Netflix just turned our worlds upside down by finally announcing the premiere date for the third season of Stranger Things [1] — July 4 this year! — and dropping a cryptic trailer [2] that we can't stop watching. However, the short clip doesn't reveal any footage of the upcoming eight-episode season [3], instead showing footage of the annual Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve special as the clocks count down to 1985 intercut with text on a retro VDU computer screen. As well as a secret coded message that reads, "When blue and yellow meet in the west," the clip shows somebody accessing a terminal at "Lynx Corp" before running the program SilverCatFeeds.exe. But what in the heck is Lynx Corp?
Stranger Things junkies have been theorizing about how this mysterious corporation will be involved in the third season, and the most popular theory out there is that Lynx Corp is linked to Russia. Remember in season one when Eleven is put in a sensory-deprivation tank by Dr. Brenner in order to spy on secret Soviet meetings? Stranger Things does take place during the final years of the Cold War, after all, and fans on Twitter have pointed out that the Russian word for Eleven ("одиннадцать") appears in the SilverCatFeeds code [4] — that can't just be a coincidence.
Still not convinced? How about the name "Lynx Corp" itself? Lynxes are endangered silver-haired felines [6] found from the western borders of Russia up to Kamchatka and Sakhalin. Though Eleven's connection to Russia hasn't been visited in a while, it's very possible that Russia could be behind the Lynx Corp, trying to find out more information about the Eleven program. Only time will tell whether these fan theories will pan out, so we'll just have to wait until Independence Day to see if the Stranger Things gang could be facing an even bigger threat than the Demogorgon.