The ever-growing Stranger Things “expanded universe” has revealed a score of superpowered test subjects, ranging from Three to Nine – and, now, they just might cross over from the Netflix show’s backstory to the narrative foreground in season 4. This is thanks to the just-begun comic book miniseries Into the Fire, which takes all of the various characters out of the 1970s and places them in the beginning of '85, just months before Stranger Things 3 takes place. By catching all of the Hawkins National Laboratory kids up to the present-day of the television series’s storyline, it’s only the next logical step for them to make their debut on the small screen in Stranger Things 4.
This kind of trans-media transition already has some precedent. Two novels were released before Stranger Things season 3 hit the streaming service in July 2019, and they highlighted two characters who had key climaxes in the season 3 finale: Police Chief Jim Hopper, who is believed by the characters (if not the audience) to be dead, and Max Mayfield, whose antagonistic step-brother, Billy, demonstrates that he still has a modicum of decency and self-sacrifice within him. While it’s technically true that the books Darkness on the Edge of Town and Runaway Max feature protagonists who were originally introduced on the show proper, the exploration of their backstories and inner emotional lives made their roles in Stranger Things season 3 even better – proving that a type of multimedia strategy is already in play.
How, exactly, would this work in Stranger Things season 4? The TV series itself already has a growing accumulation of storylines that will need some type of resolution or revisiting before the show comes to an end, whether that be after four years or five – Dr. Martin Brenner and Jim Hopper both still being alive, Eleven’s powers being lost, the Mind Flayer still remaining active, and test subject Eight still being at large with her Chicago crew. Picking up a story thread from the Expanded Universe would just be another arrow in the narrative quiver, and Kali Prasad would prove to be the natural link; with numbers Three and Nine-Point-Five already safely escaped from Brennan’s Project Indigo before Stranger Things starts up, they go on the hunt for Eight (and her hangers-on) in Into the Fire, finding her continuing her murder spree three months before season 3 takes place. She, in turn, reveals that Nine, who had been presumed dead for the past seven years, is still alive, and the three ex-Hawkins “siblings” set out to save her.
That Kali has made contact with Ricky and Marcy – and just might with Jamie as well – is hugely important, as they could be assimilated into her Chicago posse, and thus arrive on TV screens when Eleven, Mike Wheeler, and the rest of the Hawkins group finally catches up with them all. Now that the Soviet Union has been revealed to be another major player in the plot to potentially weaponize the Upside Down and its various lethal inhabitants – and now that there’s the potential that Brenner is collaborating with them – it may very well take all of the former test subjects and their various supernatural abilities to face down the Cold War threat, defeat the Mind Flayer once and for all, and, just perhaps, get Eleven’s powers back in the process.
Assembling such a team for such a daunting task would fit in with the franchise's mythology, to boot; not only have the various episodes, novels, and comic books centered around such a storyline already (Mike and his friends finding Will in the show, Eleven’s mom banding together with the very first Hawkins lab rats in the books, and, of course, Three, Eight, and Nine-Point-Five uniting to save Nine in the comics), but it would fit the X-Men vibe that just may be settling upon Stranger Things 4.
And just a development would also, in turn, pave the way for the final piece of the Stranger Things backstory: just who was test subject One? In this way, the Expanded Universe could continue to flourish even after the Netflix series finishes up its popular run.