Summary
Netflix’s plant-based Stranger Things spin-off provides a familiar feeling but can’t quite escape being a cover-band take on the original.
Can you be nostalgic for nostalgia? This question was at the forefront of my mind while soaking in the ten episodes of Netflix’s animated spin-off Stranger Things: Tales from ’85, a soft canon side story taking place between the second and third seasons of the main show. And it’s an interesting question. In its most simplistic form, Stranger Things was a time capsule, a portrait of a pre-internet era of small-town Americana and nerd ephemera, evoking all the music and movies you loved at the time or perhaps learned about through the movies and TV that called back to them in your own youth. The nostalgia was fractal.
Through no fault of its own, Stranger Things became one of the biggest TV shows ever. The wait between seasons became gargantuan, the kid cast grew up into lanky adults, the budget got ridiculous, and the episode runtimes and visual effects usage became swollen and super-sized to match. Most of the original fanbase grew out of it, or at least away from it, and then it ended and everyone hated the resolution (everyone except me, that is, but let’s not get sidetracked). The franchise’s tumour-like growth into spectacular event television lost sight, in many ways, of the basement-dwelling tabletop-gaming heart of the story and its characters.
Tales from ’85 attempts to recapture that more innocent, low-key spirit; it’s nostalgic for a show that was already about nostalgia. It returns us to Hawkins, Indiana in – you guessed it – 1985, during a relatively uneventful part of the canon where the main gang has been reunited with their best pal Will (Benjamin Plessala, Castlevania: Nocturne), who was kidnapped by a demonic entity and taken to the netherworld named the Upside Down, and secretively superpowered Eleven (Brooklyn Davey Norstedt) closed the gate in dramatic fashion. It’s a smart use of the timeline, since you can mess with events without earthquaking the original fiction too much, and you also get the best of both worlds: The usual gang all present and correct, still youthful and idealistic enough to be recognisable as their younger, less hardened selves, but an existing awareness of sci-fi shenanigans that means you can do another story about scary monsters without having to spend too much time setting it up.
Even on a character level is works pretty well. Mike (Luca Diaz) and Eleven are still in the very nascent stages of a romantic relationship, which they’re trying to keep secret from Hopper (Brett Gipson), who’s still a local cop and wildly overprotective of his foundling ward. Lucas (Elisha Williams) and Max (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) are in the early stages of their own romance, while Dustin (Braxton Quinney) and Steve (Jeremy Jordan), who at one point is described as a “haircut with lips”, have their usual bromance, though Dustin does have a kind of love/hate-interest in the form of another student named Rosario (Valeria Rodriguez). It’s all very comforting and familiar.
There is a small smattering of new characters, though, most notably Nikki (I Love LA’s Odessa A’zion), a punk-rock tearaway whose eccentric mother, Mrs. Baxter (Janeane Garofalo), largely fulfils the role of an absent Mr. Clarke. Nikki fits right in with the main gang in a way that feels unavoidably light, since it has to be feasible that none of the other characters ever mentioned her in subsequent seasons, but her presence doesn’t feel like a distraction, either.
And that’s the point, really. You’re not supposed to think about Tales from ’85 too much, and certainly not how it does – or, more accurately, does not – inform what we already knew about the plot and world of Stranger Things. You’re supposed to grin at the era-specific needle drops, at the references to classic movies and video games, at the allusions to Dungeons & Dragons and the use of walkie-talkies and bicycles and Slim Jims. You’re not supposed to be surprised when, after ten minutes or so, another plant-based supernatural threat emerges, and you’re not supposed to be worried when the kids set about dealing with it in the usual way, through a series of hastily brainstormed cackhanded plans combining nerd know-how, science, and, when things inevitably go wrong, Eleven dramatically holding up her palms while her nose bleeds.
If merely reading about this familiar formula gives you a little pang of joy, then good news – you will enjoy Tales from ’85 for what it is, and likely never think about it again after that. Its lack of proper staying power isn’t as much of a criticism as you’d think, given the show’s relatively modest ambitions. It’s very much intended to be a bit more Stranger Things in the exact style you most fondly remember, not bogged down by the bigger ideas and implications its parent show eventually succumbed to. There are downsides to this, of course; the humour and character development isn’t as good either, there’s less intrigue and mystery, and the whole thing never quite escapes the feeling of being a cover-band take on the original, a problem exacerbated by the fact that the characters all look and act the same but are played by new actors. But as a local, small-stakes sci-fi mystery in the style of ‘80s monster-of-the-week cartoons, it does the job well enough to be worth a cautious recommendation.
