Perhaps one of Netflix’s most successful shows, “Stranger Things” had an official release date drop for its fourth installment.

Netflix announced that “Stranger Things,” a sci-fi drama created in 2016 by the Duffer Brothers, will be releasing its next season on May 27. For the first time, Netflix will be releasing one of its top shows in two waves to slow it down from past seasons. Episodes 1-5, Vol. 1 will be released on their May release date, while Episodes 6-9, Vol. 2, will follow on July 1.

The latest announcement comes at the behest of COVID-19 complications. Summer of 2020 was supposed to be the release date of the latest season. However, the show was pushed back two years because of the ongoing pandemic.

Fans of “Stranger Things” have seen four mini-trailers published on YouTube illustrating how the show will be taking a darker twist than previous seasons.

For those unfamiliar with the ending of “Stranger Things 3,” released in 2019, the party contained six friends stuck in the town of Hawkins, Indiana. Mike Wheeler, Will Byers, Lucas Sinclair, Dustin Henderson, Max Mayfiled and Eleven were still fighting the Upside Down monster. However, there were also Soviet agents involved as they were working to harness the power of the Upside Down to flip the dynamics of the Cold War.

The show ended last season with the main character, Eleven, using all of her psychokinetic powers to kill the Upside Down monster and stop the Soviet agents. As “El” has lost her powers for the time being, she joins the Byers family and moves away from the Midwest, to California.

Beloved Hawkins police chief/El’s foster dad, Hopper (David Harbour), was shown at the end of the season to be vaporized by the Soviet portal underneath the Starcourt Mall. However, in the first sneak peek of “Stranger Things 4”, Hopper is shown to be very much alive in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, U.S.S.R., working on a railroad. Hopper was also alluded to be alive at the end of Season 3 by way of a jump-cut that has a Soviet agent in a prison saying, “Not the American.”

The four sneak-peek trailers published throughout 2020 and 2021 set the show up to be a reuniting of the original party and the other characters, such as Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers.

Past installments of the show were leaving fans wanting more as the pace of “Stranger Things” 1 and 2 were slower, with introductions of characters taking up most of the plot. Season 3 was the most-viewed season with more than half a billion views in the first 28 days after its release.

The Duffer Brothers have set the show up for success, and it will end officially on a fifth installment. Fans of the show will have to slow their roll for the remainder of the show rather than binging.