Does Eleven meet Mike in Season 2?

In the third episode of Stranger Things 2, Eleven sees Mike laughing with another girl and does what anyone with her powers and a petty streak would do: She knocks the girl right off her skateboard. Elle, who's been holed up with Hopper and cut off from her friends for nearly a year, assumes she's been replaced, but that's far from the truth. The girl is Max, and Mike had until then been rejecting her attempts at friendship out of loyalty to Elle, whom he's been trying to reach by walkie-talkie every night since she turned to Demogorgon dust. Max is technically the new girl of the group, even if Mike won't let her join the "party," and she's an awesome, tough, interesting one at that. But she's not the new Eleven. By the end of the season, the new Eleven is Eleven herself — the more grown-up and self-assured version she becomes while apart from the boys.

Season-1 Elle was a hero on several occasions: when she saved Mike from his cliff jump, when she flipped the van, when she squeezed the brains out of some Hawkins National Laboratory bad guys. But she was more Terminator-esque, if you swap muscle for psychic ability, than human. She said only one word ("Eleven") in the premiere, then got her nickname, love of Eggo waffles, and a lesson in the words "friends" and "promise" — all core elements of her character — from the boys in the second episode. She made Mike's bully pee himself. She searched the Upside Down for Barb and Will. She broke the pee kid's arm. While these were all glorious moments that rightly turned Eleven into an excellent Halloween costume, they revolved around the boys. "She’s our friend and she’s crazy," Dustin yells in one scene. As a viewer, you get much of your affection for Elle through her friends — the things she does for them and the ways they react in awe. In season 2, you get that affection from watching her own journey of self discovery.

While she uses her power to "visit" with Mike and enjoys triple-decker Eggo extravaganzas with Hopper, she spends much of the second season isolated and ... thinking. Who is Mama? Where is home? If friends don't lie, what is the truth? Hopper dismisses her angst, repeating some version of "it’s a risk, we don’t take risks, they’re stupid" every time she asks for a taste of freedom. Like any kid in that situation would, she rebels, only she throws dishes and a dictionary, flings a couch, overturns a bookshelf, and breaks windows with her mind. It's a coming-of-age story for a girl with superpowers.

Eventually, Elle leaves the cabin — the place we see her call "home" in a flashback — to find Mama, whose photo she discovers in a hidden file. "She always believed that you’d come home one day," her aunt tells her. "Home," Elle repeats. She's grappling with the meaning of a word that is as much concept as it is noun. Unfortunately, Mama doesn't have the answers — she's stuck in a dream circle reliving key moments in Eleven's abduction and her own electroshock therapy. But Elle believes her mother wants her to find the other little girl from the Rainbow Room, a place revealed to Elle in the loop, and before Elle can get snatched up by the authorities, she leaves Home No. 2 on a quest.

This takes Elle to Chicago, where she meets her sister, Kali (a.k.a. Eight), the young woman who caused a car crash at the very beginning of the season. It turns out Kali has the ability to make people see, or not see, whatever she wishes. She's on a perpetual mission to find and kill everyone responsible for her lab-room childhood, and in part, she represents the criminal life that can result from power unchecked. "I think this is your home," she tells Eleven, who introduced herself earlier with her birth name, Jane. "Home," Jane repeats.

While Kali is not totally trustworthy, she's the only person who's so far managed to convince Jane she's not a monster, that she should be proud of her "gift," and that's not nothing. (She also allows for the obligatory eighties makeover scene.) But by pressuring Jane to use her power in a way that doesn't suit her — Kali wants Jane to kill a man with two kids — Kali inadvertently teaches Jane another lesson. Jane does want limits. She has compassion for people. She doesn't want her anger to fester, and she doesn't think letting it loose is the way to prevent that from happening.

When she sees Hopper and Mike are in trouble, she tearfully parts ways with Kali and gets on a bus to Hawthorne. "I’m going to my friends," she tells a fellow passenger. "I’m going home."

She now knows what that is, but she wouldn't have had she not had the space to carve out her own identity, one separate from the boys. As hard as it was to see her without Mike and the gang for seven episodes, her newfound confidence — as a friend, as a surrogate daughter, as a destroyer of Demogorgons, and as a Snow Ball date — was worth it. She's that much more interesting and whole as a character. Unfortunately for Max, she's also still petty as hell.

What episode does Mike see Eleven in Season 2?

Does Eleven meet Mike again?

What episode does 11 and Mike reunite?

What season does Eleven reunite with Mike?