8 p.m. on December 31st, 2025 – a day that tens of millions of people tuned in for – the Stranger Things series finale dropped. Within hours, theories surrounded the ending of the show: was it real, or was it all an illusion meant to trick the watcher?
Dubbed Conformity Gate, conspiracy theories suspected that the ending wasn’t true. Fans decided that it must’ve been a fake-out to confuse the viewers, and that the Duffer Brothers and Netflix were secretly going to release another true finale on January 7th.
Episode 8 was action-filled, with the party creating and executing a plan to enter the Upside Down, defeat Vecna, and destroy the entire other monstrous dimension with it. Despite obstacles, like the military or the dozen children in Vecna’s lair, they completed this and destroyed the Mind Flayer as well.
Then, there was another 18-month time skip – part of a 40-minute epilogue about what happened to the group. This is where fans started to see the plot holes in the show. The theory that started it all was about the graduation scene, where every member of the Wheeler family (except Holly) wore a haircut that resembled that of Henry Creel’s.
This led people to question everything in it, and they noticed more and more each time they rewatched. These other details created a theory that felt undeniable to many:
The blank yellow poster at graduation: A show with a $450 million budget would surely have been able to write something on a poster, unless they meant to create suspicion.
The dial at the WSQK radio tower changes colors: Earlier in the season, Max mentioned that when in one of Vecna’s trances, to look for things that are out-of-place. Holly realized that the color was wrong on the spinner on the playground, and that’s how they found the door to get out. So surely, the show wouldn’t change the color of things unless they meant to.
The WHATZIT? game: Throughout the epilogue, boxes of the WHATZIT? game appeared behind main characters, with many fans likening it to Vecna’s name when preying on the children: Mr. Whatsit.
The D&D books: The final shot of the show had the main characters’ Dungeons and Dragons campaign books neatly arranged in a certain order, with the spines spelling out “X A LIE,” creating suspicion that what we saw in Dimension X was a lie.
“Milkshakes at Melvald’s”: Within the show, Melvald’s is a grocery store. However, the play – Stranger Things: The Last Shadow – focusing on Henry Creel’s backstory, features Melvald’s as a diner where he got milkshakes. Thus, it doesn’t make sense for Will to mention getting milkshakes at some random grocery store with his friends, but Vecna did.
Suzie and Vickie: Dustin and Robin’s love interests, Suzie and Vickie respectively, were oddly missing from the ending. This would seem odd, but Vecna didn’t know them, so he wouldn’t think to include them in his imaginary ending.
Although the theories seemed true, they amounted to nothing. There was no extra episode, but rather just a documentary on the making of it. How Stranger Things will continue in the future is unknown, but for now, it’s ending with this season.
