My Top 10 bits of #conformitygate evidence
My overall opinion on conformitygate is that the awfulness of Stranger Things 5.8 is so… complex that I genuinely think the more likely option is that it was deliberately bad than that it was accidentally bad.
I do also think S5 has been set up to be added to in a big meta move. If any show on the planet right now could pull this off, it would be Stranger Things, and it would be genuinely historic.
I see motive, means, and opportunity...
... and I also see giant, gaping plot holes.
So here we go:
The top 10 things that lead me to believe we're going to be getting more ST5 content, in rough order of how gravely they would have had to fuck up to do this by accident
Contents:
Clocks and time travel references that went nowhere
Spotlighting plot holes and inconsistencies
Sets and shots being changed
Mike Wheeler vs. A satisfying character arc
Missing songs
Signals (snowball) subplot dropping off
Fourth wall breaks (or, S5 already is meta)
False, alternate, twist, or meta endings
Whatzit? board game (x3)
X marks the spot: Will, the exotic matter, and Nancy's smoking gun
More detail (lots of detail) and examples of each of these below.
Seriously, fair warning, this is a looong post.
1. Clocks and time travel references that went nowhere
1a. Vecna’s association with clocks.
This association was built up incredibly strongly in S4 and reinforced in S5. I won’t list out all the points here because there are so many and it’s too obvious, but here is a handful of key examples:
Vecna’s grandfather clock chiming sound effect, and the presence of the floating grandfather clock in Vecna’s mind lair
multiple shots of young Henry standing in front of the grandfather clock, turning the hands anticlockwise—obvious implication of either turning back time or existing outside of time, especially given…
… Henry’s speech about time being a prison to baby!El in 4.7: “Where others saw order, I saw a straitjacket. A cruel, oppressive world dictated by made-up rules. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades. […] Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for it all to be over. All while performing in a silly, terrible play, day after day”
the first thing we find out about Mr. Whatsit’s appearance is that he has a pocket watch (which comes with a ticking sound effect, in case we didn’t make the connection)
after Vecna begins his ritual with the kids in 5.7, the credits music is basically composed around a bassline of ominously ticking clocks (timed with the credits text, to make the ticking stand out even more)
(related to clocks but not Vecna specifically,) we got a seemingly random clock ticking sound effect several times this season, for example when El goes into the void in 5.2 and when she interrogates Akers in 5.3 (there were others, but I didn’t take note of them all)
1b. Time travel references
S5 was filled with references to time travel, including references to famous media featuring time travel.
From the incredibly strong connection to A Wrinkle in Time, to the solid connection to Back to the Future, to the casting of the star of famous time travel/time loop movie The Terminator (Linda Hamilton), to the passing mention of Slaughterhouse Five, this theme was everywhere.
If there was not (and was never going to be) any time travel in ST5, explain all these references to me, plus:
Holly literally calls Max’s adventures through Henry’s memories “time travel” (5.4)
In A Wrinkle in Time (referenced constantly in relation to Vecna and his plans), the tesseract is an object the characters use to travel through space-time—it’s also an object we saw Derek make in class in 5.3 (a cube within a cube)
When Mr. Clarke is teaching Erica’s class about wormholes, his line delivery is interesting—after Erica says wormholes allow matter to travel between galaxies or dimensions, Mr. Clarke says, “Just think of all the places mankind could go. Another galaxy. Another time, even” (the bit about time travel is sort of hidden by the fact that Erica (and the audience) are distracted by Mike and Lucas at the window—this is a move they've pulled in previous seasons: Mr. Clarke drops important foreshadowing information while our attention is pulled elsewhere)
Why the clocks and time travel references that went nowhere matter:
On its own, I guess I can excuse all the time travel references going nowhere. It’s... possible that was all… accidental, or coincidental. (Implausible and dumb, but not impossible.) But the “Vecna is obsessed with clocks and/or time” thing coming to nothing is inexcusable. Why belabour this connection to the point of near-silliness if his evil scheme has literally nothing to do with clocks and/or time? … And these two things both amounting to nothing??
2. Spotlighting plot holes and inconsistencies
We see several instances of the show shining a spotlight on its own plot holes or inconsistencies, both in-text and from a meta standpoint. I give four examples below.
Note that I am not talking about ‘lampshading’—or deliberately drawing attention to something potentially jarring, simply in order to get it over with and move on.
