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The Stranger Things Season-One Edit Theory Is Getting Stranger

Photo: Netflix

Things are getting spooky in Hawkins, Indiana, and we’re not just talking about the deaths of assorted teenagers. Social-media users have claimed that a scene in Stranger Things season one has been edited from the original. But it’s unclear if fans are just misremembering their favorite show. In the second episode of the first season, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) spies on Nancy (Natalia Dyer) at her friends’ pool party. The original scene is said to have featured Jonathan raising his camera to take pictures of Nancy in just a bra. “Jonathan forgets his mission to take shots of Nancy, who’s in the midst of shedding her good-girl image with the wrong guy,” the Vulture recap of the 2016 episode reads. The episode currently on Netflix appears to show him lower his camera and instead capture Barb’s last moments before being abducted by the Demogorgon. The next episode still includes a picture of Nancy partially clothed. The Duffers themselves said in a June interview with Variety that they have “George Lucas’d” scenes from Stranger Things after the episodes already came out. But the official account for the Stranger Things writers’ room tweeted on July 26 that “no scenes from previous seasons have ever been cut or re-edited. And they never will be,” clarifying in another tweet that this includes the scene in question.

The potential edit was first noted on TikTok, and then took off from there, with many users recalling a different version of the scene than the one that is currently there, and questioned whether the Duffer brothers, who created the show, edited the scene in order to make Jonathan, currently considered one of the show’s heroes, more palatable. “You do have the physical copies though, the Blu-rays and stuff — you’d have to compare,” Ross Duffer said to Variety at the time. But who has time for that when Vecna’s still on the loose?

The Stranger Things Edit Theory Is Getting Stranger