Recap for ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5
Check out ‘Stranger Things’ ahead of Season 5 with details on key plot developments and epic showdowns
Stranger Things star Clark is giving fans a lesson on online misinformation.
Randy Havens, who plays teacher Scott Clark on the hit Netflix series, took to Instagram to debunk an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that the latest season was drastically cut.
“There are no Snyder secrets on the show,” Havens wrote on his Instagram Story. “Don’t believe everything random people say on the internet.”
The “Snyder Cut” refers to a 2017 campaign that called for Warner Bros. to release a director’s cut of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. After the filmmaker left the project and was replaced by director Joss Whedon, the theatrical version ended up looking very different from Snyder’s original vision. A successful online petition pressured Warner Bros. to release the so-called “Snyder Cut,” dubbed “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” on HBO Max in 2021.
But in that case, there was documented evidence of chaos behind the scenes at Justice League. In the case of Stranger Things, there is no evidence to support claims that have been circulating on social media in recent days that key scenes and storylines were cut from the new season in a way that affected the overall quality of the storytelling.
Despite this, a Change.org petition calling for the release of “unseen footage” from Season 5 of “Stranger Things” has garnered nearly 300,000 signatures, claiming that “many scenes of Volume 2 and our beloved characters must have been cut.”
One piece of evidence that fans have pointed to is the fact that some of the new episodes were previously listed on IMDb with longer runtimes, but those longer runtimes were never confirmed to be accurate in the first place. In many other cases, fans pointed out scenes they didn’t like in new episodes and simply argued that this must mean there was a missing scene that would make these plot beats meaningful.
The conspiracy ultimately stemmed from the fact that some fans were dissatisfied with the latest episode of Stranger Things, claiming it didn’t move the story forward in a satisfying way for the upcoming series finale.
The seventh episode of Season 5, “The Bridge,” was especially controversial because it featured Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) coming out as gay. Some fans felt that the scene where Will comes out of the closet in front of all of the show’s main characters at the same time was awkwardly written. On IMDb, “The Bridge” currently has a score of 5.5 out of 10, making it the lowest-rated episode in the series’ history, although it is unclear whether the homophobic backlash affected the score.
“The Bridge” is part of the second batch of episodes in the final season of “Stranger Things,” which premiered on Christmas Day after the first four episodes were released the day before Thanksgiving. This season was highly anticipated after a wait of more than three years and a fourth season that was generally well-received by critics and fans alike.
All eyes are now on the final episode of the Stranger Things series, with questions swirling whether creators Matt and Ross Duffer will be able to land the plane or whether there will be another Game of Thrones-ending backlash. The final episode will be released on Netflix on New Year’s Eve.
