Stranger Things season 2 episode 7: “The Lost Sister,” recap and analysis

Before Chicago: the cabin, the mother, the rainbow room

Fall 1984. Since coming back from the other side, Eleven has been living in hiding in the old hunting cabin that belonged to police chief Hopper's grandfather. He protects her from the government men. The rule is simple: do not go outside. In the third episode, she goes out anyway. She runs off to the middle school to see Mike, and finds him with Max, the new girl. Back home, the fight with Hopper ends with damage to the cabin.

After the fight, she finds Hopper's research on a certain Terry Ives. Her mother is alive, contrary to what she had been told. In the fifth episode, Eleven goes to see her at her aunt Becky's. Terry Ives, her mother, no longer speaks. Eleven enters her mind and sees the scene: the attempt to take her back from the lab, Brenner's men, the 450 volts. She also learns there that another girl was trained like her.

The sixth episode does without her: it is the first in the series without Millie Bobby Brown. The seventh picks up her thread where the fifth had left it. In Terry's memories, Eleven sees herself as a very small child, sitting next to another little girl, at the lab. The word “rainbow,” in her mother's loop, refers to that room: the lab's rainbow room, where Terry had found the two of them. Eleven goes through the files Terry kept at Becky's, tracks down the girl with her power, and leaves for Chicago.

1. Episode 1 The cabin

   Hopper hides Eleven in the woods. She has promised not to leave.

2. Episode 3 The forbidden outing

   She goes to the middle school to see Mike, and finds him with Max.

3. Episode 4 The Terry Ives file

   After the fight, she discovers that her mother is alive.

4. Episode 5 At Becky's

   Eleven reads Terry's memories and learns that another girl exists.

5. Episode 6 The absence

   Eleven does not appear in it, a first for the series.

6. Episode 7 Chicago

   Kali, the crew, Ray, then the vision: she goes home.

7. Episode 8 The reunion

   At the Byers', she kills a demodog and finds Mike again.

8. Episode 9 The gate

   At the lab, she puts her anger into her power and closes the gate.

Chicago: the arrival and Kali's crew

Eleven arrives alone in a big city. “Runaway,” by Bon Jovi, plays over her arrival. The Duffers have said they tried a lot of songs before settling on that one. A gang of punks comes to threaten her. A young woman from the gang steps forward, and Eleven recognizes the girl from the memory. It is Kali, Eight to the lab. They bear the same mark on the arm, 008 for one, 011 for the other. They see each other as sisters.

Kali does not live alone. Four outcasts surround her, and none of them comes from the lab. Axel, with a pink mohawk and bleached hair, is the most aggressive; he is afraid of spiders. Dottie, the newest recruit, ran away from a psychiatric hospital and wields sarcasm. Funshine is the oldest, and Kali sees him as a teddy bear despite his size. Mick drives the van and is the least aggressive. James Landry Hébert, Anna Jacoby-Heron, Kai Greene, and Gabrielle Maiden play them.

Viewers had already come across them. The season opened on them, on October 28, 1984, in Pittsburgh: a getaway from the police, and officers fooled by the woman with the 008 tattoo. Laura Bradley, of Vanity Fair, figured that most viewers would have forgotten it by the time they reached the seventh episode. At the hideout, the crew quickly grasps what Eleven is worth: a photo is all she needs to find someone. And the crew is hunting down the lab's former staff.

Kali, subject 008: illusion and anger

Kali Prasad bears the number 008. She is older than Eleven, went through the same lab, then escaped. Her whole life, from the lab to the final season, fits in the portrait of Kali, subject 008. Here, we stay with this 1984 stopover, where Eleven understands that she is only one among the numbered children of the lab.

Kali's power moves nothing. It deceives. She projects images into other people's minds: a butterfly that does not exist, and that you see anyway. Eleven, for her part, acts on matter. And Kali warns Eleven: they will always be “monsters.”

The lesson comes down to one gesture. Kali asks Eleven to think of a bad memory and feed her power with it. In front of them, a train car. It moves. The crew cheers. That day, anger becomes fuel, and Eleven will remember it.

The Duffers have said they often thought of The Empire Strikes Back for these scenes: a student, a mentor, the pull of the dark side. Scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock noted the parallel with Yoda, and its reversal. Luke learns that fear and anger lead to suffering. Eleven learns to use them.

