Thank god they dropped the X-Women plot line
Very happy to see the season2 mistep stay buried.
shareI think we're going to see Kali (Eight) at some point in the future. For the purpose of whatever role she's destined to play, they needed to have her and El already know each other. I think they did it wrong, by interrupting the flow of the story for Eleven's road trip to the city, but everything from season 2 on has been scripted with a knowledge of where things ultimately go. So it may have been clumsily executed but it wasn't a random thing.
shareYou may be right, but the fact that there was nary a mention of her during the whole of season 3, even after her plot line was the opener of s2, suggests to me that she was intended to play a bigger roll, but was perhaps dropped due to obvious problems and viewer feedback. At least I’d like to think so.
You can basically skip the episode and would be none the wiser, and probably have a better experience for it.
I’m sure the Indian girl who played her must be bummed though
I was thinking in terms of their perhaps having to gather up all the surviving subjects for the final showdown against the Mind Flayer. It knows Eleven now. It doesn't know any of the others exist yet.
I would've distributed her road trip among, say, episodes five through seven running in parallel with the other segments. They switched between Mike, Will, and Joyce, Lucas and Max, Steve and Dustin, and so forth, so just intersperse the segments with Eleven. There are contact points - when she's in her water space checking in - that tell you where she is at certain moments in the Hawkins timeline.
So halfway through Ep. 7 we see her on the bus, and the rest of the episode is back home. Ep. 7 ends at the same point Ep. 6 did, and the action just continues uninterrupted since El's storyline has already concluded. That's how I would have done it. Once things start going sideways at Hawkins Lab there are no diversions. Of course I also would've had Mike reunite with El when she went to the school and then run off and hit the road together (he really wasn't needed in Hawkins during the middle of the season).
I'm hoping the character of Kali has a reason for existing because otherwise that whole plot thread was pointless.