“People say Hawkins is cursed,” Finn Wolfhard’s Mike Wheeler ponders in the latest Stranger Things trailer. “They’re not way off.” In the first full-length preview of the long-running series’ fourth and penultimate season, the crew bands together to save the hellish city from complete, monstrous ruin once more.
In the trailer, the brave high schoolers try their best to readjust to day-to-day life in the aftermath of their most tumultuous and traumatizing battle yet, one which resulted in greater loss than they had ever experienced. But the transition from encountering warfare with grotesque creatures of the Upside Down in an after-hours mall food court to heading off to third period at a high school where everyone knows, or suspects, your hand in the town’s cursed chaos is far from simple – especially when the fight isn’t over just yet.
Season 4, which will premiere on Netflix in two parts on May 27 and July 1, focuses on the fight to save Hawkins while the crew is scattered into groups – Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) with Will and Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) after being relocated to Lenore Hills, California; Jim Hopper (David Harbour) thankfully alive but imprisoned in Russia; and Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Max (Sadie Sink) heading off to the halls of high school, hell in and of themselves.
Matt and Ross Duffer, the series’ creators, revealed recently that the show’s fourth season will consist of nine episodes, racking up a runtime almost twice as long as any of the preceding installments, making room for even more chaos as they work to tie up the loose ends of Season Three while gearing up for the final Stranger Things adventure.
“A war is coming. Your friends in Hawkins are very much in the eye of a storm,” Eleven is warned in the trailer. “I don’t know how to say this other than just to say it — without you, we can’t win this war.”