Woah. What the hell happened here?
The notion taking a show that mostly follows an ensemble format and suddenly shifting focus to a single character can work, but you have to make sure you stick it in the smartest place possible. Put it in the right place and you can create a fantastic experience that flips scripts, reveals new things and makes cliffhangers all the more nail biting – however, get it wrong and the result can be an absolute disaster; and that’s what we have with The Lost Sister.
To be honest, even taken on its own merits, the seventh installment of Stranger Things 2 simply isn’t particularly as strong as every other episode seen so far, but plonked into the middle of an amazing run of episodes that stopped at a nail biting cliffhanger, it single handed disrupts the entire flow of a season that had been going from strength to strength. We’ve once seen Eleven use her powers to stop a van dead going at full speed – wanna see her do the same to an entire season?
We rejoin Eleven still mulling over what she witnessed after delving into her mother’s brain and as she tries to put the clues together, Becky pulls the proof her sister was trying to amass out of storage to see if there’s anything there that could be of aid. In the jumble of Terry Ives’ electroshocked memories, Eleven remembers seeing herself playing with another little girl who shows up in a news clipping that has been saved. Using her psychic mojo to try an pin point her location, the tekekinetic powerhouse leaves for Chicago to track this girl down and maybe finally find someone like her.
If we cast out minds back to the start of the season, we witnessed a ragtag gang flee from the police and escape because one of their number had the ability to cast images into the minds of others, well, that girl is Kali and she bears the same kind of tattoo that Eleven has, only it reads “008”. Stunned to meet someone else who managed to make it out of Hawkins Lab, both girls regard each other as sisters and soon Eleven joins the gang who, when they aren’t robbing banks, are hunting down the people who hurt and discarded them and making them pay.
However, after their next target proves to be a man who was instrumental in not only tormented them on Dr. Brenner’s orders, but he also personally responsible for the flipping the switch on Eleven’s mother’s brain scrambling electo-shock. Having been responsible for snapping the odd neck and mushing the odd brain before, Eleven has no compunction bringing the pain to those responsible, but when it comes time to do the deed, an attack of conscience rears its head.
But as she tries to figure out her new place in the world, a vision of Hopper and Mike in peril causes Eleven to realise that she needs to return to Hawkins and aid her friends. It’s just a pity that she couldn’t have realised that at the start of the episode.
Public reception to The Lost Sister hasn’t been exactly glowing, but to be honest, this rare misstep from the Stranger Things gang only really has itself to blame. If I’m being extra kind, the episode isn’t actually as bad as you’ve probably heard and it does genuinely push the arc of Eleven (aka. Jane) forward and tie up a lot of the Terry Ives threads. However, while the episode is probably more deserving of a three star rating if it was taken in a vacuum, it’s position in the season is so damaging, I simply can’t bring myself to forgive it. Maybe if the episode had been shuffled around to become the sixth episode, it wouldn’t have slammed the brakes on the immense momentum the series had built up to so skillfully; maybe if it had been a episode released as a Christmas special to reveal what occured when Eleven left, it might have garnered more goodwill; and if it had simply been chopped up and delivered in sync with all the other episodes as part of the ensemble we might not have noticed at all. However, suddenly launching us into a completely new plot thread that’s utterly separate from everything else that’s occurring and expects us to meet and embrace a whole new bunch of characters is just too big an ask for even the most devoted Stranger Things fan.
A deep dive into Eleven’s past was admittedly due, but the transition is so jarring that not even the big, soulful eyes of Millie Bobby Brown is able to hold our attention as she joins a group of lost street urchins who dress like the Lost Boys swung by a sale being held by TK Maxx.
None of the gang are particularly likable and as worst are actively quite annoying. While the existence of Kali raises some genuinely fascinating questions (different kids from the Lab seemingly have different powers) and finally gives Eleven a true equal to bounce off and learn from, Linnea Berthelsen is less a three dimensional character as she is a standard teacher trope with really big hair. Also, as Stranger Things is a show that’s honed playing the long game nicely by deftly building the plot to boiling point over the entire season, it shows that it’s not so hot when having to cram so much brand new stuff from scratch into a single hour. While I’m not entirely sure what the timeline is for Eleven to go to Chicago, find her “sister”, get accepted into her gang, get a punk makeover and then go out and try kill a guy (I think barely two days have passed in Hawkins), everything flies by at such a pace that’s it’s impossible to care much. Even the shocking revelation that Matthew Modine’s Dr. Brenner may actually still be alive doesn’t carry the weight that it should and neither does the image of the silver haired “Papa” being planted in the head of Eleven. Maybe in the age of streaming, simply sticking a stand alone episode into the middle of an exciting cliffhanger doesn’t seem so bad as the jarring nature of it is buffered by the fact that a lot of people binge the season in a day or two. And yet I’d argue thar whether it’s jarring among a binge, or jarring on a week to week basic – the effect is generally the same: an episode that simply sticks out like a big, sore thumb.
Normal service will no doubt be resumed once we get into the next episode and some pay off for what we had to sit through here will surely be forthcoming, but that doesn’t excuse a show from obviously trying to be clever with its storytelling and then messing up the flow of the season by accidently outsmarting themselves. Hopefully the final two episodes will right the wrongs here and we’ll get back to a world of monster dogs, a laboratory under siege and Steve Harrington continuing to justify his continued existence, but for now, Stranger Things has some work to do if it wants to get things back to being rightside-up…
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