In episode 7, entitled, “The Lost Sister,” we open on Eleven’s mother, Terry, telling her story to Eleven. “Breathe. Sunflower. 3 to the right, 4 to the left. Rainbow. 450.” A string of words that Terry Ives has been repeating for years, documenting how she lost Eleven and her attempts to retrieve her. Eleven, after watching the memories, is curious about another girl that she saw in her memories. After using her powers to locate the girl, she goes after her, leaving her mother and her aunt behind. Eleven is lead to a warehouse, in which lives a band of outcasts. Kali, the girl from the visions, is one of them, another Hawkins lab experiment with the numbers “008” tattooed on her arm. The group is dedicated to killing former Hawkins Lab employees in order to avenge the suffering of the many victims of experimentation. The group invites her to join them, and they give her the iconic “punk Eleven” look. Eleven decides to assist the group on a mission, but after coming very close to killing the target, she empathizes with him and his family. The rest of the group realizes that the rest of his family were actually in the house the entire time and have called the police. The group makes an escape from the cops, but it is close. When they return, Eleven and Kali argue about the morality behind killing the Hawkins employees, but are interrupted by police officers busting into their headquarters. The group clambers into their van, but Eleven runs off in another direction. She gets on a bus, presumably returning to Hopper’s home.
Eleven has always been a mysterious character. Very little information was given about her past in the first season, and this episode is incredibly full of character background. While it was interesting, I personally didn’t appreciate the implementation of this timeline. I preferred Eleven as more of a mysterious figure with an empty past, and I think this episode provided a lot of exposition that wasn’t absolutely necessary. It gave Millie Bobby Brown more opportunities to show variety (which was probably the main highlight of this episode), but as far as the plot is concerned, it didn’t move the story forward and it didn’t stay true to the main idea of Eleven’s character. I wanted to learn more about her personality rather than about her past. The only aspect of this episode that I found incredibly interesting was Eleven’s sudden reluctance to kill. While with her sister, she is meant to execute a former Hawkins Lab employee, someone who hurt her and destroyed her life, yet she still refrains from harming him. It was an exclusive glance into the inner working of her mind, one that shows how much she values family.
The episode “The Lost Sister,” isn’t the best in the Stranger Things franchise, and it certainly wasn’t satisfying in terms of development of Eleven’s values and ideas. It was, however, worth the watch, specifically for the acting and the completion of the season (because it’s painful to leave an episode unwatched).