A heady mix of wonder, horror and nostalgia - not to mention an awesome title font - has made Stranger Things one of the biggest TV hits in years.
Last week Netflix released season two of the series, which tells the story of supernatural goings-on in an idyllic American town, to near-universal acclaim.
I've binge-watched most of it and will finish tonight. That's a little slower than many fans, but still a respectable burn rate.
There are so many things to love about Stranger Things - the spooky synth soundtrack, the stunning audio direction, the clever nods to Gremlins, Stephen King novels, Spielberg and other 80s cultural watersheds.
But episode seven should have been hurled into another dimension.
Warning: There be spoilers ahead
The standalone storyline of episode seven is clearly supposed to develop the character of Eleven, aka El aka Jane Ives, the psychokinetic girl who spent her childhood cruelly subjected to tests in the Hawkins National Laboratory.
It was Eleven who unwittingly created a link between this world and the creepy dimension known as "The Upside Down" when she encountered the horrifying demogorgon monster during an out-of-body experience in season one.
After a disturbing psychic encounter with her mentally afflicted mother reveals a some of Eleven's backstory, our telepathic heroine decides to track down another former inmate of the Hawkins lab, her "lost sister" Kali.
She finds Kali, whose superpower is making people see things that aren't real, in a Chicago warehouse-cum-hipster-lair with a bunch of misfits.
The gang's daily routine? Tracking down and killing former Hawkins lab employees who abused girls like Eleven and Kali.
And what an unconvincing gang they are. There's a sneering punk with a floppy mohawk, a very large man who is the gang's "muscle" but also a "teddy-bear", a Macy Gray-lookalike and an escapee from a Bonnie Tyler film clip.
They all share something in common - in that they are cobbled-together stereotypes completely devoid of realistic emotional lives or believable motivation. Pac-Man is a more rounded character, simply because he's an actual circle.
Kali herself is slightly more three-dimensional, but still not convincing. It's spelled out that she is a dark version of what Eleven could become should she let anger consume her, but even her "in it for revenge" story feels like a hollowed-out cliche.
This being Stranger Things, there are still some bright spots in the episode - the moral quandary that splits El and Kali in a key scene is tense and rings true.
But I spent most of a bewildering hour wondering if this was even the same show. If this were Stranger Things' first episode, I may not have tuned in for a second.
To make matters worse, this hot mess comes on the heels of a thrilling episode six, which ended with a pod of demogorgons scrambling up an elevator shaft towards a good number of the show's heroes.
The episode has generated enough negative reaction from fans that Stranger Things' creators, the Duffer Brothers, felt compelled to defend it.
"Whether it works for people or not, it allows us to experiment a little bit," Matt Duffer said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. "It's almost like doing a whole little other pilot episode in the middle of your season."
"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."
Fair play, Duffer Brothers. After all, you've created this wildly successful show and I'm just some disgruntled nerd-fan with a keyboard and an hour to spare.
But I have one request - get rid of the punk, the muscle-man, the soul singer and the Bonnie Tyler reject. They are beyond redemption, like Jar Jar Binks, Howard the Duck and the Sand Snakes from Game of Thrones.
May I suggest death by demogorgon?
