By Allison O’Reilly

The long-awaited trailer for the second season of Netflix’s original series Stranger Things aired during the Super Bowl Sunday night, providing fans with content to help hold them over until the season premier this Halloween.

The trailer opened with a vintage Eggo waffle commercial, a play on main character Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) love for the breakfast food, then shifted to spooky imagery accompanied with the sound of Mike (Finn Wolfhard) longingly shouting Eleven’s name.

The rest of the commercial includes no further dialogue but instead a fast-paced, dark video montage with images of Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) furiously digging, Eleven in what appears to be an experimental setting and Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) staring outside at black and red lightening, all of which alludes to the town of Hawkins, Indiana, being in danger.

The trailer has generated a lot of excitement from fans everywhere, receiving nearly 400,000 shares on Facebook, and College Park is no exception.

Students at this university dissected the new trailer and offered their expectations for the upcoming season.

“The trailer was a lot more alarming and dark than I thought it would be. I pictured more mystery than scare tactics, but it was definitely intriguing,” said freshman journalism major Connor Senay.

The extremely brief trailer left a lot of room for speculation amongst a fandom already known for their wild theories.

“If there’s one thing the trailer is explicit about, it’s that we’re going to see a lot more blurring of the lines between our dimension and the Upside Down, so that should be pretty interesting,” said freshman history major Kevin Costello. “I also strongly suspect that the love triangle among the teenaged characters is far from a settled matter, since it’s hard for me to believe that Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) would give up so easily.”

Theories for the second season are being built off of Barb’s (Shannon Purser) death, Will’s miraculous survival, Hawkin’s Lab’s experiments with Eleven and much more, and can be found all through Reddit and Twitter.

“I predict that Eleven will make a comeback and Will will be the most important character out of the group of boys,” Senay said.

Eleven’s appearance in the trailer is a source of joy for a lot of fans as the future of her character was unclear at the end of the first season.

“It’s really good that they see Eleven again, I wasn’t sure if she actually died during the last episode,” said sophomore biology major Susanna Yeh. “I couldn’t tell if there was a new child character in the trailer, but hopefully there is.”

The young stars of Stranger Things will not share any details about their upcoming season, but they took to Instagram to express their excitement. Brown, Wolfhard, Schnapp and their co-stars Caleb McLaughlin and Gaten Matarazzo each posted an upside-down photo of themselves with the hashtag #WorldUpsideDown after the trailer’s premiere.

Though the trailer gave little information in regards to plot, a few details about the upcoming season have been released. It will take place a year after the events of the first season.

The Duffer Brothers, the show’s creators, released the second season’s episode titles in late 2016: “Madmax,” “The Boy Who Came Back to Life,” “The Pumpkin Patch,” “The Palace,” “The Storm,” “The Pollywog,” “The Secret Cabin,” “The Brain” and “The Lost Brother.”

The cast, which won the award for “Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series” at the 2017 Screen Actors Guild Awards, will be expanding with new characters Max (Sadie Sink,) Billy (Dacre Montgomery) and Roman (Linnea Bethelsen).

The first season and the new trailer leave a lot of questions unanswered, but many hope that will make the Halloween premiere even better.

“In my very inexpert opinion, I thought (the trailer) epitomized the way the show itself has mastered the art of suspense, knowing exactly how much to show us to keep us wanting more and leaving us right in that sweet spot between sheer terror and palpable,” Costello said.

Featured Photo Credit: Feature photo courtesy of Stranger Things on Facebook.

Allison O’Reilly is a freshman journalism major and can be reached at aoreill1@terpmail.umd.edu.