Stranger Things finally debuted a brand new batch of episodes on Netflix in 2017, and fans got to see a Season 2 that upped the ante on just about everything from Season 1. We saw a brand new side of Hopper as he juggled the Upside Down creeping into Hawkins, the regular duties of law enforcement, and raising a temperamental telekinetic teenage girl on the sly. David Harbour will be back to play Hopper once more in Season 3, and he has already revealed some of what he would like to see happen in the new season:
I would love to see a Hopper and Steve get-together, but I seriously doubt that's going to happen. I'd love to work with Gaten. I want to get into the backstory of Hopper more. When Eleven goes into the basement, she sees a bunch of boxes, one of which says 'Hawkins Lab.' "Dad.' 'Vietnam.' 'New York.' There's a lot of story we can get into around Hopper's time as a cop in New York, Hopper's time in Vietnam. I would love to see more of that, but we have a ton of great characters, so I don't know how much they'll be able to do.
Well, if you ask me, David Harbour is a vertiable good idea machine! He doesn't seem to think that there's any way for Hopper and Steve to join forces, but we may not want to rule anything out. After all, Stranger Things somehow made it work that Steve would team up with Dustin and the rest of the kids in Season 2; who's to say that there's not a way Steve could join Hopper in Season 4. Maybe Steve could land a job with the Hawkins Police Department. He wasn't exactly set on a career path in Season 2, and Steve the cop alongside Chief Hopper would be worth some laughs.
It's a bit harder to imagine a story that would team David Harbour up with Gaten Matarazzo. In their few shared scenes in Season 2, Hopper was more annoyed by Dustin than anything else, especially when Dustin was trying to make his Dungeons and Dragons analogy with regard to the Shadow Monster. Still, anything is possible.
David Harbour's pitch to Variety about Stranger Things exploring Hopper's past in Season 3 seem the most likely to actually happen. Season 2 dropped those hints about Hopper's life before the beginning of the series with the boxes under the floor in the cabin. Eleven only dug into the box about Hawkins Lab and the experiments that resulted in her powers and those of other kids. Harbour has already teased that the show will probably delve more into what happened to Sara (and the potential connection to Hawkins Lab), although we might not want to count on any more details from him for a while, as he has been cut off from spoilers.
Unfortunately, we may have quite a while to wait before we find out more about Hopper or see any of the plots for Season 3. No premiere date has yet been announced for the next batch of episodes, but the odds are pretty good that we'll be waiting until 2019. The hiatus between the first season and the second lasted for more than 15 months. Given that Season 2 premiered on Netflix at the end of October 2017, we may be waiting until early 2019 for Season 3. Only time will tell. David Harbour is currently in the running for a Golden Globe for his performance as Hopper, and we're really hoping he wins for one big reason.
You can catch the first two seasons of Stranger Things streaming on Netflix now. Our 2018 Netflix premiere guide can clue you into when your non-Stranger Things streaming series will become available, and our 2018 midseason TV premiere schedule can help you plan your viewing schedule for the new year. Don't forget to swing by our rundown of 2017 TV cancellations to discover the series that were less phenomenally popular than Stranger Things.
