Stranger Things Season 5, containing two volumes, was a sore disappointment for viewers who went into the final volume with strong expectations. Even though the first volume of the season set things up for success, many viewers, including myself, felt dissatisfied with the last episodes—which finished airing on Dec. 31, 2025.

Season 5, Volume 1 focused its attention on Hawkins, Indiana, the central small town of the show that was kept under quarantine due to the villain Vecna’s attack in season four. No one except the main characters and the military were aware of Vecna’s supernatural influences. In Volume 1, the main characters prepared to kill Vecna once and for all, routinely venturing into the Upside Down realm in “crawls,” to search for an ideal moment to attack.

“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.”

The first four episodes weren’t without their drawbacks, however. The “witty” dialogue came off as unrealistic and corny, and the demogorgons’ inability to harm the main characters while wiping out hundreds of soldiers made the plot armor overtly obvious. But the cliffhanger ending was good enough to put viewers’ minds at ease: Volume 1 ended with a dramatic sequence in which the character of Will Byers unlocked his powers through his connection to Vecna’s hivemind, and singlehandedly stopped three demogorgons from killing his friends with his new abilities.

“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.”

However, after volume one, many fans agreed that the season went downhill. Volume 2 mostly explored the characters planning out how to rescue Holly Wheeler, who was kidnapped by Vecna, and kill Vecna, who they discovered was hiding in Dimension X (or The Abyss, as the characters call it), not the upside down as they had previously thought. Thanks to the abandoned notebooks of Dr. Brenner, the character Dustin Henderson was able to figure out that the Upside Down wasn’t an alternate dimension—it was the opening of a wormhole that connected Hawkins to Dimension X, which was the alternate dimension that was the real home of the demogorgons and the Mindflayer.

There was also character development in the form of Will’s coming out scene, but many fans felt that the scene was not up to the standard of Stranger Things. Because Will was essentially threatened by Vecna to come out to every single character, the scene felt inauthentic and borderline uncomfortable to viewers.

“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?”

The third volume, the finale, culminated in an unsatisfying ending. The final fight with the Mindflayer was incredibly short-lived, which feels especially lacking in payoff after the characters have spent the last four years of their lives fighting the monsters and barely making it out with their lives. In fact, fans felt so unfulfilled after the finale that a theory about a secret ninth episode coming out on Jan. 7 gained mainstream popularity under the name “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.

Evidence backing up Conformitygate ranged from far-fetched, such as the Wheeler family looking like Vecna in the epilogue or claims that an empty sign in the background of the graduation scene meaning that the viewer was possessed by Vecna, to relatively convincing, such as important props in the final season changing color and the emphasis on Vecna messing with people’s memory and Lucas Sinclair’s line about coincidences not being real.

Although Conformitygate didn’t come true, many fans see the fact that the theory existed in the first place as evidence of poor writing on the part of the Duffer brothers.

“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.”