Ever since Matt and Ross Duffer blessed us with Stranger Things back in 2016, we’ve been hooked on the nostalgic ’80s vibes, terrifying monsters, and that perfect blend of horror and heart. But let’s be real, even our beloved Netflix flagship series has dropped the ball on some storylines.
With Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, and the rest of the gang gearing up for the fifth and final season, it’s time to address the elephant in the Upside Down: all those plot threads that mysteriously vanished faster than Will Byers in Season 1.
From forgotten birthdays to missing characters who deserved better, we’re ranking the most frustrating abandoned storylines that still keep fans up at night. Grab your Eggos and let’s dive in!
10. Hopper’s Magical Healing Ankle
David Harbour’s Jim Hopper is tough as nails, but even he can’t defy basic human anatomy (or so we thought). In Season 4’s Russian prison storyline, Hopper deliberately fractures his ankle to slip out of those handcuffs, and we see him struggling through the snow, clearly in agony.
It’s brutal and realistic… until the show just forgets about it entirely. Next thing you know, Hopper’s battling a full-grown Demogorgon without so much as a limp. When Joyce (Winona Ryder) finally treats his wounds later, she somehow doesn’t notice or mention his supposedly broken foot.
Look, we get it, the Duffers had a lot going on with the split storylines across Russia, California, and Hawkins. But fractured ankles don’t just heal overnight, even with Hopper’s superhuman dad energy.
This isn’t about expecting medical drama levels of realism, but basic continuity would’ve been nice. A simple line acknowledging the injury or showing Hopper toughing it out would’ve made all the difference. Instead, it’s like the injury never happened, which is just sloppy storytelling.
9. Nancy & Jonathan’s Stalled Romance
After three seasons of building up Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) and Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) as the show’s central romantic couple, Season 4 basically hit pause on their entire relationship.
The two spent the season separated by thousands of miles, with Jonathan secretly applying to community college in California instead of Emerson with Nancy, all while getting high with his new buddy Argyle. Meanwhile, Nancy’s investigating Vecna in Hawkins alongside her ex Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), who conveniently reveals he’s still in love with her and imagines their future together, complete with six kids in an RV.
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The Duffers teased this love triangle (love corner, more like it) hard. But when Nancy and Jonathan finally reunited in the finale, their awkward tension went completely unresolved.
Jonathan’s lying about college, Nancy’s confused feelings about Steve, and the whole relationship feels like it’s been put on ice while the writers figure out what to do with it. For a romance that was built as the antithesis to Nancy’s superficial relationship with Steve in Season 1, watching it crumble offscreen feels like a narrative cop-out.
8. Why Did the Demogorgon Really Want Will?
So here’s something that’s bugged fans since day one: the Demogorgon was supposedly attracted to blood, right? That’s why it grabbed Barb (played by Shannon Purser), and how Nancy and Jonathan lured it with a blood trap. But Will’s (Noah Schnapp) first encounter breaks this rule completely.
The creature spotted him near Hawkins Lab and literally hunted him down to his house and then to that shed, no blood involved. Joyce even dropped a hint, calling Will a “sensitive kid,” which felt significant at the time. Was he more vulnerable to the Upside Down? Did he have some latent psychic ability that made him a target? The show never bothered to explain it.
This inconsistency becomes even weirder when you consider how methodical the Demogorgon was with Will versus its other victims. It’s almost like it chose him specifically, which could’ve tied into something bigger about Will’s connection to that dimension. Instead, we’re left scratching our heads about why our favorite bowl-cut kid became Patient Zero.
7. The Town That Forgot to Ask Questions
Can we talk about how Hawkins, Indiana, has the most gullible population ever? Season 1 ended with this elaborate government cover-up involving a fake body, a very public funeral for Will, and then (surprise!) Will’s magically alive again!
The Duffers showed us the funeral scene but never explained what story the town actually believed. How did Joyce explain her son’s resurrection to the neighbors? What did people think about the body they buried? Did Hawkins Lab just throw money at everyone to shut up?
