From Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve of 2025, the hit Netflix series Stranger Things aired its final season. Created in 2016 by creative duo “The Duffer Brothers,” the show garnered popularity thanks to nostalgia for the 1980s, intricately blending sci-fi and horror, and focusing primarily on coming-of-age themes. The show ended its run after five seasons, but several spinoff projects are in the works and a play, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, is currently showing on Broadway.
While the first batch of season five episodes were warmly received by fans, with episode 4 earning the series its highest IMDb rating of 9.8, the episode released on Christmas and the finale released on New Year’s Eve proved to be points of contention among fans. Episode 7 received a series low IMDb rating of 5.6, while the season finale was the third-lowest rated episode at 7.6.
Typically, any popular show with millions of viewers will never make every fan happy with its ending. Shows like Game of Thrones, Lost, The Sopranos, and many others have had the quality of their finales debated for years. However, none of these shows have had their fandoms convinced that another secret episode was on the way, as was the case with Stranger Things.
The Conformity Gate theory centered around the idea that the main villain, Vecna, had imprisoned the main characters of the show in his mind and the series finale was simply an illusion. This theory was not completely out of left field because several characters throughout the final season had been trapped in Vecna’s mind, not knowing that they weren’t in the physical world.
The theory quickly took hold across social media platforms, prompting fans to find many pieces of evidence supporting it. Several inconsistencies throughout the season, like the disappearance of Mrs. Wheeler’s scar, a doorknob now on the opposite side of a door, and the changing of a dial’s color at the radio station led fans to believe that the characters were in a false reality. The spines of Dungeons and Dragons binders seemingly spelling out the words “X a lie” made fans theorize that the final battle of the series that took place in Dimension X wasn’t actually real. The graduating class of Hawkins were seated with their hands folded in a similar position that Vecna took throughout the season, further adding to the idea that Vecna was still in control of the main characters.
While the previously mentioned pieces of evidence were some of the strongest motivational factors for fans who believed wholeheartedly in the conspiracy, other evidence was more lackluster. The character of Mike Wheeler having a haircut similar to Vecna’s human form, the message JK59 in the credits meaning “just kidding” in Season 5, Episode 9, and the ending being too perfect to be true were weak theories that only pointed out the cracks in the Conformity Gate narrative. Fans also believed that the episode would drop on January 7th, Orthodox Christmas, as all other batches of episodes had been released on holidays.
January 7th arrived, and with it came no secret episode of Stranger Things. Sophomore Ben Ferguson felt disappointed, saying, “The Duffer Brothers had a 10-year timeline to come up with an ending, not to mention they didn’t have one when they started filming season 5, and yet the ending was so incredibly bad. There was so much to be settled and the Conformity Gate seemed like the answer. I was sorely disappointed when I realized it was not going to happen and I know the Duffer Brothers could have done better.”
Freshman Nik Smith felt more neutral towards not having an episode 9, stating, “Conformity Gate gave me hope for a new, cooler final episode than the one we got. I think that it was fine that it didn’t happen, but it would’ve been fun to see.”
The entire genesis of Conformity Gate came from fans dissatisfied with the ending of Stranger Things, clearly reflecting a thematic change that occurred throughout the series. As Stranger Things gained more and more fans over the years, the series progressed from a smaller budget horror show into an all out cinematic event, with the series finale even being played in movie theaters across the United States and Canada. While the show grew bigger and bigger in scale, the early groundedness and emotional resonance that it had was lost in favor of spectacle. Sadly, this change was seen as a clear drop in the quality of writing from the first to last season, leading fans to hope that a better, more realistic finale was imminent. While the fan speculation for a secret 9th episode clearly displays the divisiveness of the finale, Stranger Things has left a defining imprint on the cultural landscape that will remain for generations to come.
