the camera, as someone asks if she’s listening.
That’s it, that’s the teaser.
Undoubtedly, the internet will spend the next couple of days scrutinizing every shot, trying to decipher the meaning. Will some of Eleven’s fellow captives will be part of the next season? Maybe we’ll be flashing back to her time as a captive? Will that upbringing come back to haunt her? Who can say? Clearly, not Netflix, which didn’t provide even a release date for the season.
That’s not a huge surprise: The series is already enormously popular and can get away with teasing its audience like this. And season four has been long-delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic—production started last year, only to be shut down halfway through.
This isn’t the first teaser that we’ve gotten, either: The last one came just before the pandemic in February 2020, which revealed that Sheriff Jim Hopper somehow survived the finale of Season three, and had ended up somewhere in Russia as a prisoner. We also know that we’ll get eight episodes, and that the show’s production was supposed to run from January to August last year, but ended up going back into production back in October 2020.
