A brief teaser for the fourth season of Netflix's Stranger Things reveals a piece of crucial information: Hopper is alive! Beginning with an overview shot that brings us to a snow-capped Soviet gulag, it then transitions to a series of shots that show people slaving away on a railroad. At the teaser’s end, we see one of the workers take off their hat, and it is indeed Jim Hopper (and a rather bald one at that), the former chief of police from Hawkins, Indiana, and arguably the most recognizable adult character on the show.

Season 3 ended with Hopper’s fate being fairly ambiguous, but it left viewers thinking that he might very well have died beneath the Starcourt Mall, as he was caught in an explosion caused by the device used to open the portal to The Upside Down. Still, those that watched the final episode’s post-credits scene could certainly put stock in the idea that this might not be the case. In this scene, we’re brought to a wintery base in Kamchatka, Russia, where we see a group of guards carrying a prisoner, and marching him down a hallway of cells. A piece of dialogue from this scene was of particular interest to Stranger Things fans: “No, not the American.”

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It didn’t take long for fans to speculate that the American these Soviet troops were referring to was Hopper. Being one of the series' most popular characters, it didn’t seem likely that the showrunners would kill him off, and the fact that none of us saw a corpse made the idea of his survival seem even more likely. It’s just a question now of how Hopper avoided death, and furthermore, how the heck is he in Russia?

The most likely answer involves The Upside Down. In Strangers Things logic, it certainly makes sense that Hopper was transported to the Upside Down by the blast, which then, even more likely, brought him into the clutches of the Russians. We already know that the Russians were attempting to open a portal to The Upside Down on American soil because they couldn’t do it for some reason in their own country, but they still may possess the technology to do so in one of their bases. Perhaps their experiments in America gave The Upside Down an extra push, and Hopper found how to locate/create a wormhole that plopped him right into a Soviet gulag.

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This theory is also strengthened by the post-credits scene from last season. In the closing moments of that scene, we see the guards bring their prisoner to a cell that is occupied by a Demodog, the penultimate stage of the Demogorgon. If Hopper did indeed transport to Russia through the Upside Down, it would make sense that he may have brought some of that dimension’s denizens with him. Given the Soviets’ failure to open into the Upside Down in their country beforehand, we can deduce that this wasn’t from an earlier effort.

Another theory, that found its way on Reddit from an enigmatic source, claims that this season will feature a new character, that actually acted as Hopper’s savior. The post says that the new character is a 10-year-old Russian boy named "B," that will have similar abilities to 11. This post also says that B will help open a portal to The Upside Down in Russia, bringing Hopper along with him.

Of course, The Upside Down isn’t the only possible scenario for Hopper’s survival. It's also been pointed out that there were several shots in Episode 8 of last season that showed a ladder off the gantry that Hopper was standing on. Given the destructive aftereffects of opening a portal to The Upside Down, it makes sense that the Russians would have designed for there to be a safety zone in the Gate Room. In that case, maybe the explosion actually blasted Hopper to safety, and then Soviet officers recovered him (and the Demodog?) in the aftermath. Seeing that Hopper was wearing a Russian uniform the whole time, it would make sense that he was mistaken for one of their own, and then realized his true nationality after they had already brought him to Russia.

Whatever the case, Netflix is clearly hoping that Hopper’s return will be a huge catalyst for this season’s success -- why else would it reveal his survival so early in the marketing campaign? The show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, have even said on Netflix's Behind The Scenes: Stranger Things 3 podcast they had been building the story up for Hopper to eventually give viewers a heartbreaking sacrifice along the same lines of Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back. Solo successfully came back for the original Star Wars trilogy's final installment, so if the parallel holds true, we can expect Hopper to do something worthy of the Millennium Falcon for Stranger Things’ next season.

Created by the Duffer Brothers, Stranger Things stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Priah Ferguson, Cary Elwes, Jake Busey and Maya Thurman-Hawke.

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