Netflix’s Promising New Stranger Things Spinoff Has Been Renewed For Season 2
And we already know what it’s about.
Stranger Things as a story may be over — the Upside Down is now gone forever, and, apparently, so is Eleven — but that doesn’t mean that Stranger Things as a franchise is. Besides the Broadway show, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, exploring the origins of the young Henry Creel, there’s also the new animated spinoff, Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85.
Set between Season 2 and 3 of the hit series, Tales from ‘85 showed the wintertime activities of the Hawkins gang and their new friend Nikki Baxter, the punk daughter of their substitute science teacher. Now, it appears as though we’ll get even more of these in-between adventures, but this time they’ll harken back to the beginnings of Hawkins itself.
Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85’s new kid in town, Nikki Baxter, will stick around for another season.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Tales from ‘85 showrunner Eric Robles revealed the series will return for Season 2 on Netflix. This was teased in the series itself, as Nikki and Mrs. Baxter are shown moving into a house with the hopes of staying in Hawkins more permanently. We know that they’ll have to leave eventually, as neither character is present in Stranger Things Season 3, but at least we’ll get another season’s worth of adventures during the springtime.
Upon release, Tales from ‘85 garnered many comparisons to Star Wars: The Clone Wars, another animated in-between spinoff series that introduced a spunky new character.
In this interview, that’s a comparison that Robles embraces. “What I’m hoping for is very much what happened with [Dave Filoni’s Star Wars:] The Clone Wars. Right out the gate, everybody was like, “The Clone Wars?” Then all of a sudden, people started watching it and were like, ‘Wait a second.’ They gave it a chance, and then got into the Star Wars of it all, understanding that these were their own unique adventures.”
Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85 will go from evil plants to deep Hawkins history.
In Season 2, those unique adventures will take the Hawkins Investigators Club further back in time than we’ve ever gone before. “For Season 2, we’re going to discover a little bit more about the history of Hawkins and what that history means to these kids,” Robles says. “There’s a little bit more lore into the founding of Hawkins as a whole, and a lot of that has to do with how all the pieces come together with that last flower you see bloom.”
While we’ve seen a lot of flashbacks over the course of Stranger Things, nothing has gone that far back. But that actually stands to answer one of the biggest mysteries of the entire series: why is all of this happening in a small town in Indiana in the first place? We’ve seen hints at this in Stranger Things Season 5 and The First Shadow, but this new season could actually change how we see the show forever.
