In recent days, my 14-year-old daughter has been exhibiting signs of becoming a conspiracy theorist. But this isn’t your common or garden Twin-Towers-grassy-knoll-moon-landings business. She has fallen, entirely and joyfully, for a conjecture known as Conformity Gate – and she is not the only one.
For the non Gen-Zers out there, Conformity Gate is the theory that the much-vaunted finale of Netflix behemoth Stranger Things, released on 1 January in the UK, wasn’t the real finale at all.
Fuelled by energy drinks and pasty from lack of sunlight, fans of the show have been beavering away in basements around the world to produce a fantastical hypothesis that the finale’s rather soupy 40-minute epilogue was all an illusion created by the show’s mind-controlling villain Vecna. A secret final episode, showing what had really happened, would be released on 7 January, at 8pm US Eastern Time (1am in the UK).
Explaining the labyrinthine intricacies of the “evidence” cited by Conformiteers would take thousands of words. Essentially, it involves some people sitting with their hands in their lap wearing orange graduation gowns, too many people wearing glasses, a roll of dice totalling seven, a dial changing colour, a wonky milkshake-timeline, strategically positioned exit signs, a woman having short hair, a door handle switching sides, a character missing some scars, and one of the characters remarking that the town of Hawkins “feels different” – hardly surprising, as it’s no longer full of murderous monsters, cracks in the earth, and a psychopath made out of tree roots.
As the fans’ Hive Mind produced ever more fanciful theories, a screenshot from the final episode was widely circulated on social media. It showed the principal characters’ Dungeons & Dragons binders lined up on a shelf. If you read some of the letters going across each binder, it says “X-A-LIE”.
This was not an indication that you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the site formerly known as Twitter, but instead proof that everything that happened in Dimension X (AKA The Abyss) was a lie. Or something. I watched every episode and I don’t even know what that means.
But I don’t need to know. Because it turns out the screenshot had been doctored. In the show itself, the row of letters read XAILE, which may just have been an exhortation for the show’s more enthusiastic conspiracists to remember to breathe out.
As hysteria mounted, Netflix posted a cryptic message on its social media accounts, saying “Your Future is on its way. #WhatNext Jan 7, 2026”. This, along with a belief in the significance of the number seven in the show (Will Byers made a dice roll of seven just before being taken by a demogorgon in Stranger Things’ first ever episode), led fans to believe that the new show would drop on 7 January. Indeed, at the appointed hour last night, so many fans tuned in to Netflix to check that the site reportedly crashed, leaving it showing an error message. Netflix was overloaded by fans searching for a show that didn’t exist.
It was never going to. In recent days, Netflix had added, in stern capital letters, to its Instagram bio the message: “ALL EPISODES OF STRANGER THINGS ARE NOW PLAYING”.
Interviewed by Variety on 1 January, the show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, addressed some of the fan theories regarding the final series. “The show has just grown so massive. Online, there’s just so much misinformation. Just tons of it. We would be here for hours trying to bat down the stuff that was not true. But at the end of the day, hopefully the work speaks for itself, and it is the show that Ross and I wanted to make.”
But perhaps the work did speak for itself – and not in an entirely good way. It seems likely that the myriad fans suggesting that there was a secret finale still to come were motivated by disappointment. For some, the ending was too saccharine (although I liked the passing of the baton to the younger generation of D&D-ers, a throwback to the Friends finale where they walked into Central Perk to find their usual seats taken by a younger group).
In the end, Conformity Gate was probably the result of a number of things: the Duffer brothers’ desire to get people discussing the show by putting in red herrings; a desire to leave things open-ended, preserving an opportunity to milk the cash cow in the future; and, most shamefully, a degree of sloppiness.
Certainly, there were mistakes. The doorknob, the dial and the missing scars were simply continuity errors. Meanwhile, we were expected to believe that Hopper returned to his job as police chief in spite of having killed that many US soldiers? Why did we never get to see the comeuppance of Linda Hamilton’s dastardly Dr Kay? And what became of poor Vickie, Robin’s erstwhile girlfriend?
Little wonder that a petition on Change.org demanding that Netflix release the full finale, including deleted scenes, reached nearly 400,000 signatures in a matter of days. Remarkably, after a 128-minute final episode including a seemingly infinite number of endings, key story arcs were just forgotten, and fans were left feeling short-changed.
Today, many will be feeling bereft that no new episode landed overnight (though I suspect many more were just having a bit of fun). But others, it seems, are soldiering on with their theory. The latest suggestion, my daughter informs me, is that the behind-the-scenes documentary landing on 12 January will actually be a meta-episode, where fiction has seeped into the reality of the actors’ lives (as happened in A Nightmare on Elm Street 7). The “documentary” will be the secret final episode. Hmm.
Looking back on the Conformity Gate craze, and how it gripped the show’s younger viewers, we can at least be grateful for one thing. Imagine, for a moment, that the mythical final episode had been predicted to land at midnight on 6/7 January: the two most irritating Gen Z crazes of recent times, merging into one. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
