If the embed won’t play, the teaser is also here on YouTube.
Netflix marked Stranger Things Day on Friday (6th November, the date in 1983 when Will Byers went missing) by finally confirming the live-action spin-off it has been hinting at for years. It’s called Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure, it’s a prequel set in the 1950s, and it arrives in 2028. A short teaser came with the announcement, and the line doing the rounds with it is “Before Hawkins, there was Marion”.
Marion is in Nevada, not Indiana, and the show starts from scratch with a new ensemble of characters, so nobody should expect a young Hopper to come cycling over the horizon. Netflix hasn’t announced a cast yet. The series takes place before Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the Olivier and Tony-winning stage play set in Hawkins in 1959, and it comes from the same team. Kate Trefry, who wrote The First Shadow, co-created it with Matt and Ross Duffer and will be showrunner. Joe Wright is directing. That’s the man behind Atonement, Darkest Hour and the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive”, so he knows a thing or two about period detail and about societies that are quietly rotten underneath.
Netflix’s announcement says the seeds of the new story may have been planted in Hawkins, and here’s a bit of our own speculation. In The First Shadow, young Henry Creel’s family moves to Hawkins from Nevada, fleeing a violent incident there. So the Duffers had already pointed at the desert before anyone mentioned Marion. Whether Henry’s old stamping ground turns out to be the same patch of sagebrush, we’ll find out in 2028.
The setting is the most promising part. The flagship show was built from Spielberg, John Carpenter and Stephen King, with a synthesiser humming under everything. 1950s Nevada offers an entirely different toy box. The government began exploding atomic bombs at the Nevada Test Site in 1951, and tourists in Las Vegas used to watch the mushroom clouds from hotel roofs. Hollywood answered with a decade of desert paranoia: giant irradiated ants in Them!, a swelling soldier in The Amazing Colossal Man, and visitors from beyond in It Came from Outer Space. Swap the synths for a theremin and the arcade for the drive-in, and the show more or less writes its own atmosphere.
The original series ended in 2025, and the animated Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 followed this April, so Netflix is clearly not ready to shut the gate to the Upside Down. That leaves the costume department two years to source enough Brylcreem, and the rest of us two years to wonder what was lurking in the desert before it found its way to Indiana.
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