Stranger Things began as a sci-fi adventure the whole family could watch. But after five seasons and 10 years, it morphed into an small-screen epic about metaphysics, secret military operations, and dubiously canonical endings. It was a great show, but a different show than the one that started it all. The live-action series may be over, but the franchise hasn’t stopped, and while there’s a pro-shot of the Broadway play Stranger Things: The First Shadow on the way, we’ve already seen the next evolution of the story: Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85, an animated “midquel” that captured the Saturday morning cartoon energy of the early seasons.
Now, less than six months later, the series is back with Season 2, which manages to find a happy medium between the episodic cartoon vibe and the serialized live-action saga.
Tales From ‘85 Season 2 puts the Hawkins Investigators Club against ghostly spectres.
Netflix
Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 Season 2 picks up a couple of months after Season 1, in February of the year between Seasons 2 and 3 of the main show. Love is in the air as Valentine’s Day approaches, but when a gift from Mike to El goes rogue, the gang discovers an entirely new threat to Hawkins, one from the town’s distant past. Just like in the previous season, the enemy lies in the flora rather than the fauna, but this time instead of haunted pumpkin patches, there are ghosts (or what seem like ghosts) wandering in the wilderness.
Season 1 of the season was surprisingly delightful, with only a few flaws in the canon and pacing. For example, the battle-per-episode pace meant that almost every action scene ended with a last-minute save from El’s telekinetic powers. This season, on the other hand, has El up against ghostly creatures that don’t respond to her powers at all. Nerfing her — even just a bit — makes the action a lot more interesting and gives El a new feeling of uselessness in the group that’s fascinating to watch.
In Season 2, new kid Nikki Baxter feels more like a member of the gang and less like a walking plot hole.
Netflix
Then, there’s the Nikki problem. The pink-haired, rebellious new kid voiced by Odessa A’Zion was doomed by the narrative, as she never appeared in the live-action version and therefore can’t make it to the summer break in this version. In the first season, this was difficult to ignore, but by the end of Season 2’s eight episodes, it’s honestly unnoticeable.
Tales From ‘85 essentially exists in a pocket universe, an eternal semester where these friends can have self-contained, supernatural adventures over and over again with multiple seasons released per calendar year. This is The Real Ghostbusters to the main show’s Ghostbusters, and the sooner you buy into that logic, the sooner you see this series for the genius it really is: Stranger Things through the looking glass.