Ray: the man from the lab, and Eleven's refusal

On a wall of the hideout, photos of Dr. Brenner's men. The target will be one of them: the man who tortured Terry. His name is Ray Carroll. A former lab employee, he is the one who gave Eleven's mother the electroshocks. Pruitt Taylor Vince plays him. Eleven locates him with her power. Before going, the crew robs a convenience store to gear up.

The apartment seems empty. Ray is there. The crew overpowers him, and the two sisters demand answers. Panicked, he says he was only obeying Brenner, then tries to bargain for his life: Brenner, he says, is still alive. Eleven starts to strangle him. Then she sees a photo of two little girls. His daughters. They are in another room, and they have just called the police.

Eleven lets go. Kali wants to shoot; Eleven stops her. She will not kill a father with his children close by. Ray's line, though, hangs in the air for two seasons. It proves true in 1986, when Eleven finds Brenner alive in the Nevada desert.

The return: the vision, the choice, the new look

At the hideout, Kali tries to hold Eleven back. She makes Brenner appear, Papa, as the lab children called him. The illusion tells Eleven that she carries a terrible wound, one that will spread and kill her. Eleven breaks down in tears. Kali then gives her the choice: go back to Hawkins, or stay and avenge her mother.

Later, in the Void, Eleven sees Hopper and Mike at the lab. They are in danger. The police then storm the hideout. Kali raises the illusion of a metal wall to block the officers. The crew flees; Eleven, for her part, chooses to go home to save her friends, and sets off alone toward Hawkins. An elderly passenger asks her where she is going, all by herself. She answers that she is going home.

She does not come back looking the same. The crew has given her a new outfit: secondhand clothes, punk but more pop, inspired by Madonna in the 80s, according to costume designer Kim Wilcox. Eleven also repeats a new word, “Bitchin'.” Millie Bobby Brown, who had worn the same outfits since the first season, was delighted with the change.

The rest plays out over two episodes. In the eighth, Eleven arrives at the Byers', kills a demodog, and finds Mike again. In the ninth, at the lab, she remembers Kali's lesson, puts her anger into her power, and closes the gate. It is all told in the season 2 ending, explained.

A stand-alone episode: its place, its reception, what came next

This is the episode that leaves Hawkins. For the first time, Joyce, Dustin, Lucas, Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve have no scenes in it. Hopper and Mike exist in it only through Eleven: at night, she hears Hopper's apologies, then her vision shows them to her. Matthew Modine returns as Brenner only for Kali's illusion. The Duffers were after the tone of the urban movies of the 70s and 80s, like The Terminator, a tone impossible to sustain in a small town. Rebecca Thomas directs it; her film Electrick Children, released in 2012, told a similar story. Justin Doble writes it: it is his fourth and last episode for the show. The runtimes of the nine episodes are in the season 2 fact sheet.

The project changed along the way. The episode was first called “The Lost Brother,” with a brother in his thirties, and Kali went by the name Roman. The Duffers set it in seventh place, because Eleven is missing from the sixth and nearly missing from the eighth. They also considered cutting it, or slipping it into the finale: an hour in Chicago between the gate and the dance. Without it, Eleven's ending did not feel earned to them. The season 2 recap puts it back among the nine.

They knew that an episode built like a second pilot would divide viewers. Most critics considered it the weakest of the series at that point. Vanity Fair saw it as the only misstep in a good season, and The Hollywood Reporter ranked it last across the first two seasons. IGN, by contrast, counted it among the best of the series. In the United States, Nielsen measured 5,3 million viewers on TV sets, 1,1 million fewer than for the sixth. Many fans saw it as the hidden pilot of a Kali series; executive producer Shawn Levy denied it. The rumor of a secret Stranger Things episode owes it part of its staying power.

In February 2018, Saturday Night Live parodied it, with Natalie Portman as Eleven. The Duffers, for their part, wanted to bring Kali back, without knowing whether they could. They did it in the fifth and final season, in 1987: she returns as a prisoner of the military. They explained this return by their wish not to leave an episode branded a “mistake” without a follow-up. Seen after season 5, “The Lost Sister” no longer reads as a detour.

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