Warning! This post contains spoilers for Stranger Things and Stranger Things 2!
Stranger Things returned to Netflix at the end of October and the new season shared a lot of the same heart and humor as the initial run. But one difference we noticed was in how showrunners the Duffer Brothers decided to wrap up the final episode this time around. In season one, loose threads dangled everywhere. What was Hopper’s secret connection to the Department of Energy? And what was the story with those slugs Will was barfing up?
Some of those questions got answered in Stranger Things 2, but others seemed to be largely discarded. In an interview with Collider, producer Shawn Levy admitted they didn’t enjoy being constrained by all those previous season cliffhangers, and it was a conscious decision to leave fewer questions unanswered between now and the inevitable Stranger Things 3.
“There were epilogue scenes that were considered for after that shot that would have hinted more at Season 3,” Levy said. “But there was a decision made by all of us where we said let’s not back in to any promises again. We always felt after Season 1 that we had to pay off that slug that Will coughs up in the sink, or whose black car Hopper was getting into, and had to — and wanted to — follow-up on Hopper putting the Eggos out in a wooden lockbox in the woods. This time the [Duffer Brothers] very consciously wanted to promise less, so that their freedom is more.”
That’s not to say there weren’t some hints as to what direction Stranger Things 3 may go or how they may get there. The final episode of Stranger Things 2 ended in the Upside Down with the mysterious Shadow Monster hovering above Hawkins Middle School, indicating it wasn’t all that interested in moving on. And while the Demodogs all died when Eleven sealed the portal between our world and the Upside Down, it’s still unclear what happened to all the undefined biological material in the tunnels under Hawkins. There was also the cloud of evil exorcised from Will with heat that flew off to parts unknown.
“We definitely see when Will is saved from those particles, that particulate, we used to call it the particulate of evil. It emerged not in the Upside Down but in our world, and maybe that’s got to be dealt with,” Levy hinted.
So there’s definitely some backdoors into the Upside Down deliberately left open for more inter-dimensional havoc in Stranger Things 3. But now the Duffer Brothers have given themselves a lot more freedom to take the story in whatever direction they want, without some of the baggage Stranger Things 2 had to deal (or not deal) with. We imagine that can only be a good thing.