Article Text
Stranger Things entered its fifth and final season with enormous expectations, but its closing episodes left many viewers deeply disappointed. Although Volume 1 built momentum, the installments that followed—ending Dec. 31, 2025—failed to deliver a satisfying payoff.
The season initially returned its attention to Hawkins, Indiana, which remained under quarantine after Vecna’s attack in Season 4. Only the central characters and the military understood the supernatural force behind the devastation.
As the group prepared to kill Vecna, they repeatedly entered the Upside Down on missions known as “crawls,” searching for an opportunity to strike.
“Season 5 was off to such a good start with Volume 1,” senior Sophia Del Cotto said. “It made the buildup of wanting to see Volume 2 so good, because the plot was moving so well.”
Those first four episodes still had noticeable weaknesses. Attempts at witty dialogue often sounded forced, while demogorgons slaughtered hundreds of soldiers but repeatedly failed to hurt the main characters, making their plot armor difficult to ignore.
Volume 1 nevertheless ended with one of the season’s strongest sequences. Drawing on his connection to Vecna’s hivemind, Will Byers revealed new abilities and singlehandedly stopped three demogorgons from killing his friends.
“I think the final moment of Volume 1 was the best part, when Will revealed he had powers,” junior Margaret Hughes said. “I think that was the best moment of the whole season.”
Momentum Slips in Volume 2
The story slowed considerably after that cliffhanger. Much of Volume 2 followed the characters as they planned to rescue Holly Wheeler, whom Vecna had kidnapped, and prepared for another confrontation with him.
They also learned that Vecna was hiding in Dimension X—called the Abyss by the characters—rather than the Upside Down. Using Dr. Brenner’s abandoned notebooks, Dustin Henderson concluded that the Upside Down was not itself an alternate dimension. Instead, it was the opening of a wormhole connecting Hawkins with Dimension X, the actual home of the demogorgons and the Mind Flayer.
Volume 2 also featured Will coming out, but the circumstances made what should have been a major character moment feel uncomfortable to some viewers. Vecna had effectively pressured Will into revealing himself in front of the entire group, weakening the scene’s emotional authenticity.
“It just seemed really odd that every single character was there,” Del Cotto said. “It seemed so unnecessary. Will was saying Vecna showed him these horrible things, but, why did [the audience] never see what Vecna showed him?”
A Finale With Too Little Payoff
The final installment culminated in a brief fight against the Mind Flayer. After four years of the characters battling monsters and barely surviving, the short confrontation offered little sense of payoff.
Disappointment became so widespread that a theory predicting a secret ninth episode on Jan. 7 gained mainstream attention. Fans called it “Conformitygate.”
“At first I didn’t believe in Conformitygate, but then I started believing in it because all of the evidence made so much sense,” Hughes said.
Some supposed clues were highly speculative. Fans claimed the Wheeler family resembled Vecna in the epilogue and interpreted an empty sign during the graduation scene as evidence that viewers were trapped under Vecna’s influence.
Other details appeared more persuasive to supporters of the theory, including significant props changing color, repeated attention to Vecna’s manipulation of memory and Lucas Sinclair’s statement that coincidences are not real.
Conformitygate ultimately proved false. For some fans, however, the theory’s popularity showed how unwilling viewers were to accept the finale as the real ending.
“It must suck for the Duffers because imagine writing an ending so bad, your fans come up with an insane conspiracy theory that there’s another secret episode coming out,” junior Ellennita Haile said. “I was so disappointed by the ending of one of my favorite shows.”