“If you understand the problem with a Ouija Board, you don’t want anybody playing with a Ouija Board,” he added. “[But] I don’t think that the Duffer brothers even think that they’re that big of a deal. I don’t think that they believe that the supernatural actually exists.”
Sean and Scottie McDowell Discuss Season 5’s Controversial ‘Coming Out’ Scene
Later in the review, Sean and Scottie discussed a controversial scene in which one of the show’s characters, Will Byers, came out as gay. Sean noted that the show portrayed Will’s coming out as giving him “a kind of superpower” to ultimately defeat the show’s villain, Vecna.
Describing his reaction to the scene, Scottie said, “I literally was—I’m done. I’m like this is ridiculous. The world is ending and we need to take a 15-minute break so Will can tell everybody that he’s gay?”
Scottie added that the scene felt like it was “interjected into the show for no reason” and that “it made me upset.”
“This makes me upset because of how much I love this show and how unneeded [the scene] was,” said Scottie. “It’s so unneeded.” Scottie indicated that he has observed a politically diverse group of people are “clowning on” the scene online for how forced and unrealistic it came across.
Sean said, “In some ways, it felt like we’ve had crammed down our throats, culturally speaking, how important it is to praise how everybody feels about themselves. However somebody identifies, we all have to love and praise on them.”
“And in this show, the world is literally ending. And it’s more important to affirm Will’s feelings and make sure everybody loves on him than to actually go out and save the universe,” said Sean. “So in some ways, I’m watching this going, ‘Did they not get the memo in 2025 that it’s not 2020 anymore?’”
“It felt like not only is this a show in the 80s that never would have gone down that way,” he continued, “but it also felt like a show stuck in the early 2020s, where they didn’t get the memo that culture has kind of moved on from that and [is] a little tired of being preached at.”
Sean went on to note that Christian movies are often maligned for “always preaching” but that “Stranger Things” is guilty of the same. He argued that “Stranger Things” had an opportunity to tell a nuanced and thought-provoking story that explored the challenges of being same-sex attracted in the 1980s “but just didn’t do so.”
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“So that scene in itself, my Christian ethic aside—in which we could talk about all those issues, and I’ve done a ton of videos here people can watch to figure out my position on marriage and sexuality and LGBTQ,” said Sean. “But just from a filmmaking and a storytelling perspective, I thought it was just…driven by an agenda and it’s driven by a worldview.”