What I’m talking about here is more like leaning on the fourth wall—the show engaging subtly but directly with the audience by critiqueing its own content, while keeping plausible in-universe deniability.
With that in mind, if there was not (and was never going to be) any additional S5 content, explain the following to me.
2a. Milkshakes at Melvald’s
After Will made an objectively incorrect, easily disproven statement about him and his friends “biking to Melvald’s for malted milkshakes” in 5.7…
… why did the crew then go out of their way to highlight that Melvald’s is a general store in three separate scenes in 5.8?
First there’s a looong shot of it when Kay is storming the Radio Shack, then several shots of it in the MAC-Z arrest scene, then a looong (well-lit) shot of it in the epilogue.
Melvald’s is the general store where Joyce worked for 10 years, up to 1985 (S3), which we the audience have been inside several times since S1.
But Melvald’s used to be a diner that sold milkshakes in the ‘60s, before Will was born (or of biking age)…
… when Henry Creel was a teenager.
It even had a milkshake on the logo.
(I talked about this point a bit more in On anachronisms: milkshakes at Melvald's, and orange graduation gowns.)
With how much emphasis the Duffers put on how carefully they wrote Will’s coming out scene, I simply do not accept that this was a script error:
Matt Duffer: “I think we probably spent longer writing that scene than any other scene this year. We were very nervous about it. Obviously, we've been building up to that for a while. We took a long time working on that.”
2b. The “real” me
In 5.8, El tells Mike:
El: “You understand me. Better than anyone. You always have. From the day we met… you’ve seen me. The real me.”
Aside from the gross display of “tell, don’t show” in both the dialogue and the flashbacks in this scene, and after literally the whole season of El and Mike never being shown acting like a couple…
… El tells Mike that he:
Saw the real her, from the day they met, and
Has always understood her, better than anyone
Firstly, both of these points are objectively disprovable (I'll get to that in a second).
Secondly, you barely even need to recall the events of the show to question the first statement—the edit immediately does it for you.
When El tells Mike he’s always seen the real her, the literal first flashback shot they show is of El in a "normal girl" costume.
This isn’t an anti-M!leven point, it’s just a startling choice of all possible shots they could have chosen to indicate that Mike has ever understood who El really was.
The edit just… ruthlessly mocks the dialogue.
And perhaps that’s fair, given that in their fight in 4.3, El makes it explicitly clear to us and to Mike that he can never truly understand her and her experiences—and that he makes her feel even worse about herself. That entire conversation is just heartbreaking for El, and it was never resolved.
To add insult to injury, Mike repeatedly insists on calling her a superhero—when she so clearly just wants to be loved as a person. For who she is, not for her powers. The real her. (And the fact that Mike seeing El as a superhero makes him feel like shit about himself (4.8) just makes the whole thing even more dysfunctional.)
As for whether Mike understands El “better than anyone", here’s my take on two characters who are shown to understand El better than Mike and/or actually see the real El, beyond her powers:
Max, her best friend, who encouraged El to discover who she was outside of her relationships with men, gave her female role models (herself and Wonder Woman), and helped her express her own style and femininity after a lifetime of enforced androgyny Will, her brother, who saw and stuck by her during one of the worst, weakest times of her life (orphaned, stripped of her power, bullied cruelly), who knows what it's like to be different, and to worry about your place in the world, and to have an un-asked-for supernatural connection
Both Mike in his 4.9 monologue to El, and El in her 5.8 farewell to Mike, reference the day they met as the start of some sort of epic romance. But on the day they met, Mike wanted to get rid of El as soon as he could without getting busted for going out to search for Will in the night, by having his mom “send her back to Pennhurst [asylum] or wherever she comes from” (1.2).
Or, at least, he wants to get her out of the way until he finds out that bad people are after her… and she points out Will’s photograph… and he connects the dots.
In other words, he wants to get her out of the way until he finds out she might be useful. Later, he outright calls her a “weapon”.
All in all... it’s not a particularly honest or romantic farewell from El.
And again, the edit tells us that what El's saying is suspect, at best. Never mind the way the actors perform it so stiffly. Everything else we see in the scene is disagreeing with the dialogue.
