#note: I'm not using the word retcon is a negative way necessarily

[jq37]

I'm so confused about Kalina, she helped them??? And now she's being set up as the villain?

Yeah man, as far as I can tell this is just a straight up retcon.

Which was technically soft setup earlier in the season when we learn that kitten Kalina was a wedding present which isn't how you'd usually get a familiar (see eg: Adaine summoning Boggy). So hypothetically she could have more agency than a regular familiar if she's essentially just Cass's regular pet. But she's still mechanically treated like a regular familiar--Brennan says that if she kills herself she can just respawn. So that's not quite buttoned up.

And she did 100% help that out by giving them the Ragh clue and killing herself in the Baron episode to keep herself from attacking any of them.

If you want my read on the situation, I think that Brennan intended Kalina to be not evil but at odds with Kristen because of how blasé she was at the top of the season in a way that was hurting her mistress. But Kristen/Ally seized onto the idea that Kalina was shady so Brennan leaned into it with Ankarna also hating Kalina and used it as the plot hook for season 4 since it was one of the untied loose ends. And I can say confidently that this is plausible because in the AP, Brennan said he was gonna have it be just that Fabian was getting a new dog not a new sibling, but that got a more muted reaction so he pivoted to the funnier thing.

But yeah, that's not typically how familiars work and it struck me as an odd choice, especially since I didn't really read Kalina as being wrong at the top of the season, even thought Kristen didn't trust her.