David Harbour is a movie star in his own right, most notably with a staring role in Hellboy to his name. But his big hit has been as Hopper in the Netflix series Stranger Things. Which is why no matter what he wanted to do with his opening monologue on Saturday Night Live, the show made sure his bit was spooky and involved some references to the show.
Harbour didn’t appear as a Democratic presidential candidate in the show’s cold open, though the season premiere’s host, Woody Harrelson, returned as Joe Biden. That gave Harbour some time to gear up for a monologue where he pulled the classic ‘explore the studio’ move and cracked wise on the run. Unfortunately for him, he almost immediately ran into an alarmed Kate McKinnon, who told Harbor the show needed him to explore a mysterious hole that appeared in Studio 8H.
Harbor peeled away the cobwebs and dove into a pretty faithful representation of The Upside Down, and what did he find? Pete Davidson! The Suicide Squad member finally appeared on this season of SNL after two weeks of jokes about where he had gone missing. Apparently all it took was Harbour to show up for that portal to open up and give us a look at Davidson after all.
The most accurate joke about the show, however, was when Lorne Michaels appeared in the Upside Down as an NBC page running lunch orders for Kenan Thompson, who really runs the show. And now we know he doesn’t like cheese on his burgers, too.
Later in the episode Davidson popped up again, riffing on a reported rise in sexually transmitted diseases during Weekend Update.
“I get tested all the time because, you know, I look like I got all of them,” Davidson said. “And I look like I could have invented one.”
While he didn’t mention why he missed the show’s first two weeks, he did bring up the jokes made at his expense while he was gone, including one Colin Jost made about him losing his car at a music festival. But all that’s over now: Davidson is back and giving America bad advice about reproductive health.
