The series finale of Stranger Things played to emotion rather than logic, and that initially seemed to be a smart move by the Duffer brothers. Over on IMDb, Stranger Things Season 5’s finale has a respectable user score of 7.7/10 after more than 159 thousand reviews. Most reviews call out the finale for being safe, but generally treat it as satisfying.
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Then came #conformitygate, a popular fan theory that there’s a secret ninth episode of Stranger Things. This pointed to the many unanswered questions and flaws, as well as production details and elements of set design, and many viewers seem to have found it convincing. Enough people turned on Netflix for a possible episode drop to actually crash the streamer, giving a sense of just how popular #conformitygate had really become. It seems to have been particularly big on TikTok, where some videos had over 2 million views.
Looking back, this suggests Stranger Things‘ series finale didn’t play out quite as successfully as had seemed to be the case. Sure, some of those hopeful Netflix viewers may have just been reluctant to let Hawkins go, but this indicates all the fan theories – the plot holes, the set details and the like – had caught public attention to an unprecedented degree. So what should the real ending have looked like?
It’s Very Hard to End a Series Well
Every successful TV series has to end, and the pressure is on to end well. The longer the series and the more influential it is in terms of popular culture, the bigger the pressure. Game of Thrones‘ ending made history as the worst offender, but even some of the best series finales of all time had their detractors. Breaking Bad and The Sopranos pulled it off, but viewers all wanted different outcomes, and so the finales proved controversial and divisive.
You don’t get much bigger than Stranger Things, the Netflix Original that essentially kicked off the entire streaming boom. What’s more, five seasons may not look impressive in historical terms, but it’s incredibly unusual in the modern entertainment industry. You also have to factor in that each season took years to make, meaning the show dominated popular culture for a full decade. In truth, even if Stranger Things avoided Game of Thrones‘ fate, it was never going to satisfy everybody.
Viewed through this lens, Stranger Things‘ ambiguous ending – did Eleven survive or not? – was designed to try to avoid this. It left room for audiences to pick which version of reality they believed was true, with the Duffers insisting they won’t be returning to these specific characters, so things would never be nailed down. But this pretty naked attempt to “have their cake and eat it” coincided with a finale packed with plot holes and unanswered questions, and so it’s clearly backfired.
ConformityGate Suggested a Major Vecna Twist
Let’s try to reconstruct what a successful Stranger Things ending would look like, based on the various aspects of #ConformityGate. The first thing we can see straightaway is that viewers simply wanted to believe everything mattered, even the little details that were really just stumbles in terms of set design (things changing color) or direction (every background character sitting in an identical posture during the graduation scene). Previous seasons of Stranger Things encouraged audiences to pay attention to the details, but the details didn’t quite work here.
That led to the popular theory that the finale was all an illusion cast by Vecna, a false reality the Hawkins heroes had become trapped in. It was deliberately engineered as a blend of their own “happily ever afters” (Dustin got to make a speech, flip off the principal, and get invited out by girls) and their worst nightmares (Mike loses Eleven, and both he and Nancy gradually become their parents, signified by their hairstyles).
It’s a smart solution, and it presumably sets up a story where the Hawkins heroes realize something’s wrong and challenge the reality, breaking out of it to defeat Vecna for real. It would mean the show’s “safe” ending was a fake all along, and that anything could happen; people could live, people could die, and we could get yet more shocks and thrills in the Upside Down.
There’s One Major Thing ConformityGate Hoped For
Ultimately, though, there’s one thing driving #ConformityGate; a desire for romance. The Stranger Things series finale ends with Max and Lucas together and Joyce and Hopper engaged, but that’s about it. Assuming Eleven’s alive, she and Mike will never see one another again. A popular ship involving Mike and Will, which realistically was never likely, is ditched. The love triangle with Nancy, Steve, and Jonathan ends with Nancy single. Even Robin apparently broke up with Vickie off-screen.
We’re in the middle of a romantasy boom right now, and yet modern science-fiction and fantasy often seems to forget that people get invested in romance stories. Just look at Star Wars, which handled its Han, Luke, and Leia love triangle in a very different way to Stranger Things – but where we haven’t had a single romance plot on big or small screen since Disney took over in 2012. Stranger Things follows the same pattern, and it’s frankly dissatisfying.
So this is the big difference between #ConformityGate and the actual series finale. Vecna’s fake reality gives a way to rewrite this ending, to leave some more characters together. Of course, it’s impossible to satisfy both the Eleven-Mike romance and the Will-Mike shippers, so we’re back to the idea of conflicting hopes, but the point stands; there’s a real hunger for romance stories in sci-fi and fantasy to actually work out. Stranger Things‘ writers missed that, and so guaranteed their ending just wouldn’t work. Viewed from this lend, the whole conspiracy theory was perhaps inevitable.
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