30 easters eggs you might have missed in Stranger Things 4 Volume 1

26. Hold on to your butts!

In order to find out where the Nina Project bunker is located, Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle enlist the help of Dustin’s genius girlfriend Suzie. After luring Suzie’s father away from her confiscated computer, she finally settles down behind the keyboard and gets to work.

There are a couple of nods to the original Jurassic Park in this scene, though they’re all meant for the audience and not in-world jokes since the film won’t be out for years yet. The first is that the computer is an Amiga with the built-in Amiga operating system; this computer company eventually developed a UNIX-based operating system similar to the type used on the computers in Jurassic Park.

Then there’s a nod to Samuel L. Jackson’s iconic “Hold on to your butts” line when Suzie says, “Hold your butts, I’ll just trace the IP.” We see what you did there, Duffer Brothers.

And because there’s no reason to have one movie reference when you can have two, there’s also a point earlier in the season where Argyle shouts “Hold on to your butts!” before peeling out in his pizza van.

27. The Muppet Movie

As with most of the bedrooms in Stranger Things, Suzie’s is littered with posters and easter eggs, which tell us things about her character in addition to serving as fun nods to the audience. One particularly interesting one is that she has a poster of The Muppet Movie, which is a road trip Muppet film that explores the Muppets’ origins, not dissimilar to how the California crew is road tripping around and Eleven is exploring her past. It also heavily featured rainbows in its imagery, and we all know how fond the Hawkins Lab is of those.

28. The fate of Eight

Through Eleven’s flashbacks, we finally get to see what the Hawkins Lab was like when it was filled with other psychic children. We also see the grisly demise of pretty much all of them, but there’s one who did escape: Eight, who we met when Eleven took a road trip to Chicago in season 2.

When One is coaching Eleven in the Rainbow Room, he tries to get her to remember the time her mother broke into Hawkins Lab so that she can use her anger to draw more psychic strength. Describing the break-in, he says, “This would have been when Eight was still here,” suggesting that by this time Eight had already escaped the Hawkins Lab. So she’s gone by the time the massacre happens.

29. The pipe

During Eleven’s climactic flashback sequence in Episode 7, One brings her to a pipe in the basement of the Hawkins Lab, which he tells her leads outside. While Eleven doesn’t go through the pipe in this scene because she doesn’t want to leave without her friend, this is exactly how she escapes the Hawkins Lab in season 1. It just takes a couple of years before she has another opportunity.

30. The date of the Massacre at Hawkins Lab

Throughout season 4, Dr. Brenner helps Eleven in the quest to regain her powers by having her relive old memories of her time in the Hawkins Lab. The way he does this is by using security tapes from his years of experimenting on children; often, there’s horrific stuff on those tapes. But when exactly does El’s final confrontation with One, aka Henry Creel, take place?

If you keep your eyes peeled, you can actually pick out the date on the video tape that Brenner takes off the shelf in Episode 7, which contains the footage of One’s massacre. It’s September 8, 1979. September 8 also happens to be the release date for IT Chapter One.

That means that Eleven blasted One into the Upside Down a full four years before she accidentally contacted the Demogorgon and created the gate in Hawkins Lab during season 1, which happened on November 6th, 1983.

What happened to El during those lost years? We’ll likely learn more in Volume 2.

Thus concludes our round-up of 30 easter eggs you may have missed in Stranger Things 4 Volume 1. How many did you catch? And did you have any favorites that we missed? With a show like Stranger Things, there’s always another easter egg to nerd out about.

Stranger Things 4 Volume 2 premieres on Netflix on July 1.

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