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Stranger Things 4 preview brings back a face from the past

After a nearly three-year wait, Stranger Things 4 is just a week away. But before the new season officially gets underway, Netflix has released the first eight minutes of the new season, and they aren’t for the faint of heart!

In this flashback to 1979, we’re reintroduced to Matthew Modine’s Dr. Martin Brenner, the man who made Eleven into a superhuman girl. We’ve known for a long time that Eleven wasn’t the only child who was experimented on over the years. However, we’ve never seen one of those experiments take such a dark turn as we do in this clip for both the kids and the scientists who work with them. In fact, this might be our first real glimpse of this year’s big bad villain, back when they were something closer to human.

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Stranger Things 4 | The First 8 Minutes | Netflix

Winona Ryder stars in the series as Joyce Byers, with David Harbour as Jim Hopper, Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler, Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven/Jane Hopper, Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair, Noah Schnapp as Will Byers, Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield, Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler, Charlie Heaton as Jonathan Byers, Joe Keery as Steve Harrington, Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley, Priah Ferguson as Erica Sinclair, Cara Buono as Karen Wheeler, Brett Gelman as Murray Bauman, Jamie Campbell Bower as Peter Ballard, Eduardo Franco as Argyle, and Joseph Quinn as Eddie Munson.

Matthew Modine in Stranger Things 4.

Because Stranger Things 4 is much longer than previous seasons, Netflix is splitting it into two. The first seven episodes will premiere May 27, with episode 7 clocking in at 98 minutes. Only two episodes will be held back for volume 2 of Stranger Things 4 on July 1. But episode 8 will be 85 minutes, while the season finale is truly feature-length with a nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime.

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