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The show hints that Hopper made some kind of deal with the shady government scientists to sweep everything under the rug, but we never get details. Season 2 tried to address this with Nancy’s crusade to expose the lab, but even that felt incomplete.
For a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business, the residents of Hawkins are remarkably incurious about all the weird stuff happening. This isn’t just about one plot hole; it’s about the show’s reluctance to explore how ordinary people process extraordinary (and traumatic) events in their community.
6. Eleven’s Disappearing Vocabulary
Season 4 threw us a curveball with those Hawkins Lab flashbacks, and eagle-eyed fans noticed something weird. Young Eleven, played brilliantly by Millie Bobby Brown, could communicate pretty well back in 1979 when she was hanging with the other test subjects.
She had conversations, understood complex instructions, and spoke in full sentences. But when she escaped in 1983 and met Mike (Finn Wolfhard), she could barely string two words together. “Bad.” “Mouth breather.” That was about it.
The timeline doesn’t add up, and the Duffers never addressed this regression in her communication skills. Was it trauma from banishing One/Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) to the Upside Down? Did Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) do something to suppress her cognitive abilities? Or did the writers just not plan that far ahead when creating the flashback sequences?
This feels like a significant continuity error that could’ve been explained with one line of dialogue about psychological trauma or memory suppression. Instead, it’s another head-scratcher in a season that was otherwise pretty tight with its mythology.
5. The Upside Down’s Time Paradox Problem
Season 4 dropped a major revelation when Nancy discovered that the Upside Down is frozen on November 6, 1983 —the exact day Will vanished and Eleven first contacted the Demogorgon. Super cool concept, right? Except it creates a massive problem with Season 1.
If everything in the Upside Down is stuck on November 6, how did Will see and respond to Joyce’s Christmas lights alphabet wall that she painted several days after that date? Those lights and letters shouldn’t exist in Will’s version of the Byers’ house.
The Duffers never addressed this contradiction directly, though some fans theorized that light sources in the real world create particle clusters in the Upside Down, which Will manipulated to spell out messages. That’s actually a clever explanation, but here’s the thing: it’s fan theory, not canon.
The show needed to explain its own rules about how these dimensions interact, especially after introducing such a specific detail about the time freeze. This paradox goes beyond nitpicking; it affects our understanding of how the Upside Down actually works and whether the rules established in Season 1 still apply.
4. Vecna’s Weirdly Passive Final Battle
The Duffers spent all of Season 4 building up Vecna as the ultimate big bad, and Jamie Campbell Bower absolutely killed it with that terrifying performance. This dude created the Mind Flayer, opened the original gate, and had been orchestrating everything from the shadows for years. So why did he just… stand there during the finale?
When Steve, Nancy, and Robin (Maya Hawke) attacked him in the Upside Down with Molotov cocktails, Vecna barely defended himself. Sure, he sent vines after them initially, choking them out, but then he just released them for no clear reason.
And during the actual fire attack? He literally stood there absorbing each flaming bottle with seconds between throws, never fighting back or using his considerable powers. Some fans argue he was distracted fighting Eleven in Max’s (Sadie Sink) mind simultaneously, but the show never confirmed this as the reason.
For someone so strategic and powerful, this passivity felt less like a character choice and more like the writers needed the heroes to win. It undermined what should’ve been a terrifying confrontation and made Vecna seem oddly incompetent despite being set up as unstoppable.
3. The Birthday Nobody Remembered (Including the Writers)
Oh boy, this one’s awkward. Season 2 clearly established Will’s birthday as March 22 when Joyce told him a story about his birth. Fast forward to Season 4, and the camera timestamp at Rink-O-Mania shows March 22, 1986: Will’s 15th birthday. Yet nobody (not Mike, not Eleven, not Jonathan, and not even Joyce) acknowledges it. Not a single “happy birthday,” card, or cake.
