One more thing about Stranger Things Season 5, and why I now realize that the writing was actually really horrendous in the final season.
Her character was introduced in Season 2, Episode 7, The Lost Sister.
Here’s my opinion: when you give characters a name, especially in a show that was known for its attention to minute details, I always assumed that the naming would be intentional.
We’ve seen this done well before. Take Arcane, for example. One of their characters is named Sevika, which comes from the Sanskrit sevaka, meaning “servant.” She represents the people who fight in a revolution without leading it — those who serve a cause they believe in rather than command it. That kind of naming is genuinely clever.
I expected something similar with Kali in Stranger Things. And there were reasons to think that.
Before Season 5 came out, the Duffer Brothers explicitly said that one of the episodes we needed to rewatch was Season 2, Episode 7.
So I rewatched it. And the first thing that stood out to me was Kali’s name.
I’m Indian. I’m Hindu. Kali is one of the goddesses I worship.
Because the name felt peculiar, I spoke to one of my aunts about it. She’s a scholar of Hinduism — well-versed in the scriptures and very critical in how she reads them, especially in how theology intersects with philosophy, sociology, and even science.
She’s never seen Stranger Things. I simply asked her about the name “Kali.”
She told me that the name can be traced back to two Sanskrit roots. In English they’re spelled similarly, but in Sanskrit and Hindi they’re written with different matras, which changes their pronunciation and meaning — and that’s why people often confuse their origins.
The two meanings are completely different.
The first translates to the color black. That aligns with the goddess Kali being described as dark-skinned.
The second translates to time — which also makes sense, because Kali is considered a goddess of time.
This is where it gets interesting. Kali is not just associated with time — she is known as the one who controls it.
When my aunt explained this, it immediately caught my attention.
I went back and rewatched Episode 7 again.
There have long been theories about Season 5 involving time travel. Season 4 leaned heavily into clock imagery — the ticking, the chiming, the repetition. It was excessive.
That theory came back to me recently because my little sister wanted to watch Stranger Things for the first time. So I started rewatching the show with her from Season 1.
In Episode 2, while Joyce is leaving Melvald’s with the new phone, the town clock chimes four times. Just like Vecna’s clock.
If the Duffers were genuinely good writers, that moment could be interpreted as an early Easter egg. But given what we now know, that probably isn’t the case.
Still, at the time, these were exactly the kinds of details that made people believe time travel would be explored in Season 5.
And when you combine that with the Duffers telling us to rewatch Season 2, Episode 7 — the episode where Kali is introduced — it strongly implied that she would return in some meaningful way.
I assumed she would come back because of her connection to time.
And that assumption wasn’t baseless.
Unlike Eleven, Henry, or the other children we see in the Season 4 flashbacks, Kali doesn’t have telekinetic or telepathic abilities. She creates illusions.
So the question becomes: why is she different? Why is she the only one with a completely separate set of powers?
That brings me to my third point: Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the play.
I haven’t seen it — I don’t live in the US — but based on what people have discussed, it establishes that Henry briefly being exposed to Dimension X as a child is what gave him his powers. The environment itself altered him.
And that exposure happened because of a Cold War government experiment gone wrong.
But the US wasn’t the only country involved in the Cold War.
The Western alliance was large, and one of America’s closest allies was the UK. We’re even shown a newspaper mentioning a kidnapped girl from London.
When I saw that, everything clicked.
What if the US wasn’t the only Western country experimenting with alternate dimensions? What if Britain — and possibly others — were involved too?
And what if similar experiments failed elsewhere?
In that case, Kali could have been a child who was directly exposed to Dimension X in the UK. And instead of developing telekinesis or telepathy like Henry, she developed a different ability entirely.
Maybe there are multiple children out there with different powers because they were exposed to Dimension X itself, rather than to someone else’s blood.
And maybe Kali was later brought into Hawkins Lab so her abilities could be studied and controlled alongside the others.
That line of reasoning led me to believe that Kali would eventually gain control over time — and that she would play a key role in helping the group.
That direction makes sense.
But none of it happened, because it was never intended.
They picked the name for no real reason.
They gave the name “Kali” to the only dark-skinned Indian character in the show — and yes, I am absolutely calling that out.
Kali is not a common name in India outside of direct reference to the goddess. And in Indian society, which is deeply affected by colorism, “Kali” is often used as a derogatory term for dark-skinned girls. It’s associated with social stigma, marriage prospects, and perceived failure — and that mindset still exists in many parts of India today.
So giving that name to a dark-skinned Indian character feels deeply out of touch.
But honestly, it doesn’t seem like the Duffers are good enough writers to have researched any of this. They clearly didn’t understand the cultural weight of the name they chose.
And that’s the frustrating part — because if they were good writers, this storyline would have made perfect sense.
