Stranger Things 3: Are there any deleted scenes?
Stranger Things 3 teased episode titles last year that never made it into the season. Does that mean they deleted important scenes?
The wait for Netflix’s Stranger Things 3 seemed like forever for fans of the popular show. After releasing the second season during Halloween 2017, fans waited impatiently over a year without any sign of when the show would return.
When Netflix released a teaser trailer with the theme song that revealed just the titles of all new 8 episodes last December, everyone jumped for joy and used the titles as a jumping-off point for theories on what was new in Hawkins.
Looking back at the teaser trailer, though, it appears two episodes never made it into Stranger Things 3 when it premiered on July 4, 2019. Since the trailer was released about a month after ST3 wrapped up filming, it’s possible that they were still editing and changes that came later in the process forced them to change the names of two of the episodes. But do the changes also mean that important scenes were deleted?
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The 5th episode in the trailer is called “The Source,” but in Season 3 the actual title is “The Flayed.” In “The Flayed,” the teen troop has joined Nancy and Jonathan to discover that the Mind Flayer is back.
They pay a visit to Mrs. Driscoll at the hospital and find that Nancy’s Hawkins Post coworkers have been flayed (or under the possession of the Mind Flayer) and have been waiting for them. The Hawkins Post journalists turn into a pile of jelly meat and combine to create a monster with many teeth.
It seems that the initial intent of the Duffer brothers was to focus on the source, which would be the Mind Flayer. But at some point, they may have realized that the real focus of the episode was with the people who were being possessed.
The teens may have found out that the Mind Flayer was back, but their biggest obstacle are the Flayed working on its behalf. The episode title change may be an editorial decision that was made to better focus on the theme of the episode, and there is likely no change to the episode itself.
However, the 6th episode name change seems more significant. It was called “The Birthday” in the first trailer but was released as “E Pluribus Unum.” The phrase E Pluribus Unum means “out of many, one” which is an indirect way of saying that there are many Flayed in Hawkins, but the puppeteer is the Mind Flayer.
This is the episode where the Flayed all flock back to Brimborn Steelworks to spontaneously combust and join the Mind Flayer’s massive meat jelly body.
However, this episode has nothing to do with a birthday, which leads me to believe that there is a deleted scene that forced the creators to change the name of the episode entirely. While we may never know the contents of any deleted material there is a part that we could imagine may have included a birthday.
In this episode, Eleven decides to enter Billy’s mind to find the location where all the Flayed have been hiding and has to sift through the memories of his troubled childhood.
Perhaps there was an important birthday memory that affected Billy more than the others and imparted some information about why he was such a conflicted soul. Since the other childhood memories drew a picture of an abandoned and thoroughly abused child that took out his anger on others, there was probably no need for a birthday scene to say what could be understood from the other memories collectively.
Unfortunately, Netflix doesn’t air deleted scenes so the world may never know why the titles were changed and what was possibly removed or reworked for the season. That being said, I doubt there’s anything modified that will affect the greatness of the seasons to come.
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Stranger Things 3 is available to stream on Netflix!