'Stranger Things' creators forgot Will’s birthday, plan to retcon it 'George Lucas' style

The characters we’ve come to care about have gone through a lot in Stranger Things 4 Vol. 1. 

But while Max (Sadie Sink) had to survive Vecna via a killer song, and Hopper (David Harbour) worked to escape a Russian prison, it was poor Will (Noah Schnapp) who faced the most heartwrenching moment of all.

That moment, of course, is when he, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), and Mike (Finn Wolfhard) head to the roller rink early on in the season. A lot goes down there (including the scene that distressed Brown the most) but the real tragedy is that Will’s two best friends didn’t even acknowledge that it was his birthday.

Will’s birthday was established early on in the show as being on March 22. The Season 4 trip to the roller rink also takes place on March 22, which we learn via the time stamp on a rolling camera. That means that Will wasn’t only a third wheel to Eleven and Mike that day —  he was completely forgotten and dismissed by his friends.

It turns out that Eleven and Mike weren’t the only ones who forgot Will’s birthday. Show creators Matt and Ross Duffer have since confessed that they forgot Will’s special day was on March 22, and inadvertently set the roller rink date to be the same. In an interview with Variety, however, they said that they were going to retcon Will’s birthday to save him from the pain of having his friends forget the day of his birth. 

“It’s too sad!” Matt Duffer told Variety about keeping Will’s birthday as-is. “And it doesn’t make any narrative sense. But we were talking about it yesterday, and I think we’re going to George Lucas that.”

Duffer is likely referencing George Lucas’ infamous retcon in Star Wars: A New Hope, where he changed it so Han Solo (Harrison Ford) didn’t shoot first when killing Greedo. 

Changing Will’s birthday won’t be the only thing The Duffer Brothers have “George Lucas’d” in the series. While they declined to give specifics, they also confessed to Variety that they have changed other things as well, and challenged fans to do a compare-and-contrast to what’s on Netflix versus what’s on the Blu-ray editions of previous seasons. 

If that exercise sounds a bit much for you, don't worry — we'll all soon get more of the show when Stranger Things 4 Vol. 2 drops on Netflix on July 1. 

Looking for more sci-fi TV in the meantime? Check out shows like Resident Alien, Brave New World, Project Blue Book, Eureka, Heroes, Intergalactic, and more streaming now on Peacock. Looking ahead, SYFY has the new series The Ark in the works from original Stargate film producer Dean Devlin, as well as Stargate SG-1 producer Jonathan Glassner.