Noah Schnapp’s sad puppy dog eyes hit different when you realize everyone forgot his birthday. Here’s where it gets even better: Matt and Ross Duffer admitted in a Variety interview that they straight-up forgot about Will’s birthday when planning the season’s timeline.
Matt said they were debating whether to “George Lucas it” and digitally alter Joyce’s Season 2 dialogue to change his birthday to May 22, or “just let it be really sad.” Ross called it “obviously a mistake” and apologized to fans and especially to Will.
While this could’ve been spun as intentional character development (showing how isolated Will felt in California), nope, just an honest-to-goodness whoopsie. It’s simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, and perfectly encapsulates how Will keeps getting the short end of the stick in his own show.
2. Barb’s Half-Finished Justice Arc
Shannon Purser’s Barbara Holland appeared in exactly three episodes but somehow became Stranger Things‘ first breakout character. The #JusticeForBarb movement exploded across social media, with fans demanding acknowledgment for Nancy’s loyal best friend, who was brutally killed by the Demogorgon while everyone obsessed over Will.
Season 2 tried to address this with Nancy’s subplot exposing Hawkins Lab’s role in Barb’s death, getting her parents closure through a fabricated toxic spill story. Season 4 even had Vecna torture Nancy with visions of Barb’s corpse, proving the guilt still haunted her.
But here’s the problem: Barb remained a plot device for Nancy’s character development rather than a fully realized person whose death mattered to the broader community. The Duffers promised justice, and while we got some, it never felt complete. Barb represented every overlooked, loyal friend who gets left behind, and her death highlighted how easily people become collateral damage.
The show partially delivered on the fan outcry but never truly honored what Barb meant beyond being Nancy’s motivation. Even Purser’s Emmy nomination couldn’t save Barb from being remembered primarily as a meme rather than a meaningful character, which feels like a missed opportunity for a show that usually nails emotional depth.
1. Kali: The Sister Who Vanished Into Thin Air
Remember “The Lost Sister“? That controversial Season 2, Episode 7, where Eleven tracked down Kali Prasad (Linnea Berthelsen), aka Eight, in Chicago? Yeah, the Duffers apparently want us to forget that too.
Kali was another Hawkins Lab escapee with completely different powers: creating realistic illusions instead of telekinesis. She and Eleven bonded over shared trauma, Kali taught El to channel anger for strength, and then… nothing. Complete radio silence for Seasons 3 and 4. Despite Matt and Ross Duffer telling The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 that
chances are very high she comes back
and
it feels weird to me that we wouldn’t solve [her] storyline,
Kali has been MIA ever since. Season 4’s extensive Hawkins Lab flashbacks featuring all the numbered kids somehow never mentioned her, even though the timeline confirms she escaped before the 1979 massacre.
Here’s why this is the biggest abandoned storyline: Kali’s illusion powers could’ve been crucial against Vecna, who also manipulates minds. She’s one of the few survivors who knew One/Henry Creel before he became the season’s big bad.
Her relationship with Eleven, their contrasting approaches to trauma (vengeance versus love), and her entire gang setup screamed “we’ll return to this.” But four seasons later, “The Lost Sister” stands as the series’ lowest-rated episode and biggest narrative dead end. Season 5 is our last chance for Kali’s redemption, but at this point, fans aren’t holding their breath.
Look, we love Stranger Things, that’s why we’re talking about its plot holes! Matt and Ross Duffer have created something special, and most of these abandoned storylines are honestly forgivable given the show’s massive scope.
But as we head into the final season, we’re really hoping the brothers tie up at least some of these loose ends. Will deserves his moment (and an acknowledged birthday). Kali deserves closure. And we all deserve answers about how the Upside Down actually works.
What abandoned storyline frustrates you the most? Think the Duffers will bring back Kali for Season 5? Drop your theories in the comments below!
Ready to rewatch and spot these plot holes yourself? Stranger Things Seasons 1-4 are currently streaming on Netflix. Season 5 (the epic conclusion) is all set to premiere in November of this year. Time to grab those Eggos and dive back into the Upside Down!
