The following is spoiler-free. Proceed with reckless abandon!

"Here's the thing about you people. It hasn't been that long," David Harbour, aka Chief Hopper, says pointedly to Mashable — and fans everywhere impatiently awaiting the seemingly overdue release of Stranger Things 3.

"Think about how long it takes Marvel to make a two-hour movie. It takes them like two to three years to make one movie. And then in a year and a half, we make an eight-hour epic movie? I mean, come on."

"You don't want to lose the fact that people love what you do."

Harbour's mock-authoritarian tone, which was all in good fun but a bit too terrifying in the moment, highlights an important part of the creator-audience divide.

While we Stranger Things fans have been impatiently twiddling our thumbs waiting for the release of Season 3, Harbour and the rest of the show's cast and crew have been tirelessly working to make it.

"Season 1 came out July 15th of 2016," notes Harbour of the show's oft-maligned production timeline. "And then the next season comes out October 27th of 2017. So that's what? Like a year and a half. And now Season 3 is coming out in July again. It's basically the same amount of time!"

Although Harbour eventually agreed that it did "feel" like a longer wait than usual, the actor contends that there was no wasted time in getting the highly-anticipated project to audiences — and admits that he was initially nervous the show had, for want of a better phrase, jumped the Demogorgon in Season 3.

"I thought it was very different and very risky," says Harbour of his first reaction to this season's scripts. "It's hard with a TV show, especially a successful one, because you don't want to lose the fact that people love what you do, but you also don't want to have to play the same beats that you have played every season so that people get that same feeling. "

Image: Netflix

For Harbour's role in Hawkins, that meant finding new, inventive ways to present his maverick Chief of Police, a character that on the surface represents a stale archetype tackled time and time again across genres.

"We might've jumped the shark. I might be Fonzie, jumping over with those water skis right now."

As such, in Season 3, Hopper's relationship to his adopted daughter Eleven takes center stage, a move that transforms his essence and at first made Harbour very nervous.

"Hopper is this rugged, masculine individualist in the first season," recalls Harbour. "Now, [in Season 3] he's softening, to the point that he's getting bigger, just eating chips and salsa, and dealing with his daughter. He's in full-on dad mode. But the hard cop side is one thing that I've really loved about him, and I was worried, like, 'Oh no, what are people gonna think?'"

Describing Hopper's Season 3 phase as "comedic, to the point that it's kind of like a Midnight Run type of thing, where [Hopper and Joyce] are chasing bad guys and he's got a mustache and this shirt," Harbour emphasized his concern that viewers might be turned off. [Editor's note: We're fairly certainly he means this "this shirt."]

"All of that is a lot for audiences to accept," Harbour says. "So the whole time we were shooting, I would have these days where I was like, 'I don't know, man. We might've jumped the shark. I might be Fonzie, jumping over with those water skis right now.'"

Image: netflix

It should be said, Harbour's fears were not without cause. Hopper's characterization in Stranger Things 2 received pushback from select critics and fans — although plenty of folks, including this reporter, liked Season 2 Hopper and his many (read: very, very many) mistakes just fine.

In time, Harbour says he came to see why Season 3's so-called Papa Hop was going to work so well, describing what finally sold him on the change.

"When I saw it all put together and finally saw those same beating hearts of the characters preserved, I thought, 'Oh, that is so impressive,'" notes Harbour.

"A lot of that is due to the Duffers and to the excellent writing and the excellent way they have put these shows together, but they're also paying attention to [the actors]. They're wanting to go on this journey with us and what we find interesting and where we're growing as human beings too. You have to stretch and you have to grow, otherwise you get bored and just start playing a cliché."

Chief Jim Hopper may be a lot of things, but he's never a cliché — and the new season seems set to prove that, at long last.

Stranger Things 3 begins streaming July 4 on Netflix.