Stranger Things season 3 episode 1: “Suzie, Do You Copy?”, summary and analysis

The chapter fact file

The title and the original title are in the fact file. Matt and Ross Duffer write and direct it. The online release of season 3 is Thursday, July 4, 2019, with the whole season. It is episode 18 of the series. The teaser of December 9, 2018 announced this title first.

The wiki timeline places the mall evening on Friday, June 28, 1985, and what follows on Saturday the 29th. In the United States, the average audience per minute, for people age 2 and older, is 8.86 million on the day and 19.16 million over three days. It is the highest figure of the eight episodes.

Two days, in edit order

The chapter starts a year earlier, far from town, then returns to the mall evening. The next day mixes the return from camp, the pool, the ice-cream shop and the hill. The night closes on a missed motel and a steel mill.

1. 1984 The machine

   A beam, an explosion, a year given to a second-in-command.

2. Friday, June 28, evening The mall

   A screening, a blackout, a cloud that drives rats off.

3. The next morning The wake-ups

   The clocks were not reset. Someone comes home from camp.

4. The day The pool and the store

   A compliment at the edge of the pool, a complaint at the store.

5. The ice-cream shop The board

   A tally of customers, a hat, one more pickup attempt.

6. The hill The radio

   Rats on the way up, then nobody answers.

7. The evening The police car

   A speech that gets mocked, an invented grandmother, then three sentences in Russian.

8. The night The choice to stay

   She stays. A car hits the abandoned steel mill.

A machine in 1984, then the mall

In 1984, scientists start a machine shaped like a cannon. The beam begins to open a breach in a wall. The machine explodes and kills those closest to it. At the end of the scene, a helicopter leaving shows that this is the Soviet Union. The choir heard is called “The Red Army Is The Strongest”. The rest of the season follows the Russians and their machine.

A giant of a man strangles the chief scientist. We learn later: it is Grigori. The general who is there gives the second scientist a year. The line is in Russian, subtitled “You have one year”. That scientist is Alexei. Alec Utgoff plays him from this prologue on. Neither is named on screen.

A year later, the Starcourt mall slowly empties the downtown shops, and the locals see it. That evening opens the summer of 1985: a secret screening of Day of the Dead, a film not yet released, then a blackout in the mall and in town. During the outage, at the abandoned steel mill, a black cloud forms and drives the rats off. The power comes back. The back of Will’s neck burns. He tells Mike that everything is fine.

Behind the counter

This is Robin’s first appearance on screen. She already works at the ice-cream shop: she is not a new arrival at the store. On the evening of June 28, she calls to Steve: “Hey, dingus, your children are here”. He lets the group in through a back door, into the room showing the film. The power goes out. He flips the switch. She answers: “That isn't gonna work, dingus”. Earlier, in the mall aisles, Erica and her friends had run into the group and gotten into it with Lucas.

The next day, she keeps a board, “You rule” on one side, “You suck” on the other. The tally of customers Steve fails to win over stands at “You are oh-for-six, Popeye”. He blames the hat: “It's this stupid hat”. She suggests he tell the truth. He sums it up: turned down by college, a father who wants to teach him a lesson, three dollars an hour, no future. He takes the hat off, walks up to a group (“I'll be your captain”) and fails again.

She decodes nothing in this chapter. She is the one who will decipher the Russian message, at Scoops Ahoy, in the following chapters.

The couples of June

Mike and Eleven kiss to “Never Surrender”, by Corey Hart, then Mike starts singing it. The door has to stay open three inches: “Three-inch minimum!” He promises to come back the next day. The three-inch rule and the evening speech are also covered in the article on Hopper and Eleven.

At Melvald’s, Hopper complains about Mike to Joyce. She advises a calm conversation, as equals, and helps him write it. He jokes: “I'm the chief of police, I could cover it up.” He invites her to dinner. She says she has plans. That evening, she eats alone in front of Cheers, an episode titled “Rescue Me”, and remembers Bob. The fridge magnets fall back down.

That evening, he knocks without raising his voice and starts his prepared speech. Mike mocks him. He then invents a call: the grandmother is supposedly sick. He takes Mike into the police car. There, he announces another speech. If Mike is lucky, Hopper might let him keep seeing his daughter.

At the community pool, Billy is a lifeguard. He arrives to “Moving in Stereo”, by the Cars, and compliments Karen. Later, he offers lessons at the Motel 6 in Cornwallis, at 8 p.m. She starts by refusing, stammering: “I'm sorry. I can't.” Then: “I don't think I need any lessons.” He insists. The scene ends with no answer from her.

That evening, she gets ready anyway, takes off her wedding ring, sees Ted snoring near a sleeping Holly, and stays. The song in this scene is called “(I Just) Died in Your Arms”. Billy, for his part, drives toward the motel repeating his lines. He will not get there.

Nancy and Jonathan wake up late: the clocks were not reset after the outage the night before, and it is almost 9 a.m. That evening, a call about the rats reaches the Hawkins Post.

The hill, the rats, the steel mill

Dustin comes back from a month at Camp Know Where. He calls on his walkie-talkie, “Gold Leader”, with no answer. Eleven animates his toys to guide him to the living room. Surprised, he sprays Lucas with hairspray. Among his inventions, Cerebro, a radio big enough to talk over long distances. On the way up Weathertop hill, the highest point in town according to the wiki, Mike and Eleven slip away. Mike cites his curfew, and the boys do not believe it: “Curfew at 4:00?” At the top, nobody answers.

Max and Lucas doubt Suzie, then everyone leaves. Left on the hill, he picks up three sentences: “the silver cat feeds when blue meets yellow in the west”, “a trip to China sounds nice if you tread lightly”, “the week is long”. In the base, Alexei watches the machine under construction. A colleague calls out to him, in Russian: “Beautiful, isn't it?”

Earlier, on the way up, the back of Will’s neck acts up again. Hundreds of rats run toward the abandoned steel mill, convulsing, then burst into masses of flesh. When night comes, Billy finds something in his path: the windshield gives way, the car hits the building. A liquid is on the glass. A flesh tendril drags him by the ankle down to the basement. What hit the glass, we learn later: a fragment of the Mind Flayer, already covered in the monster of season 3. On screen, he is dragged. He is not yet seen among the possessed.

In this chapter, the wiki notes winks at Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the animated toys), at Star Wars (“Gold Leader”) and at Magnum, P.I., and an anachronism: Dustin’s Ultra Magnus toy was not on sale before 1986. The other songs of the chapter: “Captain Pugwash” during the blackout, “Workin' for a Livin'”, “Hot Blooded”, “Can't Fight This Feeling”.

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