The Worst Episode Of 'Stranger Things 2' Has Me Slightly Worried About 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'

Stranger Things 2 kicks off with what we later find out is the aftermath of a murder, as a group of punk outcasts get in a car chase with the cops. We soon find out that Kali has different abilities than Eleven: Kali can make people see projections that aren't really there. The group escapes from the cops, and we don't see them again until the seventh episode, where we find out that Kali and her friends are systematically killing the people responsible for experimenting on her when she was a child. Eleven meets up with them, gets a full-on '80s glam makeover, and eventually decides to go home and help her friends after sparing the life of one of the former lab employees. To put it mildly, the episode has not gone over well with fans – myself included. Here's what our own Chris Evangelista wrote about the episode in his spoiler review of season 2:

By the time episode 7 rolls around, tensions are high in Hawkins and the main storyline is really picking up steam. So what does Stranger Things do? It airs a backdoor pilot episode where Eleven teams up with the rag-tag gang of punk rock misfits we saw in the opening of the series. Having a plotline where Eleven meets Kali and learns more about her past would've been fine, but to have an entire episode devoted to this, so late in the season, doesn't work at all. It reminds one of those frustrating episodes of Lost that would suddenly focus on members of the tail section when all we wanted to do was get back to the main cast. It doesn't help that the punks Eleven hooks up with are all generic as hell and unmemorable. This entire episode seems to exist simply to give Eleven a moment where she announces, "I'm going back to help my friends!"

The Duffers spoke with Entertainment Weekly and defended their decision to include that divergence from the main storyline:

"Whether it works for people or not, it allows us to experiment a little bit," says Matt. "It's important for Ross and I to try stuff and not feel like we're doing the same thing over and over again. It's almost like doing a whole little other pilot episode in the middle of your season, which is kind of a crazy thing to do. But it was really fun to write and cast and work on.

Our test of the episode was we tried to pull it out of the show just to make sure that we needed it because I didn't want it in there as filler — even though some critics are accusing us of doing that. But Eleven's  journey kind of fell apart, like the ending didn't work, without it. So I was like, whether this works or not, we need this building block in here or the whole show is going to collapse. It's not going to end well. The Mind Flayer is going to take over Hawkins."

I love the idea of building out the show's mythology and finding out more about Eleven's mysterious backstory and the other subjects of the lab, and even the notion of expanding the scope of the show in the second season isn't a terrible one – but the way they chose to go about doing it here was a huge blunder. Introducing us to characters we don't care about and who are clearly not aligned with the mentality of the show's lead characters puts the narrative at a standstill while we wait for Eleven's inevitable realization that she needs to return home. The fact that these characters aren't interesting even on a stylistic level (they look like a combination of low-budget Terminator and X-Men cosplayers) makes it even tougher to sit through.