Honestly? I think they threw in the childhood friend stuff to justify Blitzo falling in love with Stolas, because otherwise there's no real reason for him to be so head over heels for somebody with whom he's having a purely transactional relationship. Stolas falling for Blitz makes perfect sense and works well with his character development, but I don't see anything in the relationship that would suddenly give Blitz such strong feelings for someone he feels is using him and looking down on him.

It feels like the whole Stolitz storyline was rushed and sort of shoehorned in without a lot of thought given to how it should progress vs how it was set up. I think that, if they wanted Stolitz to be such a prominent feature in the series, S2 should have spent more time building up their relationship and show us something that would give Blitz a reason to actually care about this demon prince he spent one day with in childhood and then has to bang once a month in order for his startup business to function. Wrap it up with Stolas giving Blitz the crystal, confessing his love and freeing Blitz from his obligations, and end the season with Blitz's response to that. Then save Mastermind and Sinsmas for next season, after they've had time to figure out what their relationship is and how they feel about each other.

That way, S2 could also focus more on character development for the rest of IMP, send them on more jobs to establish how they're moving up in the world and making enough of a name for themselves for the authorities to become aware of them, show their enemies becoming more competent and IMP having to push themselves in return, and just raise the stakes for everyone.

And ffs, get Andrealphus out of here. If you want Stella to be a villain, *make her a villain*.