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One of the best moments in all of Netflix’s I Am Not Okay With This has to do with a flying bowling ball. Sure it’s a stunning display of Sydney’s (Sophia Lillis) burgeoning superpowers, but it’s also the climax of a sequence that solidifies the power of Sydney and Stanley’s (Wyatt Oleff) friendship.
In I Am Not Okay With This Episode 4 “Stan By Me,” Sydney visits Stanley at the bowling alley to see if they can come up with any answers about her mysterious powers. The team had one day on set to shoot the whole sequence, special effects, emotional outbursts and all. “Wyatt and Sophia were just on it,” I Am Not Okay With This creator Jonathan Entwistle told Decider in an interview last month, adding that the sequence kicks off with a nod to comic book culture on purpose.
“I just wanted to an interesting sequence where we flip it around where we’re going to comic books to describe the comic book thing and nobody comes up with any answers,” Entwistle says.
However, after dubbing himself Syd’s mentor, Stanley is undeterred. He’s witnessed Sydney’s powers in action. After all, he stumbled upon her in the woods after she blew down those trees. So he asks Syd what she was doing that night right before that and she reluctantly admits that she was kissing someone at the party. The revelation that Syd not only has a crush on someone else, but that she’s also not interested in him romantically briefly shatters Stanley. But not for long.
“He turns his jealousy that she kissed somebody else into a positive and he doesn’t brood on it,” Entwistle said. “We really kind of put a point on their relationship that is no longer romantic or kind of joking. It’s got real stakes now.
The stakes are so high that when Sydney fails to call upon her powers in practice, Stanley tries a different tactic. He berates the bejesus out of her to make her so upset that her powers emerge.
“I remember on the day Sophia was like, ‘Why does he keep pushing me? Why does he keep pushing me?’ and I think that is key,” Entwistle said. “He’s pushing her because he’s assuming that mentor role that he’s completely unprepared for.”
However, when Entwistle explained the ending of I Am Not Okay With This to Decider, he noted that Stanley’s position as Syd’s mentor is up in the air after Season 1. After all, I Am Not Okay With This Season 1 ends with a mysterious figure revealing himself to Syd as her true mentor.
“Stan has no powers, so if somebody with cool powers steps in and starts saying things to Sydney then that’s going to kind of hurt his ego a little bit,” Entwistle said. “What type of mentor is he to Sydney at this point in the story?”
