For audiences and creatives alike, endings are hard. A great ending is like the punctuation mark at the end of a sentence, giving the entire thing that preceded it meaning and closure. However, this is a blade that cuts both ways, as a less-than-great ending can muddle the impact of everything that came before it and make it all feel diluted. If you’re reading a really strong, compelling statement of a sentence that then ends with a question mark as its punctuation, you’d be confused. Now imagine that sentence is being strung out, word-by-word, over the course of a decade, giving you and everyone else plenty of time to invest a whole lot of emotion and meaning into each word before it ever even reaches its final, confounding punctuation. That’s essentially what has happened with Stranger Things, and its given birth to the rise of an insane new fan theory: Conformity Gate.
To say that Stranger Things’ final season was divisive feels like an understatement. While fans were generally pleased with the first four episodes of the season (released in bulk as Volume I) the reception of latter half of the episodes (released as Volume II and the Finale) proved far more contentious. Viewers grew increasingly displeased and vocal about their displeasure with the way certain long-running storylines were wrapping up as these episodes were releasing. All of this culminated with the finale, which left many viewers cold.
Much of the grand, overarching storyline and larger mythology of the series was put on the backburner or confined to the margins, as the final episode, “The Rightside Up,” instead focused on a streamlined final battle between the heroes, Vecna, and the Mind Flayer, while spotlighting several interpersonal character moments, especially in its forty-minutes-plus epilogue, which jumped forward eighteen months to show how the main characters were saying goodbye. All of this resulted in many fans feeling that several of the key things they were looking for in a culminating chapter had been untouched upon.
In tandem with this, many fans took umbrage with the way that many of the main characters’ storylines closed out. For a show that had long been about the outcasts and self-proclaimed freaks, these endings saw many of the main characters growing up and becoming more sterilized, mature people. In a word, conforming.
Conformity Gate explained
All of this has led to fans speculating that the finale wasn’t actually the finale. The Conformity Gate theory has become enormously popular online and taken on a life of its own, as fans blend together various bits of interviews with the actors, the Duffer Brothers, and more with bits of dialogue and potential story teases from across the series to suggest that “The Rightside Up” is actually a decoy; an episode that is entirely fabricated by Vecna, and that the real finale will come in form of a secret ninth episode.
For as tantalizing of a possibility as this is, it is pretty blatantly untrue. For one, from a marketing perspective, the idea of having this fake-out finale be the one episode of the entire series that is released concurrently to theaters is absolute nonsense; if there was any kind of long-game in mind, that theatrical release simply wouldn’t have happened. Furthermore, the Duffers have been making the rounds in the press since the release of the finale taking absolute bullets, as interviewers ask them questions that generate responses that ignite highly negative online reactions. They straight-up would not be doing any of this at this point if they had a secret episode up their sleeves.
I think that the most enticing aspect of Conformity Gate is the idea that there is more to Vecna than the final season makes it seem. One of the most disappointing elements of this whole season for me was the use of Vecna as a character, with him being far less compelling than he was in the prior season, despite Jamie Campbell Bowers’ stellar performance. The idea that Vecna’s defeat was too easy and that it is all a trick on his part, on both the characters and the audience, is certainly enticing. When an ending is disappointing, it makes you long for a better one, to wish that there was more to it. But alas, it’s not true.