Stranger Things writers deny re-editing old episodes (and promise they never will)

In some rather embarrassing news, British GQ was forced to correct an article published earlier today after erroneously reporting that members of the Stranger Things production had gone back and edited an earlier episode to make a character appear less creepy.

The scene in question occurs in season 1, episode 2 when Jonathan Byers is creeping around outside of Steve’s house while Nancy, Steve and their friends party. Jonathan takes photos of Nancy through the window, but once she takes her shirt off he puts his camera down and focuses on Barb and the swimming pool instead.

However, in the next episode, we get the confrontation between Steve and Jonathan that results in Steve breaking his camera and tearing up the photos. During this scene, we see that Jonathan actually did take a photograph of Nancy while she was changing, we just didn’t see him do it.

What was the initial Stranger Things rumor?

Thus the controversy begins. It all began with a TikTok rumor (because doesn’t everything these days? People, please fact-check!) suggesting a moment of Jonathan actually photographing Nancy was cut to make him seem less creepy.

Honestly, that just doesn’t make sense. Why cut the moment of him taking the photograph if they were going to leave the creepy photograph in question in the third episode? Wouldn’t they have also removed the snippet where Nancy’s friend shows her the photo he took? Because as things are, Jonathan still looks creepy. Obviously he and Steve have both come a long way since then, but just in this instance, I think we can all safely say the peeping Tom thing was icky.

The thing is, there was never a version of the scene where we saw Jonathan take that photo. Nothing was edited. But someone on TikTok thought otherwise. I’m assuming there was some kind of Mandela effect at play here where people were misremembering the scene and conflating the episode 3 moment where we see the photo of Nancy, and then assuming there was an extra moment of seeing Jonathan actually snap the picture.

To be fair, it’s not 100% the TikTokers fault. Matt and Ross Duffer recently admitted that they were considering going back and “George Lucas-ing” Will’s birthday after mistakenly forgetting it in season 4. They also revealed they had already gone back and fixed a couple of things that no one seemed to notice yet.

But I’m pretty sure what they meant was going back to touch-up CGI or VFX, not altering moments that could entirely change the meaning of a scene or character motivation.

Stranger Things writers fire back at British GQ

All of this came to a head on July 27 when British GQ published an article claiming that the scene had been edited. It seems like there wasn’t a fact-checker to verify with the Netflix version of the show vs. the DVD/Blu-ray edition (which several other people on TikTok had actually done themselves and debunked this rumor already, by the way).

The Duffers had remained pretty quiet about the growing controversy until today when the Stranger Things writer’s room Twitter finally logged on to give British GQ a piece of their mind.

Not only did they poke fun at the irony of the situation, with British GQ having to go back and publish a correction after accusing the Stranger Things team of doing something similar, but they also promised fans that was not something they would ever do.

So, don’t worry, it sounds like there isn’t a “dangerous new trend” lurking on the horizon after all.