as a queer person who was in love with his best friend for 7 years, i would NOT have an epilogue boyfriend. not a single queer writer on this damn team. not a single one.
I think I get so upset about Kali's storyline not just because it's incredibly sad and violating and suffering for the sake of suffering (which are already pretty big reasons), but because...
It is so fucking dumb.
Basically what they told us in the show is that the Mindflayer connection rests in the blood, and if you take that blood and give it to pregnant women, the babies will develop that same connection with the Mindflayer—thus the babies develop powers, right? And that's why they kept Henry around, because they needed his blood; and that's what they tried to do to Kali but her blood "made the women sick" (how such a racist plot point managed to pass is beyond me). And they show Dr. Kay taking a lot of blood from Kali, and a LOT of pregnant women being experimented on.
And, to put it simply, that's not how any of that works. Walk with me:
I've tried researching (I know, the Duffers could never) about it and just the surface level stuff already tells me there's a lot to donating blood. Like, sure, you can replenish your blood volume in about 48 hours by drinking enough water, but your blood has several different types of cells, and they all get replenished at different rates. Most annoyingly, the cells that is responsible for oxygenating the rest of your cells and tissues (red cells) needs about 3-4 MONTHS to be replenished to normal levels. So, if you're gonna do stuff that needs blood, there's a limit of how much one person can provide blood for your. And since Kali was born female, she needs more time to replenish, so you can only take about 3 pints/1,5L of blood from her A YEAR. But, admittedly, that is assuming they want the absolutely best blood from her in order to have the best chance of creating viable Numbers.
So, not only would they have very little good blood to work with, but during pregnancy, the mother doesn't share blood with the fetus—the fetus has its own blood that circulates between the fetus, the umbilical cord and the placenta, where the carbon dioxide and other ejects from the fetus's system are dumped so that the mother's circulatory system can deal with it. There's very little exchange of actual blood cells between the two systems. Why would giving the women blood do anything to the babies' blood?
"Oh, Yapper, but bloodborne diseases can pass from mother to fetus through the placenta!" Well, if it works like a blood infection, they still don't need a ton of fucking blood, do they? They don't need to be treating Henry and Kali like a fucking milking cow, now, do they? And if it's bloodborne, surely the women would also develop powers, no? Since they have a lot more blood for the infection to spread? Why are we making such constant transfusions?
"Oh, but Yapper, they might need very little blood!" Then Dr. Kay wouldn't take as much as she did, which Kali says in the show that is was enough for her to think of Dr. Kay as "a vampire" (Duffers, I fucking hate you and your corny lines—you sound like a 13yo trying to write something cool and evocative with zero experience). And also, if you just need a bit of blood, why the fuck is Kali stuck to that damn table UPRIGHT the entire fucking time???
And the worst part is, the Duffers themselves already wrote a way out of this in S1—the pregnant women were a part of MKUltra. The government pumped them full of drugs, including LSD, and the babies came out with powers. But there were also side effects for the moms, exemplified by how Terry could manipulate the lights in her house (and the TV static) to communicate. They didn't need blood at all. AND apparently there were hints in The First Shadow that Henry's relation to El was different; like it could be inferred that she specifically was his biological child. So what the lab would ACTUALLY need to recreate the numbers would be genetic material—therefore, they needed El and Kali to stay in the lab because they wanted their eggs.
The reason why Dr. Kay was "hitting a wall" in S5E1 could have been because Kali had just had a miscarriage, or yet another one, or some genetic problem was affecting her eggs (meaning there would be no need for a dozen of pregnant women to be used as shock value) thus making IVF non-viable. And, you know, maybe having an interdimensional tether to a hivemind can affect your genes in unpredictable ways. Who knows? It's a sci-fi show, and if I can find enough science to come up with all this in LESS THAN A DAY OF SURFACE-LEVEL RESEARCH, maybe the guys getting paid half a billion dollars to write the damn show could've come up with something that made even more sense than this.
They could've even used Kali for more than just creating more numbers—her powers could have been the basis or the source of whatever kryptonite beam the military was using against El, and that could be why they needed her to be fucking immobile in the center of the room. Kali could've been the one powering that shit, making her rescue be a huge leg up against the military for the main characters. And that damn beam could've been used against the demogorgons, too; you're telling me that they can imobilize El and Kali specifically, and yet they do not fuck up the demogorgons' connection with Vecna and/or the Mindflayer in any way, even though they all come from the same source according to your own script? You're telling me that they had a whole base in the Upside-down, studying every creature from that place, and there wasn't a single thought about how to handle a horde of demogorgons?
Ok, I have to stop thinking about this because the more I think, the more holes in the plot I find, and the more pissed off I get. The conclusion is: there was a better way to handle the military's plan and how that interacted with Kali and El's plot, and the fact that I, someone who's not payed to write in any capacity, could at least start thinking about a way that made more sense and required less actors to pull off than canon, IS RIDICULOUS and the Duffers should be ashamed for the rest of their lives for making this pile of bullshit their legacy.
duffers had the chance to make something genuinely good and fun with tales from '85 and they instead chose to do the equivalent of pointing a shotgun at their already barely hanging on plot