2c. The painting
Will’s D&D painting was a major plot point in S4. The first shot we see of Will in the season, he’s painting it. We find out El thinks it’s for a girl he has a crush on, because he won’t let her see it. He brings it to the airport and it’s repeatedly pointed out. He brings it on their impromptu roadtrip (after Mike apologises for being an asshole to him the previous day).
Then he gives it to Mike, to assuage Mike’s fear that he is a useless nerd who his superpowered girlfriend has no need for.
Will hides his own love confession behind El’s name. He tells Mike that he’s the heart and leader of the party, and that Will El is reassured and strengthened by his her relationship with Mike, fears losing him, needs him… and always will need him.
Then Will breaks down crying, presumably at Mike’s obliviousness because he just sublimated his own feelings into a proxy love confession to try to make his best friend/crush and beloved sister happy together—
—and in doing so, lost an internal fight against his own belief that Mike does not value Will or Will’s love as much as he values El and El’s love.
(In 5.4, Vecna cites that moment of pain as a reason Will does not belong in the real world, but instead in Vecna’s world.)
Finn Wolfhard said in an interview that the van confession and painting scene was hard to film because Mike was so painfully oblivious:
Finn: “How is he this… clueless [scoffs] right now? What with the Will scene, in the car, I was like, what, how? I remember asking the Duffers, ‘Why—how—why would he not know this?’ And they were like, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll pay off. The end.’ And so I trust them.”
The payoff for this would be Mike finding out (and, if there is any screenwriting talent in the room, confronting and dealing with the implications of finding out) that:
El had nothing to do with the painting, and
Will loves him
(I talked about this more in On bravery and heroism: Mike, Holly, and the Heart)
Both of these facts would have pretty fundamental interpersonal consequences for all three characters involved—and El doesn’t even know this happened. Hell, given the Willel sibling relationship, the ‘payoff’ should also really require El to find out who the painting was for, and therefore about Will’s feelings for Mike.
In the next episode, Will quoted his own love confession to cajole Mike into giving his choking girlfriend a rousing speech, instead of just frantically repeating her name (though Mike does it with yet more superhero crap that visibly pisses El off to hear).
So it’s arguable, at best, that anyone other than Jonathan (and maaaybe Robin) is aware of Will’s actual feelings for Mike after 5.7—except perhaps as a past crush—
—but it’s inarguable that Mike does not know that the painting (and the accompanying love confession) was from Will, not El.
And then they shamelessly spotlighted this glaring plot hole and lack of payoff in 5.8 by having the painting clearly visible on epilogue!Mike’s wall, front and centre in the frame.
(And that’s in addition to the Funko Pop! released as part of the S5 promo merch that clearly considered the painting to be a defining feature of the character of Mike Wheeler. Not to mention the Funko Pop! of Mike dressed how Will painted him.)
So where the hell was the payoff for the painting, the confession, and the lie… and why the hell did they actively point out the lack of any payoff for this whatsoever in 5.8?
2d. The exotic matter
It was made incredibly obvious that the exotic matter had already been disturbed and resettled at least once before Nancy shot it in 5.5, from the fact that Jonathan and Nancy found the top of Hawkins Lab (a) pre-melted and (b) home to the corpses of three soldiers.
(They also note that there are no spores in the air, and that whatever happened must have been Vecna’s dark magic—which Dustin later refutes... but that's all we get on that, folks.)
And just in case you somehow missed these guys, they used a gross close-up of wall!soldier as a transition shot, and Nancy later says in the goo room that one of the soldiers downstairs had managed to cut through the door.
So what disturbed the exotic matter the first time? Did one of the soldiers do a Nancy and shoot it? And when did this happen? Presumably it was in the 18-month timeskip, after Vecna opened the gates in S4, when the military moved into the UD. So the military is aware of the exotic matter!
(The soldiers' helmets look contemporary to the 80s, maybe a little older. The button-up shirt and lack of camo print suggests an even earlier time period, like, 1940s, but it's a bit ambiguous.)
But what happened, exactly, and were there any… uh, consequences?
Because in 5.6, after Nancy shot the exotic matter, it sent out a double blast wave that made the entire wall of the wormhole ripple, and punched a hole right through it at the weak point where Steve’s Beamer had been embedded.
And if this ‘first disturbance’ is, as it appears to be now, a pointless plot hole, why did they call it out in the episode recap videos on YouTube?
