Lucas’s little sister, Erica, will have a bigger role in the third season of Stranger Things. Played with scene-stealing panache by Priah Ferguson, Erica was a guest star in Stranger Things 2; for the third season, she’s been upgraded to a recurring character, and she’ll also get her own side adventure!
As Variety describes, Erica “returns in the next installment with an army of her own friends. No longer content with sitting on the sidelines, Erica finds herself on a wild mission to save Hawkins from a dangerous new threat.”
Erica was an instantly memorable addition to the second season, with her one-liners and her connoisseur’s eye for action-figure OTPs. (Barbie and He-Man forever, Erica. I’m sorry you have to live in the time before AO3 and fanfiction.net.) While some users found her retro little-sister shtick annoying or stereotypical, plenty more loved the energy and peerless DGAF she brought to the show.
The Duffer brothers were clearly huge fans of her performance last season. “It was going to be a throwaway part,” Matt Duffer told Vulture, a day after Stranger Things 2 premiered on Netflix. “This girl came in from Georgia and just killed it, and then she killed it on set. I was thinking, ‘Maybe she just nailed the audition,’ but it was every day. We were dying … She knocked it out of the park every time we brought her in. Any excuse we had to get Erica in there, we’d write her in.” It looks like they took that opportunity for Season Three.
Ferguson herself previously told Teen Vogue, “I hope Erica could partner with Lucas and fight off the Demogorgan with Eleven, Mad Max, and the whole cast.” While it sounds like she’ll be off on her own adventure for at least part of the season, she will finally get to do some evil-fighting.
The show also added another female character, who will be played by Maya Hawke (Jo March in the BBC’s 2017 Little Women miniseries). Hawke’s character, Robin, is described as an “alternative girl” who seeks an exciting escape from her boring day job, but “gets more than she bargained for when she uncovers a dark secret.” Any time I see the phrase “alternative girl” in a series written by middle-aged men, I worry, but I’ll wait to see what happens. If she gets to mentor Eleven or Max like Steve mentored Dustin in Season Two, I will be very into this.
All told, I’m glad that Stranger Things is adding more female characters for this third season, and I’m especially excited that Erica will get a larger role. Having Nancy and Mike on parallel but intersecting adventures has worked really well, and I’d love to see Erica and Lucas have a similar sibling dynamic. Stranger Things is at its best when it remembers that everyone has some heroism in them—even our annoying little siblings.
(via CBR; image: Netflix)
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