New Stranger Things Season 4 Teaser Has Fans Convinced A Trailer Is Coming

Fans of the Netflix mega-hit "Stranger Things" are on high alert after a new teaser for the show's fourth season dropped May 5, with a promise of more to come the following day. 

The series' official YouTube channel posted a video to its account entitled "HNL Control Room." For just under two minutes, the video shows a set of seven televisions, six of them arranged in a hexagon around a seventh in the center, each of them broadcasting a pattern of static. One by one, the televisions flicker to life briefly, showing tantalizing glimpses of locations and objects: a room filled with rainbow patterns, a series of games and children's toys — it's all very opaque and mysterious.

Rest assured, fans have guesses about what all these images mean, but the most crucial piece of information might be contained below the video in its description: "Due to technical difficulties, Hawkins National Laboratory will be closed until further notice. We will be back in service tomorrow at 9:00AM ET." Posters in the comments and on Twitter are taking this as a sign that a new trailer for what star Finn Wolfhard called "the darkest season that's ever been" is set to be released on the morning of May 6. 

Several of the images that pop up on the screens show what appears to be a child's classroom with rainbow stripes painted on the walls and the floor. This seems like a reference to the lab's Rainbow Room, where Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and the lab's other child test subjects played. But that room was shown in Eleven's mother's (Aimee Mullins) memories as having a single rainbow mural on the door, and being all white inside, so either those glimpses weren't entirely reliable or someone's redecorated.

The rest of the images hint at what the technical difficulties might have been, and who might have been behind them. There's a chessboard with its pieces toppled and a bloodstain on its corner. There are a pair of dice on the floor with another smear of blood, two of their faces showing a six and a five. Zero points for adding up who that might be a reference to, but the other faces also show a four and a two, so the potential references might be more complicated than that.

And then there's a Magic 8-Ball, also bloodied, which fans are taking to signal the return of Kali Prasad, or Eight (Linnea Berthelsen), another one of the Hawkins National Lab's subjects from Eleven's time there. Eight was last seen in the show's second season, seeking revenge on the employees of the lab for what they did to her. If something (else) terrible were to happen to HNL, she would be at the top of the list, though one can never rule out Mind Flayers, Demodogs, or any number of other, stranger, things.

Plenty of fans were just excited to get any kind of content from the series. "Holy crap we are finally getting a #StrangerThings4 trailer," read one tweet from @bhccpod. "Stranger things is really making me wake up at 6 AM TOMORROW HUH ?? I'M SO NERVOUS," wrote @mikaylaflores, who clearly tweets from the Pacific Time Zone.

On the other hand, some in the comments and on Twitter doubted whether the show would have a trailer ready, since it's still in production after a COVID-19 delay. If a trailer's not actually forthcoming, then the announcement may be something simpler, a release date for Season 4 or more images from the set. But others point out that the lengthy time it's taken to shoot Season 4 should have left the filmmakers with plenty of time to put something together.

In the meantime, others have already begun piecing together the clues contained within the teaser. @yeetyeetskeet13 found the French song that plays over the teaser, which has a title that translates to "When The Beloved Will Return." Another user added up a different combination of numbers on the dice and deduced that not only will Eight be returning, but the show may also incorporate Nine or other numbers among its new cast members.

Whatever ends up happening, fans will get some small portion of the answers May 6 when the Hawkins National Lab is back in service.