Stranger Things season four is yet to be announced by Netflix, but one fan thinks they’ve worked out when it will be released.
Considering the show is one of the streaming service’s most popular titles, there’s no doubt that the Duffer brothers will bring back the show for another outing.
One eagle-eyed fan analysed several frames from several season three episodes as well as behind-the-scenes footage, and has formulated a rather convincing argument that season four could premiere far sooner than we thought.
Posting the theory to Reddit, which was highlighted by seventeen.com, the viewer focused on the drawings that can be seen in Will Byers’s room in the set tour video Netflix posted on YouTube.
The picture in question shows a man wearing a prisoner’s outfit, which fans are obviously believing to be Hopper (who may or may not be "the American" mentioned in the latest season's mid-credits sequence).
Look closer, though, and you see the number on the overalls – 403.
This number stuck out to the fan, because it’s the same one that appears on the door of the hospital room where Nancy Wheeler visits Mrs Driscoll in season three.
Why have they used the same number? The viewer wonders whether it’s because the show could make a surprise return on... 3 April (or indeed the 4 March).
This is backed up by another few theories that predicted the show would take place in the month of April – and could even have a surprising link to the Chernobyl disaster, which took place in April 1986, six months on from where season three left off.
While it wouldn’t make sense for Netflix to drop certain titles unannounced, it’s almost a no-brainer for Stranger Things, a show with such a dedicated fanbase that such a stunt would never affect its viewership.
Stranger Things is available to stream on Netflix now.
