Stranger Things 4’s new teaser promises ‘the best spring break ever’

Stranger Things 4 has gotten yet another mysterious teaser trailer, the latest in a series of clips promoting the upcoming fourth series of Netflix’s flagship supernatural drama.

We open with a voiceover of Eleven writing a letter to Mike, looking forward to spring break when she gets to see him again. She describes how much she likes school and has made lots of friends (even though we actually see other kids being mean to her). We then get a few quick cuts of a roller rink, Eleven watching skaters and looking upset with some creepy music playing, someone shooting through windows, Joyce looking at a creepy doll, government thugs restraining Eleven, helicopters, explosions, and a dial being turned up (but we cut away before we can see if it goes to eleven).

The new trailer, titled “Welcome to California,” is the fourth of Netflix’s teasers, which the company has been steadily counting off in its YouTube descriptions since February 2020. So far, we’ve had teaser 001 (“From Russia With Love…” promising the return of a fan-favorite character), teaser 002 (“Eleven, Are You Listening?” diving into Eleven’s dark past), and teaser 003 (“The Creel House,” revealing a creepy new location). Combined with the other three teasers, it seems clear that the new season is looking to expand its setting far beyond the town of Hawkins, Indiana in the coming season.

Today’s new trailer is listed as 004/004, which would hopefully indicate that it’ll be the final of the smaller teasers for the series that Netflix is doing ahead of a proper, full-length trailer sometime in the future. Also absent from the news today is a firm release date: so far, Netflix has just said that it’ll be releasing the series sometime in 2022.

The new announcements come as part of Netflix’s celebration of “Stranger Things Day,” which is meant to “commemorate” the in-universe date of November 6th, 1983 — the day that Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) first disappeared into the dark Upside-Down dimension in the first season of Stranger Things. (If one was feeling less charitable, one could also attribute it to a cynical and slightly desperate attempt to try and create a cash-in fan holiday for one of its most popular genre shows like May 4th’s “Star Wars Day.”)

It’s been a longer than usual wait for the fourth season after Stranger Things 3 — which was released in July 2019 — due to a months-long delay in production caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down filming on Stranger Things 4 after just two weeks in early 2020.

Stranger Things 4 is set to return in 2022.