‘Stranger Things’ Bosses Talk Season 2 Plan to Explore ‘Upside Down’

The eight-episode run of Netflix’s Stranger Things let many viewers to breeze through the Stephen King-meets-Spielberg story in one weekend, still leaving open the question of a second run. Cast and crew have pointed either way, but now creators the Duffer brothers detail what Season 2 might entail, as well some major upsets of the first season.

You’re warned of full spoilers for Season 1 of Stranger Things from here on out, but where previously creators Matt and Ross Duffer pointed to a potential second season as more of a “sequel” than arbitrary continuation, Season 1 left a number of hanging plot points ready to pick up. That was no accident, as Ross Duffer tells Variety that only some of their ideas for “Upside Down” and its monster made it to the screen:

There’s a lot there we don’t know or understand. Even with the Upside Down, we have a 30-page document that is pretty intricate in terms of what it all means, and where this monster actually came from, and why aren’t there more monsters — we have all this stuff that we just didn’t have time for, or we didn’t feel like we needed to get into in season one, because of the main tension of Will. We have that whole other world that we haven’t fully explored in this season, and that was very purposeful. […]

We leave these dangling threads at the end. If people respond to this show and we get to continue this story — we had those initial discussions of where we might go with it. If there was going to be a season two, we would reveal more of that 30 page document, but we’d still want to keep it from the point of view of our original characters.

Among the ideas teased, the Duffers alluded to a bond between Chief Hopper (David Harbour) and the seemingly-disintegrated Eleven (Millie Brown), as well whatever Will (Noah Schnapp) appeared to bring back with him from a week in the other realm. One character not so lucky as to return from the other dimension’s monster, Barb (Shannon Purser), understandably weighed heavy on Matt Duffer to kill off:

With the first episode we wanted someone to die very quickly — which was the Benny character [the diner cook played by Chris Sullivan] — someone set up who looks like a substantial character and dies. And then Barb who looks like a substantial character. We wanted it to feel unsafe.

One reason we fell in love with television is we’ve seen so many movies and they tend to follow a very similar pattern. Television has been breaking narrative rules. George R.R. Martin obviously pushed that to another level [with “Game of Thrones”], you suddenly don’t feel safe and it freaks you out. Every scene has a little more tension in it.

It’s something we want to preserve as we go into season two, where you feel everyone including the kids is unsafe and anything can happen. We pushed it this season with Barb, but I want to continue to amp up that threat. It makes it scarier, but it’s also sad.

It seems likely that Netflix would move forward with a second season, if only that most every series garners an additional order, regardless of its performance, but will the mystery have worn out by Season 2? Did poor Barb get too raw a deal?

Watch the trailers below, and check out all Stranger Things streaming now.