Stranger Things: Tales From '85 season 2 review — what happens when Hawkins meets its first-ever ghosts
Hawkins, Indiana cannot have one normal holiday. Not Halloween, not Christmas, and — as of season 2 of Netflix's animated spinoff, all eight episodes of which dropped today — definitely not Valentine's Day.
I binged the whole thing in one sitting, which the half-hour episode format practically dares you to do, and I have news: the ghosts are great, the ghosts are also not entirely what they seem, and this show remains a very charming toy that occasionally remembers it's not allowed to be anything more.
The setup: flowers, sprites, and one very rude entity
It's February 1985, the gang is planning Valentine's Day, and Max and resident new kid Nikki Baxter start selling pretty blue roses around town. The roses spread. Then glowing apparitions start drifting through the woods, accompanied by swarms of nasty little creatures the show calls hate sprites, which is also what I call my group chat.
The scary part — and the show's best idea — is that these things shrug off Eleven's powers completely. Watching the franchise's walking nuke discover she's useless is genuinely unsettling, and it forces the Hawkins Investigators Club back into Scooby-Doo mode: golf clubs, bats, library research, bad plans executed with total confidence. The trail leads to the town's abandoned silver mines, because of course Hawkins has haunted mines. Showrunner Eric Robles promised as much when the season was announced, saying "We're thrilled to return to the winter of '85 for Season 2" and teasing exactly where that blue flower from the season 1 finale was headed.
What works (mild spoilers from here)
- The animation is still the star: neon-drenched, snow-covered, and more atmospheric than half the live-action season budgets.
- The "ghosts" have an actual answer tied to season 1's cliffhanger, and the reveal — Dustin dubbing the big bad "the Lich" is a top-tier D&D-brain moment — is smarter than a filler spinoff needed to be.
- Nikki Baxter is, once again, the best character on the show, which is impressive for someone invented last spring.
Slow Horses lost its showrunner after five seasons, and season 6 opened at 100%
What doesn't
The show is frozen in amber, and it knows it. Nobody can die, nobody can grow, no relationship can move an inch — season 3 already exists, and it's standing there like a chaperone at the dance.
That's the structural problem no amount of gorgeous animation fixes. Every scare comes with an invisible asterisk: you've seen these kids in 1986, they're fine. The season paces its mystery well and then has to hand your emotional investment back at the door, gently, like a coat check.
Netflix clearly doesn't mind — the first season got renewed four days after it premiered with 2.8 million views, and Robles has floated the idea of five of these seasons. I'll keep watching, because it's a cozy, spooky Saturday-morning cartoon for adults with rent anxiety. Just don't expect it to haunt you. The ghosts certainly won't; they're barely even ghosts.
Previously we wrote: Four days from the Lioness finale, Paramount+ still hasn't ordered a season 4
