Spoilers ahead for Stranger Things 3

The third season of Netflix's Stranger Things brought back a few familiar monstrous faces, as the Upside-Down's resident boogeyman the Mind-Flayer returned yet again to possess the residents of Hawkins, Indiana. The show remains a delight—Collider's Adam Chitwood called this the best season yet—but after three years all these strange things don't seem to be getting that much stranger.

That could change with a hypothetical fourth season, say showrunners Ross and Matt Duffer. Speaking to EW, the series creators noted that they plan the broad strokes of each chapter well in advance, and the plans they're currently cooking up feel "very different" than season 3.

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Image via Netflix

“We don’t want to write ourselves in a corner so we try to have these early discussions with the writers just to make sure that we’re setting ourselves up to go in the right direction,” says Ross Duffer. “We don’t know a lot, but we do know a lot of the big broad strokes. At the end of season two, we knew about Billy. We knew that the Russians were going to come in. We didn’t know the mall and stuff, but again, we know these big broad strokes. That’s sort of where we are in season four. We have the big broad strokes. It’s just now about filling in those lines in the details. We’re pretty excited about where it’s potentially going to go. Again, like we said, it’s going to feel very different than this season. But I think that’s the right thing to do and I think it’ll be exciting.”

Matt Duffer added that a fourth season would "open up a little bit", not just in terms of the largescale special effects and set pieces, but also "allowing portals into areas outside of Hawkins."

A figure of speech or actual sci-fi-ass portals? Hard to say. Also, technically, hard to say whether this plan will ever come to fruition, as Netflix hasn't officially greenlit a fourth season of Stranger Things quite yet. The numbers the streaming service have touted for Stranger Things 3 are astronomical, but Netflix's top-secret numbers need to be taken with several grains of salt; they'll never tell you when a show flops, but they'll let you know when a show was streamed into eleventy-trillion households plus a couple on the moon.

Should Stranger Things return—and, I mean, come on—executive producer and frequent director Shawn Levy confirmed that they'll face all the hanging threads left by season 3 dead on. This includes the apparent death of David Harbour's Sheriff Jim Hopper and the mid-credits scene set in a Russian military base, where an "American" is being kept prisoner and the military is feeding inmates to a Demogorgon.

“Certainly season three ends with several plot strands that are separate from each other,” Levy said. “And should there be a season 4, I think we’ll see them all explored.”

For more on all things Stranger Things, check out the links below:

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Image via Netflix
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Image via Netflix
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Image via Netflix