The anticipated third season of Netflix’s smash hit Stranger Things is “definitely going to get darker still, places that I think audiences are going to really love,” executive producer and director Shawn Levy said Thursday after the series received 12 Emmy nominations. “It’s got so much heart and humor.”
Deadline reports more quotes from the series writer.
Describing Season 1 as “very Stephen King-y” while Season 2 was “more Spielberg-y,” Harbour added: “We’re experimenting a lot this season, and we’re taking risks, and I hope that they pay off but they are risks. We’re going into territories we’ve never been to before, and it’s exciting.”
Season 3 will also see Harbour combine versions of his character Jim Hopper that we saw in the first and second seasons.
“We had a little softer season with Jim in Season 2,” he said, “where he was really working off these fatherly instincts and understanding a responsibility that was larger than himself, and I think one of the things that we missed from Season 1 was this guy who goes into government facilities and punches people in the face. He’s not a doofus, but he’s a bit of a Columbo character.”
He said the third season will see a combination of the more daring Hopper, along with the softer, more fatherly version. “There was a sort of swashbuckling guy that we put on the back burner,” he said, “so I think we’ll see a little more of the swashbuckling Hopper you may have liked from Season 1. It’s almost like [Season] 1 plus two, equals three. It’s like you have this third character now, who goes back to the swashbuckling guy of Season 1, but also has behind him this adopted daughter who he loves very much, so it’s really cool.”
Hopefully this evolution of Jim will provide a much-needed break from the “Will and the Gang” plotline that was the weakest point of the show in Season Two. Remember, Will wasn’t present in Season One. That was the strength of the plotline. Everyone was running wild looking for him. But when Season Two dropped, it seemed to forget that what viewers had invested in Will was the fact that he was missing- not the fact that he was this weird thread tying our world to the Upside Down. This clumsy writing error plus sidetracked characters (like when Mikey was EVERYWHERE for no reason and everyone did that hunched over scrunched face thing and called it acting) made for a very odd narrative. Stranger Things might still have a shot at redemption by shifting the focus and raising the stakes.
What did you think about Stranger Things seasons one and two? Will you tune in for season three? Or are the 80s and Steve’s awesome hair dead for you? Tell Nerdbot about it in the comments and get the conversation going!
