Netflix put out the Season 2 trailer for “Stranger Things: Tales From ’85” on 25 August, and buried in the middle of it is a line that changes the shape of the whole thing. “We threw everything we had at that thing,” somebody says, over footage of the Hawkins kids backing away through blue lit woods. “Nothing worked. Not even El’s powers.” That is a bigger deal than it sounds. The live action series spent five seasons building Eleven into the answer to every problem, and the animated spinoff has just written her out of the solution while keeping her in the story.
The date is locked at 17 September, which closes out a run of announcements that started the week before, and Netflix is putting out eight episodes this time against the ten that made up the first season. It is created and showrun by Eric Robles, with Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer and Shawn Levy executive producing, and it sits in a very specific gap: between seasons two and three of the live action show, during the winter of 1985. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Stranger Things: Tales From ’85” and for the Season 2 threat its trailer spends two minutes setting up.
The live action series spent five seasons building Eleven into the answer to every problem, and the animated spinoff has just written her out of the solution while keeping her in the story.”
The thing that starts it is flowers, and the trailer is smart about how slowly it lets that land. “I’ve never seen flowers bloom in winter like this,” somebody says early, over a shot of a single blue bloom pushing up through snow. It reads as pretty for about four seconds. Then one of the kids gets a look at one and delivers the verdict the audience already reached: “Those flowers have Upside Down written all over them.” What makes it a story rather than a warning is what the kids do next. Max and Nikki spot a business opportunity and start selling them, which is how the flowers get everywhere, which is how this becomes their fault.
That instinct is the reason this show works at all, and it is worth saying plainly. The framing device is the Hawkins Investigators Club, and one of them states the mission in the trailer with total seriousness: “We’re the first line of defense against paranormal threats to our town. It’s our duty as the Hawkins Investigators Club to investigate.” These are children who have decided they are a paranormal agency, and they have gone as far as making themselves merchandise: one of them wears a blue baseball cap reading H.I.C. throughout, which is the most convincing thing about the whole operation. The live action show had to keep manufacturing reasons for kids to be at the centre of a government conspiracy. This one just gives them a club, a notebook and a camcorder, and lets them go looking.
Visually the trailer commits hard to one idea, which is cold. Hawkins is under snow, the water tower stands against a blue dusk, and almost every exterior is lit in that same freezing blue except where somebody is holding a torch. The kids sit around a diner table in a booth with the flower on it, and in another shot three of them stand behind a table holding up a camcorder like they are presenting evidence. They run through woods in a line of bobbing flashlight beams. There is a field of crystalline blue blooms that looks like ice and is clearly not, a headlight sweep across a snowbound road, and a barn interior lit in warm orange that is the only shot in two minutes with any heat in it. A pale skeletal figure stands among the junk in there. And there is one shot of a translucent blue shape rising between the trees that the trailer does not linger on, which is the correct call, because the less you see of a thing like that the better it works. The cut ends on the whole club standing in a line in the dark, torches up, facing something we are not shown.
It is a ghost story, and the trailer gets the genre change out of the way with a joke. A local warns them to run: “You all need to get out of here before it comes back.” Before what comes back? “Whatever’s haunting these woods.” And one of the kids, wonderfully, refuses to accept the premise: “Haunting? A ghost? You dorks cannot be serious.” That is the whole tonal problem of a “Stranger Things” ghost episode handled in one line, by a character who has personally met a Demogorgon and still finds ghosts embarrassing. Somebody in that writers room understands these kids.
Which brings it back to Eleven, and the reason we think this is the most interesting swing the spinoff has taken. Every “Stranger Things” finale eventually resolves into Eleven pointing at something and screaming, and that is thrilling twice and then becomes a structural problem, because a character who can solve anything makes everything else decorative. Taking her powers off the table against this particular threat forces the other seven kids to matter. “I can’t stop it,” she says at one point, and the answer that follows is not from her: “We are the only chance this town has. It’s up to us to find a way.”
Worth knowing before you go in: none of the original actors are here, and that is by design rather than a budget problem. Brooklyn Davey Norstedt voices Eleven, with Jolie Hoang-Rappaport as Max, Luca Diaz as Mike, Braxton Quinney as Dustin, Benjamin Plessala as Will, Elisha Williams as Lucas and Odessa A’zion as Nikki, the club member who has no live action counterpart. Jeremy Jordan plays Steve Harrington, Alessandra Antonelli plays Nancy Wheeler, and Janeane Garofalo plays Anna Baxter. Casting age appropriate voices for kids in 1985 is the only honest way to do this, given the live action cast are now adults and the show they were in has finished. It also frees the writers from the thing that quietly strangled the later live action seasons, which was a cast visibly ageing out of the ages their characters were supposed to be. Animation does not have that clock. Nikki is the clearest sign of what that buys them: a club member with no live action counterpart at all, which means she can be written toward without anyone checking her against a canon that has already closed.
So the read is that this is the healthiest thing the franchise has going. The mothership is over, the Duffers have signed elsewhere, and what is left is a spinoff that has quietly worked out how to tell Hawkins stories without the machinery that made the later seasons heavy: no lab, no government, no world ending stakes, just eight episodes about kids who formed a club and found something in the woods. The winter 1985 setting is doing real work too, because it is a genuine gap in the timeline rather than a prequel nobody asked for. If the ghost holds up, this is the version of “Stranger Things” that can run for years.
What Do You Think? Is taking Eleven’s powers off the table the fix the franchise needed, or does a “Stranger Things” story without her trump card lose the thing that made it feel dangerous? Does a ghost belong in the Upside Down’s rules, or is this the show stretching past its own mythology? And are Max and Nikki selling cursed flowers for pocket money the most in character thing anybody has done in this universe?
Catch up properly: every Stranger Things episode in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Stranger Things timeline.
See you on the next binge!
