Nearly five months after Stranger Things came to an end, creators The Duffer Brothers, executive producer Shawn Levy and stars Noah Schnapp, David Harbour, Natalia Dyer and Jamie Campbell Bower reunited on Thursday for an Emmys For Your Consideration event in Los Angeles, where they opened up about the finale — and that viral conspiracy theory about a secret last episode.
The fifth and final season of Netflix’s monster hit was released in three parts, with the series finale arriving on New Year’s Eve. After it dropped, some fans latched onto an extensive theory dubbed “Conformity Gate,” that the final episode had portrayed an illusion created by villain Vecna (played by Bower) and that a surprise ninth episode was going to be released, serving as the show’s real ending.
“That was crazy, that was fucking crazy,” Bower said of that time, noting how the fans were further fueled by a social video he did to promote his appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. “The fans held onto that, they were like, ‘He’s saying something about time and he’s stopping on nine!’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no, we’ve just come up with this idea in the back of a car to the airport!’”
Schnapp told The Hollywood Reporter how he was being spammed with texts from people asking about the secret finale “and I was like, ‘I promise you we did not film another episode.’ I don’t know where people got that from, I’ve never seen so many people convinced of something so wrong.”
Levy also weighed in on that time, saying, “The sort of wishful thinking, legendary, fabled episode nine — that was baffling and thank God by that point I had learned not to even try engaging with people online, and that the internet and social media is this sort of self-fueling machine of theory and story. I felt bad for the world, because they really believed; as much as I believe that Eleven is still alive somewhere by those waterfalls, the world seemed to really believe for a while in that extra episode. I knew they were going to get their hearts broken by its absence, but there was nothing I could do to spare them that pain.”
As Levy referenced, the real finale was left open-ended, with Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven seemingly sacrificing herself inside the collapsing Upside Down, but then followed by a scene that implies she may still be alive and in hiding. Bower and Schnapp said they both believe Eleven survived at the end, as Levy emphasized that he thinks The Duffers “successfully gave audiences a complete experience while still asking for engagement in that ‘what if?’ The show ends but how we envision these characters moving forward is sort of up to us, it’s a little choose-your-own-adventure.”
“For me, it was really successful, and you’ll never satisfy everyone but it feels like we satisfied most,” Levy continued. “That’s better than most series I can think of, especially ones with this kind of fan base, which is ferocious.”
The FYC event, which took over the famed Hollywood Forever Cemetery, also featured a conversation with the crafts team including makeup effects department head Barrie Gower, hair department head Sarah Hindsgaul, supervising sound editor Craig Henighan, stunt coordinator Hiro Koda and VFX supervisor/concept artist Michael Maher.