The Worst Episode Of ‘Stranger Things 2’ Has Me Slightly Worried About ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’
By Ben Pearson/Oct. 30, 2017 11:00 am EST
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Stranger Things 2. Proceed with caution if you haven’t finished watching the new season yet. The seventh episode of Stranger Things 2, entitled “The Lost Sister,” is the show’s largest divergence thus far. In it, Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown) travels to Chicago to seek out her “sister,” a young woman named Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) who has “008” tattooed on her arm in the same place Eleven has her “011” and was also experimented on at the Hawkins Lab. The episode focuses on their relationship and doesn’t cut back to Hawkins or the other characters at all, and taking a quick glance at social media, it’s clear that the attempt to widen the show’s mythology did not succeed the way the Duffer Brothers hoped it would.
The showrunners have released a new statement defending the episode, and you can read their comments below. But watching that episode, I felt a twinge of worry about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. That may seem a bit nutty, but I’ll explain why.
The Star Wars Connection
But it’s Ross Duffer’s comment that drew a direct line to something I was thinking about during that very episode – Star Wars:
“That Eleven story line overall is sort of the biggest risk we took. We’re going to continue to do risks moving forward to keep us on our toes. I didn’t want her to just magically save the day. Just like Luke Skywalker, she needed to go off on her own and learn something about herself.”
Think about how many filmmakers have referenced The Empire Strikes Back as an influence when it comes to making a sequel. Now think about how many of those sequels worked nearly as well as Empire. It’s not a high percentage. Eleven spends most of Stranger Things 2 away from the rest of the main cast, and robbing the audience of the dynamic that worked so well in the first season simply wasn’t worth it for the storyline we got in season 2. We know Rey (Daisy Ridley) will be spending quite a bit of Star Wars: The Last Jedi training with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and away from Finn (John Boyega) and BB-8, with whom she shared terrific chemistry in The Force Awakens. We’ve also heard rumblings that The Last Jedi takes some storytelling chances and will prove divisive when it comes out.
At the end of the day, of course I’d like to see more storytellers take chances in film and television. But I don’t think the only two options are “Do what you did in season 1 again” or “blow the whole thing up from the inside out” – there’s a happy medium in there somewhere that Stranger Things 2 doesn’t quite achieve, and while I have faith in The Last Jedi writer/director Rian Johnson as a storyteller, I’m hoping the character dynamics we loved from The Force Awakens aren’t sacrificed in service of driving the plot. Nine out of ten times, it’s the characters that the audience falls in love with, not the plot.
The Worst Episode Of ‘Stranger Things 2’ Has Me Slightly Worried About ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’
By Ben Pearson/Oct. 30, 2017 11:00 am EST
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Stranger Things 2. Proceed with caution if you haven’t finished watching the new season yet. The seventh episode of Stranger Things 2, entitled “The Lost Sister,” is the show’s largest divergence thus far. In it, Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown) travels to Chicago to seek out her “sister,” a young woman named Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) who has “008” tattooed on her arm in the same place Eleven has her “011” and was also experimented on at the Hawkins Lab. The episode focuses on their relationship and doesn’t cut back to Hawkins or the other characters at all, and taking a quick glance at social media, it’s clear that the attempt to widen the show’s mythology did not succeed the way the Duffer Brothers hoped it would.
The showrunners have released a new statement defending the episode, and you can read their comments below. But watching that episode, I felt a twinge of worry about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. That may seem a bit nutty, but I’ll explain why.
The seventh episode of Stranger Things 2, entitled “The Lost Sister,” is the show’s largest divergence thus far. In it, Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown) travels to Chicago to seek out her “sister,” a young woman named Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) who has “008” tattooed on her arm in the same place Eleven has her “011” and was also experimented on at the Hawkins Lab. The episode focuses on their relationship and doesn’t cut back to Hawkins or the other characters at all, and taking a quick glance at social media, it’s clear that the attempt to widen the show’s mythology did not succeed the way the Duffer Brothers hoped it would.
The showrunners have released a new statement defending the episode, and you can read their comments below. But watching that episode, I felt a twinge of worry about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. That may seem a bit nutty, but I’ll explain why.
The Worst Episode of Stranger Things 2
The Duffers spoke with Entertainment Weekly and defended their decision to include that divergence from the main storyline:
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."
“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.
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.
The Star Wars Connection
But it’s Ross Duffer’s comment that drew a direct line to something I was thinking about during that very episode – Star Wars:
“That Eleven story line overall is sort of the biggest risk we took. We’re going to continue to do risks moving forward to keep us on our toes. I didn’t want her to just magically save the day. Just like Luke Skywalker, she needed to go off on her own and learn something about herself.”
Think about how many filmmakers have referenced The Empire Strikes Back as an influence when it comes to making a sequel. Now think about how many of those sequels worked nearly as well as Empire. It’s not a high percentage. Eleven spends most of Stranger Things 2 away from the rest of the main cast, and robbing the audience of the dynamic that worked so well in the first season simply wasn’t worth it for the storyline we got in season 2. We know Rey (Daisy Ridley) will be spending quite a bit of Star Wars: The Last Jedi training with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and away from Finn (John Boyega) and BB-8, with whom she shared terrific chemistry in The Force Awakens. We’ve also heard rumblings that The Last Jedi takes some storytelling chances and will prove divisive when it comes out.
At the end of the day, of course I’d like to see more storytellers take chances in film and television. But I don’t think the only two options are “Do what you did in season 1 again” or “blow the whole thing up from the inside out” – there’s a happy medium in there somewhere that Stranger Things 2 doesn’t quite achieve, and while I have faith in The Last Jedi writer/director Rian Johnson as a storyteller, I’m hoping the character dynamics we loved from The Force Awakens aren’t sacrificed in service of driving the plot. Nine out of ten times, it’s the characters that the audience falls in love with, not the plot.
Think about how many filmmakers have referenced The Empire Strikes Back as an influence when it comes to making a sequel. Now think about how many of those sequels worked nearly as well as Empire. It’s not a high percentage. Eleven spends most of Stranger Things 2 away from the rest of the main cast, and robbing the audience of the dynamic that worked so well in the first season simply wasn’t worth it for the storyline we got in season 2. We know Rey (Daisy Ridley) will be spending quite a bit of Star Wars: The Last Jedi training with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and away from Finn (John Boyega) and BB-8, with whom she shared terrific chemistry in The Force Awakens. We’ve also heard rumblings that The Last Jedi takes some storytelling chances and will prove divisive when it comes out.
“That Eleven story line overall is sort of the biggest risk we took. We’re going to continue to do risks moving forward to keep us on our toes. I didn’t want her to just magically save the day. Just like Luke Skywalker, she needed to go off on her own and learn something about herself.”
At the end of the day, of course I’d like to see more storytellers take chances in film and television. But I don’t think the only two options are “Do what you did in season 1 again” or “blow the whole thing up from the inside out” – there’s a happy medium in there somewhere that Stranger Things 2 doesn’t quite achieve, and while I have faith in The Last Jedi writer/director Rian Johnson as a storyteller, I’m hoping the character dynamics we loved from The Force Awakens aren’t sacrificed in service of driving the plot. Nine out of ten times, it’s the characters that the audience falls in love with, not the plot.
