So does that mean Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, is still alive and set to return, as was suggested by Hopper’s (David Harbour) offering of Eggos frozen waffles left out in the wilderness in the finale?
‘We don’t know about Eleven,’ Ross Duffer admits. ‘We leave that up in the air.’
What we do know is that the creepy Upside Down world will be explored in far more detail next time around.
‘We kinda just peeled back the curtain and revealed a tiny by of the Upside Down,’ Matt Duffer previews. ‘So we definitely want to explore a little bit more. There’s a lot we don’t know about the Upside Down at the end of season one.’
With season two featuring an additional ninth episode, Matt reveals it was a conscious decision not to diverge too far from the original format.
‘We’re letting the story dictate it. I think if it gets any longer, it gets inwieldy for us,’ he explains. ‘We want to make sure it’s manageable and we want to be able to tell a movie-like story where it’s never treading water. We want it to have the same feel and pacing as season one. I think if we extend it too much, it will have a very different feel.’
Ross also explains that while they considered jumping forward in time, they ultimately decided against it as they all felt there was more story to be told in the ’80s.
‘We talked like a larger time jump where the kids are older now and it’s a different decade. That’s something we batted around from the very beginning,’ he says. ‘But for us, there’s still more story here, there’s still things that are unresolved.’