The Sauna Test
The Sauna Test is the fourth episode of season three. Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers go to the town hall in Hawkins Square, where they head down paths and elevators to find the office of Mayor Larry Kline. Hopper and Joyce find many weird men who they fight, and eventually they reach ground floor again. Hopper finds a note on the wall that says 1 – Bathroom. 2 – Aide. 3 – Secret. Hopper realizes that the bathroom and aide office have levers, and he pulls them. He finds a loose bookshelf and then finds a lever there, opening a secret group of files. Hopper and Joyce search in there and find some files, but Mayor Kline finds them and is scared because they are infiltrating his personal storage, so he tells some bodyguards to stop Hopper and Joyce. They defeat the bodyguards and Hopper slaps Kline, leading Kline to be weakened. Hopper tells Kline to tell him about Starcourt Mall, which leads Kline to admit that the owners of the property don’t speak English. Hopper gives Kline a slap for the road. Dustin Henderson reports back to Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley at Starcourt Mall, who tell him another sentence they have translated; A trip to China sounds nice. Dustin searches the mall for clues and finds a travel agency. Dustin goes there and asks for a trip to China. The person running the store suddenly looks shocked and closes the blinds and locks the door. He tells Dustin a code in Russian, but once it is obvious he does not understand, the store owner pulls a rifle out and cleans up the red stains before re-opening the travel agency. The kids (Mike Wheeler, Will Byers, Eleven, and Max Mayfield) decide to trap Billy Hargrove because he has been bullying them at Hawkins Suburbs. Mike asks Chet if he has any spare CPR dummies, which he manages to acquire after cleaning up a storage room and impressing Chet, which made Chet give them the keys to the storage room in the back. They also take a wig from Eleven’s clothes inside of Hopper’s Cabin. They also steal a walkie-talkie from Dustin without him knowing, and they tie it up to the CPR dummy with a wig. They put the CPR dummy inside of the sauna, and when Billy goes into the sauna with a knife to attack the “person,” they lock Billy in. They set the heat to 149 C, and Billy starts heating up. They threaten to turn the heat to 150 C if Billy didn’t talk. Billy says that he was being such a bully because a black wisp of smoke was bullying him and hurting his feelings. Billy then becomes enraged and escapes the sauna, and his veins start being black because of the immense heat that he felt. The kids chase Billy into a room with many boxes, and Billy starts running towards them and ramming the walls. When he hit the walls, he was weaker, allowing the kids to attack Billy. Enraged, Billy enters another room with some rats. He starts running twice as much, and then after being annoyed even more, enters another room where he runs a lot more, with less predictable patterns on when he runs. After beating Billy up, Billy escapes and tells Heather Holloway about the kids hurting his feelings. All of a sudden, a lot of people who have been bullied by the Mind Flayer reveal themselves and say that the kids won’t bully all of them.
