First Look At Charlie Heaton's Stranger Things Season 5 Return Is Totally Bizarre

As "Stranger Things" Season 5 looms ever closer, the team behind the hit Netflix sci-fi series has entered its usual pre-release cycle of cryptic hints and teases at what the new installment will look like. One of the latest bits of information has to do with the return of Charlie Heaton's Jonathan Byers — at least, it kind of does. In a new behind-the-scenes sneak preview of the upcoming season, the longtime cast member looks a little more animated than usual.

On September 29, the official X (formerly Twitter) account for the "Stranger Things" writers' room tweeted out a GIF featuring a scene from Season 5 in which Jonathan is connecting two wires next to a machine alongside Joe Keery's Steve Harrington. The strange thing is that the scene is a completely computer-generated render, with the models for both Jonathan and Steve being particularly crude approximations of their respective actors. The writers' room seemingly acknowledged this idea, captioning the tweet, "They did Charlie dirty."

There's no doubt that the GIF of a computer-generated model of Charlie Heaton's likeness caused some heads online to turn, but anyone who's worried that "Stranger Things" Season 5 is suddenly going to shift from live action to low-quality CGI animation should rest assured that isn't the case. By the same token, this GIF isn't teasing some strange animated sequence that's set to pop up at some point in the new season. What it's actually showing is a production snippet known as a pre-vis.

Per the "Stranger Things" writers' room's explanation in a separate tweet, a pre-vis is a piece of basic animation that allows the show's crew to visualize how a certain scene will generally look and play out before they actually shoot it with live actors — essentially an advanced form of storyboarding. "We only do it for scenes involving lots of VFX or complex action," the writers' room explained. Indeed, one day prior to the Jonathan GIF, the team shared a first look at Joe Keery's Steve by use of another pre-vis snippet.

In this unique scenario, the pre-vis snippets that the "Stranger Things" team is using are helpful for another reason. Due to the ongoing 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, many actors have not resumed work on their respective productions. These pre-vis animations help the show's crew make progress on the development and production of "Stranger Things" Season 5 while the actors are unavailable, though they'll obviously need to film these shots with the actual cast eventually. The writers' room poked fun at the situation with its pre-vis GIF of Steve, writing, "Hope the studios make a fair deal with SAG soon or else Season 5 is looking like this."

Just because pre-vis animations of the "Stranger Things" cast are helpful to the production crew, that doesn't make them any less uncanny to see as fans. In fact, the actors portraying these characters may find the situation to be similarly surreal, as Charlie Heaton had a pretty humorous reaction to seeing the pre-vis animation of himself.

Several days after the "Stranger Things" writers' room tweeted out the pre-vis GIF of Jonathan, it posted a photo shared by Joe Keery of Heaton reacting to the GIF. In the photo, Heaton attempts to emulate his CGI counterpart's surprised expression and hand movements, and the results are just as funny as one might expect.

It remains to be seen just what exactly the context is for the scene of Jonathan connecting the wires. However, whenever "Stranger Things" Season 5 eventually drops and fans reach the scene in question, those who remember this bizarre pre-vis might have to pause for a laugh or two.