Netflix's New Stranger Things Episodes Mark A Major Lore Change

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Grace Van Dien and Joseph Quinn in Stranger Things season 4

Published Sep 3, 2026, 12:01 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While Netflix’s iconic mega hit Stranger Things returns with new episodes in September 2026, the show’s comeback will look very different thanks to a radical genre shift by this upcoming season of the spinoff Tales from ’85. While Netflix’s Altered Carbon was underrated during its brief two-season run, the streaming service has historically struggled to outdo its competitors when it comes to creating big-budget, high-profile sci-fi shows.

Apple TV has the Asimov adaptation Foundation, with its flawless 10% Rotten Tomatoes score, as well as the dystopian thriller Silo, the Blake Crouch adaptation Dark Matter, the Monsterverse spinoff Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and the acclaimed satire Severance. Not one to be outdone, Prime Video has Tales from the Loop, Outer Range, and The Peripheral, as well as the upcoming spinoff series Blade Runner: 2099. Hulu is no slouch in this department either, with titles like Paradise and The Handmaid’s Tale on its roster.

Thank goodness, then, for Stranger Things. While the original series is also a small town mystery, a coming-of-age character study, a conspiracy thriller, and a sweet dramedy, Stranger Things is undoubtedly one of the biggest mainstream hits Netflix has in the sci-fi genre. With its telekinetic heroine, its mirror universes, and the show’s shadowy experiments in secret government labs, Stranger Things blends the Spielbergian awe of Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the unnerving, paranoid sci-fi of Stephen King’s Firestarter, Dreamcatcher, or The Dead Zone.

Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 Season Is Full-On Paranormal Horror

The kids facing a ghost in Stranger Things Tales From '85 season 2

However, the show’s first spinoff, Tales from ’85, shifted its tone substantially. Moving away from the darker, more mature elements of the original series and doubling down on the kid-friendly antics of its later seasons, the animated spinoff Tales from ’85 mixed Stranger Things with Netflix’s massive 2025 hit KPop Demon Hunters. Where the original show centered on troubled adult characters like Hooper and Joyce as much as its teen heroes, Tales from ’85 is firmly a show about children, aimed at children.

It might be tough to remember some ten years after season 1’s July 2016 debut, but Stranger Things was once a surprisingly dark and gritty show. The first season of the Netflix hit featured plentiful scenes of the heroes being brutally bullied by their classmates, and the small-town homophobia, slut shaming, and intolerance of Hawkins were depicted in unvarnished terms throughout the show’s debut outing.

Tales from ’85 season 1 makes for a stark contrast with this tone, sanitizing any remnants of the show’s original edge in favor of a light-hearted, family-friendly tone. Compared to HBO Max’s Stephen King prequel It: Welcome to Derry, this spinoff proves that Stranger Things has entirely abandoned the show’s dark origins and repalced them with a glossy, upbeat vision of idealized ‘80s suburbia that owes more to E.T. the Extraterrestrial than Stephen King’s It.

This change alone alienated many fans of the original show, but the first full-length trailer for Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 season 2 proves that the series is only moving further away from its original style with its next outing. The trailer teases a seance at a cabin in the woods, what look like faeries or sprites in the forest outside Hawkins, and full-blown ghostly apparitions, one of which appears to drive a truck down a hill like a malevolent poltergeist at one point.

Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 Already Changed The Series

All of this zaniness would be welcome in a kid’s cartoon like a Scooby-Doo reboot, or a nostalgic throwback to classic ‘80s Saturday morning cartoons based on another beloved property from the era, like Are You Afraid of the Dark or Goosebumps. However, the journey that Stranger Things took from the mature live-action original series to this solely kid-focused, family-friendly cartoon was already jarring for longtime fans of the franchise, so the show’s full-tilt embrace of supernatural horror is now just another leap further away from its origins.

The first two seasons of Stranger Things could have passed for one of Mike Flanagan’s Netflix shows like Midnight Mass, with their deft character portraits, their grim but compelling storylines, and their grounded incorporation of far fetched story elements into a recognizable, realistic setting. In contrast, Tales from ’85 season 1 was already a DayGlo kid’s cartoon, and season 2’s incorporation of full-blown supernatural horror makes the show all the more madcap.

The more bizarre the plot of Tales from ’85 becomes, the less the campy cartoon feels even remotely linked to the story of the original series. This would be a problem for any franchise, but it is particularly troubling when Tales from ’85 isn’t exactly a major departure from the show’s original storyline. On the contrary, there is almost no daylight between the two franchise outings.

Stranger Things: Tales from ’85’s Season 2 Genre Switch Makes Its Biggest Problem Worse

Nikki handing something to Eleven in Stranger Things Tales from 85

Where most spinoff shows, like the Cheers spinoff Frasier, take place after or before the original series, in a new setting, Tales from ’85 takes place during the events of Stranger Things. The spinoff specifically takes place between seasons 2 and 3 of the original series, filling in the blanks between these two outings by explaining what Eleven, Max, Lucas, Dustin, Mike, and Will got up to with their hitherto unmentioned friend Nikki during the hiatus.

This obviously causes a pretty major canon plot hole for the original show, since none of the characters listed above ever mentioned Odessa A’Zion’s character Nikki during Stranger Things, nor did they ever refer to the events of the spinoff even in passing. While this was already a weird oversight after season 1 of Tales from ’85, the introduction of full-blown supernatural horror elements in season 2’s trailer makes this plot hole even more egregious.

There are few reasonable ways for the spinoff to explain how in the world the main characters never mention any of the paranormal peculiarities they experienced between seasons 2 and 3 in the main series. Unless the entire cast have their memories erased Men in Black-style at the end of the spinoff’s sophomore outing, Tales from ’85 will always feel like the Stranger Things spinoff has massively confused the original storyline, characters, and tone of the Netflix hit.