When you have a franchise as big as Stranger Things on your hands, it's probably not too hard to imagine it being difficult to wave goodbye to the money that it brings into your streaming service. We all basically knew when Netflix announced that Stranger Things would end with Season 5 that it likely had more plans for the world of Hawkins, though, and now that's proven accurate.
It's been some months since Stranger Things: Tales from '85 was first announced and then teased, but now we have a proper trailer for the show, making it clear that it'll tell a fairly typical Stranger Things story in a very new, animated style, and that it'll introduce at least one big new character to make that story work.
The big new addition in this trailer is Nikki, a punk-haired rebel who looks like she's a little older than most of the cast of characters at this point in the story (after the second season, that is). She's going to get ambushed by one heck of a scary monster while out walking one day, and it seems like that's the inciting incident that gets our main gang of characters involved.
Given that they thought they closed the portal to the upside-down so recently, it's baffling that there are still demonic monsters appearing in Hawkins, so they set out to figure out what's happening. There will presumably be some dovetailing with where the start of Season 3 of the main show finds them, although that's not exactly confirmed.
The trailer also leaves me with one big question – given we're clearly going to get a lot of screentime with this new Nikki character, how's the show going to explain away her absence in subsequent seasons of the show? Hopefully, this isn't an indication that she's doomed from the start, and we can cross our fingers that she just moves away or something before the live-action show's action picked up.
Given she's never mentioned in the show, though, it's a good reminder of how fleshing out previous episodes in characters' lives can be a complicated approach. If something big happens to them all but they never mention it again, that can seem fairly weird. We'll see how Tales from '85 threads that needle closer to the time, I guess. It should start streaming on 23 April.
