Stranger Things Failed Eleven's Chicago Crew Immediately After Sparking Our Interest

"Stranger Things" has grown into an absolute force of nature following the immense popularity of its third and fourth seasons (via Parrot Analytics). With the fifth and final season looming in the distance, it would seem that fans' time with the show's close-knit group of outcasts and misfits from Hawkins is running out.

Still, all in all, each of the four seasons of "Stranger Things" comprises an overall compelling narrative that almost never wastes the time of viewers. Unfortunately, that "almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting thanks mostly to a poorly received Season 2 episode that seemed to serve as a back-door pilot for a possible spin-off.

In case it wasn't totally obvious, that plan clearly didn't pan out for Netflix, the show's streaming home, and the series' creators, the Duffer Brothers, as pretty much everyone under the sun agreed that the episode was awful and the rare total waste of time.

Season 2 lays out what is ultimately a great expansion to the characters and plotlines of the freshman season of "Stranger Things," but there is one caveat to that statement. Season 2, Episode 7 ("The Lost Sister") sees Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) running away to Chicago and meeting up with a group of '80s punk rock cliches led by her long-lost sister from the Hawkins Lab, Kali (Linnea Berthelsen).

While the premise behind the episode, that other psychics like Eleven may have escaped the lab as well, is compelling, whatever cache "Stranger Things" gains from that idea is immediately squandered with weak characters who take up an entire episode only to disappear forever and never be mentioned by almost anyone for the remainder of the series.

For this reason, fans sitting down with the series for the first time can skip this episode entirely so long as they know that Eleven ran away and then came back in the nick of time in the following episode. Furthermore, since Season 4 of "Stranger Things" shows that everyone else — save Eleven, Kali, and Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) — was killed prior to Season 1, even the notion that this plot thread could be spun out into something interesting is no longer a possibility.