Stranger Things: Tales From ’85 Season 2 remains beautiful to watch, but a snooze too. This season’s overarching mystery isn’t complex or interesting enough to feel worthy of eight whole episodes, and although the series does tie up loose ends from Season 1, it suffers from a lack of consequential stakes.

Despite a more compelling mystery, Season 2 of Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 feels more hopelessly constrained by its concept, lacking in serious stakes and significant character development to maintain the status quo.

While the first installment had nostalgic charm, Season 2 struggles to stand on its own.

No matter how refreshing these monsters feel at first, though, they gradually lose their impact when most of the show is the characters running away from or fighting them over and over again. The action and chase sequences begin to feel monotonous and blur together, and the characters need more time for themselves and their relationships to breathe.