For a brand as massive as Stranger Things, you’d think that the second season of its animated spin-off, Stranger Things: Tales from ’85, would have had a bit more in the way of marketing. You’d also think it wouldn’t be quietly stealth-dropped in full on a random Thursday, but here we are. Only a couple of episodes into Season 2, though, and the reason for Netflix’s caginess becomes obvious. This show just isn’t very good.

Is it bad? That’s harder to say. I liked Season 1 for the most part, since it felt like a bit of a throwback to the humbler, more contained feeling of the earlier seasons that the parent show lost over time. But the problems with it were obvious. The lack of surety surrounding its canon status made the storytelling difficult. Nothing could really happen in it that would impact later seasons of the main show, keeping the plot and character development low stakes. The vibe was there, but the vibe was overly familiar; that’s fine for a one-off, but it doesn’t make a compelling basis for multiple seasons, and this second go-around proves it.

It’s Valentine’s Day, this time out, making for nice, wintry early-February theming but doing little to inform a plot involving bioluminescent flowers and ghosts connected to the lore of Hawkins’ founding. It also doesn’t do much for the character dynamics, with the romantic date leading to a frustratingly pointless rift between Max (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and Lucas (Elisha “EJ” Williams) that seems designed to keep them in an on-again-off-again Season 3 stasis. Similarly, Eleven (Brooklyn Davey Norstedt) and Mike (Luca Diaz) continue to figure out whatever relationship they’re currently in, but not in any meaningful way, since it can’t evolve beyond the state that the main show finds it in.

These limitations were always there, even in Season 1, but I noticed them a lot more here. The main problem is one of inherent contradiction. Given this show’s position in the timeline, weird supernatural stuff isn’t supposed to be happening. You could accept the first season’s Upside-Down-adjacent plotting as a bit of a holdover from previous events, but for something similar to happen again feels forced, and needlessly constrained by the fact that nothing serious can happen to any of the characters, and none of the events depicted can be serious enough that it’d be weird if they were never mentioned again. To justify this season existing, the show almost definitionally has to make its drama worse.

The Hawkins Investigators Club, or HIC, is fine as a concept, especially since it’s mostly used to continue to ingratiate Nikki Baxter (Odessa A’zion) into the main group and function as an outgrowth of Dustin’s (Braxton Quinney) need for something weird to be happening, even if it potentially isn’t. But that doesn’t last long enough to take as an idea, because something weird is happening, or there wouldn’t be a second season in the first place. For me, Tales from ’85 never managed to escape this paradox in Season 2. Its action is powered by its own pointlessness.

Across another eight episodes, you realise both what worked about Stranger Things and what doesn’t work about this. Divorced from a proper large-scale mystery and meaningful character development, what we’re left with is a string of familiar-feeling set-pieces as the kids fling themselves into danger that we know they’ll survive. Character growth is incremental to the point of nonexistence. The lore looks back instead of outwards. The script, always a pleasure in this franchise, feels like it’s ticking boxes of ready-made cliches and one-note teen-centric problems. It’s all distractingly formulaic.

Increasingly, I’m beginning to think that Tales from ’85 only exists for animation’s sake. Flying Bark Productions have once again done a really wonderful job here, and everything from the character and creature designs to the orchestration of the action sequences feels very nifty. This is undoubtedly a show with a serious creative pedigree – even the voice cast, while audibly not the original actors, do a great job – that is doing the best it can within the limitations of the concept. But those limitations aren’t going anywhere, and the maintenance of the status quo, despite a mystery that is arguably more intriguing than Season 1’s, ends up killing a lot of the show’s energy and verve.

Really die-hard franchise fans may find something to enjoy here, whether that’s in getting to spend more time with the characters or learn a little bit more about the setting. But the daring originality and emotional sentiment that characterised the main show at its best simply isn’t here, and the more Tales from ’85 we get, the more obvious that seems to be.