Waiting patiently for the next season of Netflix’s cult hit Stranger Things was never going to be anything other than desperately feeding off every scrap of information drip fed to us or clues left carelessly behind for us to find. We have no shame, and that’s OK. It’s a good show.
So that brings us to what looks like a slip-up on the part of some one or some ones involved with the show, which reveals something about what to expect next season.
Are the Russians coming to Hawkins Indiana?
Last month, a Reddit post highlighted that IMDb listed several Stranger Things season three cast members as ‘Russian Guard, Russian Soldier’ etc.
It didn’t take long for all those ‘Russian’ descriptors to be deleted from IMDb. although the Inverse spotted one left behind – Ryan Mari is listed on the show as a stunt performer playing a Russian Guard.
Now, seeing as editing IMDb is open to anyone (like Wikipedia), there’s obviously a chance that this is a red herring put in place by some oddly subtle randoms. But it’s actually not uncommon for this kind of accidental IMDb spoiler to go live when people with minor roles update their own IMDb page.
So my money is on Russians making an appearance next season.
Of course, now the theories are running rampant. Will next season’s antagonists be Soviet Russia? Slashfilm pointed out that that plotline would fit in with the shows aptitude for 80’s movie references, specifically echoing a trashy 1984 film Red Dawn in which Russians invade a small American town, forcing a crew of teens to fight back.
If the Russians do make an appearance, you can be pretty sure that they would only be the human element to the plot’s antagonist. Just like season one’s Demogorgon and season two’s Mind Flayer, we can expect there’s a scifi villain on the cards for next season.
Until we are blessed with new Stranger Things episodes, we’ll just have to take these scraps as they come and distract ourselves with the activity of rogue detective work.