Stranger Things Season 3: Episodes, Release Date, Trailer, Cast, Story, and News
Stranger Things season 3 is in the works over at Netflix. The show has become a certified pop culture phenomenon that has elevated itself and the aggregate of the streaming giant’s original content lineup into the stratosphere. Plenty of cast announcements have been made, and the new season will be here before you know it.
Stranger Things Season 3 Episodes
In what is becoming a fun little yearly tradition, Netflix has released a video containing the titles for each of Stranger Thing Season 3’s eight episodes. Take a look below.
The episode names are pretty vague towards the beginning of the season but a finale called “The Battle of Starcourt” is certainly eye-opening. Here is the full list in case you couldn’t make it through an exhausting one-minute video.
1. Suzie, Do You Copy?
2. The Mall Rats
3. The Case of the Missing Lifeguard
4. The Sauna Test
5. The Source
6. The Birthday
7. The Bite
8. The Battle of Starcourt
Stranger Things Season 3 Release Date
Despite being the seasonal hit around Halloween in season two, Stranger Things season 3 won’t return to Hawkins, Indiana until summer of 2019. “It’s a handcrafted show. The Duffer brothers and Shawn Levy have worked really hard, and they understand the stakes are high,” Netflix VP of Programming Cindy Holland said. “They want to deliver something bigger and better than what they did last year. And so they really want to take the time to get it right.”
The series has just wrapped filming…
If we assume that a show of this scale is going to take about six months of post-production, we should see the Stranger Things Season 3 Netflix premiere right around early summer.
Stranger Things Season 3 Cast
Obviously our regulars will be back, but Netflix also named some other newcomers.
Priah Ferguson, who played Lucas’ little sister Erica, is now a series regular, so she’ll show up in all eight episodes this year. Considering how much fun she was in the few minutes of screentime we got with her in season two, this can only be a good thing.
Stranger Things season 3 will present another important archetype of ’80s filmdom: the popular teenage lifeguard.
Francesca Reale (best known for starring in Netflix’s Haters Back Off) is joining the cast in a recurring role as Hawkins Community Pool lifeguard Heather. Heather will become a centerpiece of season three’s mystery, according to a Deadline report.
Cary Elwes will play Mayor Kline. The character is described as “handsome, slick, and sleazy, your classic ’80s politician — more concerned with his own image than with the people of the small town he governs.” However, it was not specified if Kline presides over the show’s town setting of Hawkins, Indiana.
Elwes’s casting is another coup of a setting-appropriate former ‘80s star, since he is best known from his role as handsome hero Westley in the 1987 film classic, The Princess Bride, along with subsequent movie roles in Glory, Days of Thunder, Hot Shots!, Francis Ford Coppola-directed Bram Stoker’s Dracula and as the titular star of Mel Brooks comedy Robin Hood: Men in Tights, with later roles in Kiss the Girls, the original Saw, and a recurring TV role on The X-Files. His most recent work includes TV runs on Youth & Consequences and Life in Pieces and horror film Don’t Sleep.
Jake Busey has been cast for the role of Bruce. The character seems to be right up the actor’s alley, described as “a journalist for the The Hawkins Post with questionable morals and a sick sense of humor.”
Jake, the second-generation actor son of Gary Busey, has been acting since childhood, first appearing in the 1978 crime drama, Straight Time, in which his father co-starred with Dustin Hoffman. After grown roles in 1990s films PCU, S.F.W., Twister, (Peter Jackson’s) The Frighteners and Contact, the junior Busey’s acting career took off into space, literally, as part of the ensemble of Starship Troopers, and has since been a steady player in film and television. His most recent roles include TV runs on Agents of SHIELD, Ray Donovan, Freakish and From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series. Amongst the upcoming film roles he has banked is a part in the upcoming sci-fi/action franchise revival, The Predator, in which he will, in poetic fashion, play the son of his father’s Predator 2 character government agent Peter Keyes.
Maya Thurman-Hawke will play “an ‘alternative girl’ bored with her mundane day job. She seeks excitement in her life and gets more than she bargained for when she uncovers a dark secret in Hawkins” (description via Variety).
Stranger Things Season 3 Episodes
One thing we do know is that when we get Stranger Things Season 3, there will be a little less of it than we got before, according to TV Line. The third season will consist of 8 episodes, rather than 9 (which is what we got in season 2). That is, however, the same episode count as season one. In some ways, it’s rather refreshing that Stranger Things Season 3 won’t fall prey to the inflated episode counts we see on some streaming series.
Stranger Things Season 3 Trailer
Stranger Things Season 3 has released its first teaser of sorts.
Continuing the show’s tour de force of 80s tropes, the teaser takes shape as an era-appropriate style local commercial for a new destination of commerce in the supernatural-stricken Hawkins, the Starcourt Mall.
Those who are patient enough to sit through this quaint montage about a now-Amazon-ravaged brick-and-mortar retail institution will be treated to an update on the man, the myth, the legend that is Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), who seems to have parlayed his role in saving the town from Upside Down invaders into a career at ice cream parlor Scoops Ahoy, joined there by a co-worker in the new character, Robin (Maya Hawke).
Filming has been underway, and Netflix recently released a start of production teaser trailer…
Stranger Things Season 3 Story
“We’re thinking it will be a four-season thing and then out,” Ross Duffer told New York Magazine a while back. “We just have to keep adjusting the story,” said Matt. “Though I don’t know if we can justify something bad happening to them once a year.”
It’s true, after three straight years of monsters invading the town of Hawkins, Indiana, it might be time for the characters to pitch their tents elsewhere. “They’re going to have to get the fuck out of this town!” said Ross. “It’s ridiculous!”
Expect a time jump, though. Instead of moving from season 2’s 1983 to 1984, Stranger Things season 3 will take place in 1985. “We can only write and produce the show so fast,” Matt Duffer told THR. “They’re going to be almost a year older by the time we start shooting season three. It provides certain challenges. You can’t start right after season two ended. It forces you to do a time jump. But what I like is that it makes you evolve the show. It forces the show to evolve and change, because the kids are changing.”
Star Noah Schnapp told Variety that viewers can expect Stranger Things season 3 to blend some of the more successful elements of the previous two seasons. “Season one, I feel like, was more playful,” Schnapp said. “Season two was a lot darker. And then season three does really well blending them together, and that’s what I love about it.”
We wrote more about what we expect from the Stranger Things season 3 story right here.
Michael Ahr is a writer, reviewer, and podcaster here at Den of Geek; you can check out his work here or follow him on Twitter. Joseph Baxter is a contributor for Den of Geek and Syfy Wire. You can find his work here. Follow him on Twitter @josbaxter.
