After a show achieves popularity, one of the obvious next steps is for someone to come along and spoof it. Saturday Night Live did that this past weekend when Lin-Manuel Miranda hosted, offering up a playful parody of the Netflix summer darling Stranger Things that saw the Duffer Brothers (SNL newcomers Mikey Day and Alex Moffat) addressing some of the unanswered questions from season one.
While the sketch doesn’t shed any light on the whereabouts of Barb, or have the cast members playing any of the older kids like Nancy, Jonathan and Steve, we do find out exactly where Lucas’s parents (Leslie Jones and Kenan Thompson) have been this entire time. Turns out they’re not very happy that Lucas (Sasheer Zamata) has been spending all of his time with Mike (Kyle Mooney) and Dustin (Lin-Manuel Miranda), and they’ve come to take him home.
The sketch itself has a lot of fun nods to the show–like Eleven’s love for her Eggos–and Melissa Villesenor and Beck Bennett’s cameos as Joyce and Chief Hopper make you realize that maaaaybe these adults shouldn’t really be hanging out with a bunch of kids. The bit also cleverly manages to take a shot at how the show itself didn’t really address racial tensions in its idyllic eighties setting–and that there’s plenty in the real world that can be scary enough.
However, one of the best things to come out of all of this might just be this Twitter interaction between Miranda and Gaten Matarazzo (a.k.a. the real Dustin) after the show:
ROLE OF A LIFETIME GATEN! You are the BEST! pic.twitter.com/9h8mbEhnXn
— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) October 9, 2016
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