They show a gruesome shot of one of the soldiers' corpses... why?
Why this shot, of all possible shots to include from that episode??
It’s the third shot in that video. It comes before we see Will, who just manifested superpowers.
What happened the first time the exotic matter was disturbed??
Why all the spotlit plot holes and inconsistencies matter:
This one almost doesn’t need explanation, but in short: if you knew that your show contained plot holes and inconsistencies, why in the hell would you go out of your way to point them out to the audience through in-text and metatexual editing?? The only reasonable answer has to be: because you want the audience to notice your plot holes and inconsistencies, for some sort of payoff… … and/or because they aren’t really plot holes and inconsistencies, they just have yet to pay off.
3. Sets and shots being changed
If there was not (and was never going to be) any additional S5 content, explain to me why dozens of people not only forgot how to do their jobs and maintain continuity, but actively injected continuity errors into final shots?
3a. Radio tower voltage dial changing colours
By now, a conformitygate classic.
This dial was an actual set piece, so for this to happen, they would have needed to procure or make it in two separate colours.
If it wasn’t deliberate, everyone involved in production would have had to miss that they were two different colours, from creation or procurement of the prop/set piece all the way through installation, rehearsals, and filming.
Someone had to swap them out.
And worse, both coloured dials are shown in the same episode—in 5.5, when Lucas is talking about pumping the dead Demo with electricity from the tower, there’s a flashback to Steve turning the dial in 5.1. So we know that this "inconsistency" also went past an editor or two.
3b. Mike Wheeler vanishing and reappearing
I absolutely did not spot this one myself, but I went back and checked after someone else pointed it out and, lo and behold, a magic (disappearing and reappearing) Mike!
Not to put too fine a point on it, but where the fuck did Mike go in that middle shot?
As with the radio tower dial, that is not an editing or VFX or minor continuity mistake, like someone’s arm or hair not being in the exact same position from shot to shot.
That is a whole-ass real-world human being—and one of the core cast members since the first season of the show—who straight up vanished and reappeared from shot to shot, which means they either:
momentarily forgot Finn was in this sequence, so accidentally filmed a shot without him while he was having a quick break and then, oopsie, kept that shot in the final cut, OR
intentionally kept Finn out of that shot for some reason…
3c. Wheeler basement door swapping sides
The door handle, uh, swaps sides?
(To phrase it another way… “it flipped!”)
Again, as with the radio tower dial, this is a set piece. The Wheeler house set(s), as far as I am aware, have just sat there on the studio lot for the last 10 years.
The décor in the basement is different, fine, but it's the same door... just flipped.
Why the sets and shots being changed matters:
This one is also fairly self-explanatory. The changes I gave examples of above are not mere continuity errors: they required effort to achieve. They were deliberate. But as of now we don't know why this was done. If no new content is incoming, then it was a bizarre waste of time. But if new content is coming, this could be a way of showing that we are perhaps in a false or reconstructed world, where some of the finer details have just slipped through the cracks...
4. Mike Wheeler vs. A satisfying character arc
If there was not (and was never going to be) any additional S5 content, explain to me why Mike Wheeler—one of the six OG main characters—was the only one who fell off the face of the earth after about 5.4...
... despite being obviously set up for a hero arc through foreshadowing and clear parallels with newly-promoted main character Holly and her (manifested) hero arc.
(I talk about this in more depth in On bravery and heroism: Mike, Holly, and the Heart)
4a. Mike the Brave Holly the Heroic
We see Mike telling Holly that he uses the character of “Mike the Brave” to help him when he’s feeling scared:
Mike: "I just imagine that he's at my side."
Mike separates himself from the character of Mike the Brave.
But Holly uses the character of “Holly the Heroic”—which Mike gives her in 5.1—very differently. First, the figurine becomes a little totem for her, with Holly weaving it onto her necklace and gripping it when she’s scared or upset.
And later, when Holly is in mortal danger, she actually becomes Holly the Heroic, both in dress and in actions. In 5.6, Max explicitly says that Holly is Holly the Heroic.
There’s a strong connection drawn between Mike and Holly, starting with their respective alter egos, and continuing through Holly’s adventures in Camazotz with Max. In 5.6, Max first says Holly is reminding her of Mike for stress pacing, then says, “You don’t remind me of your brother. You are your brother!” when Holly hares stubbornly off into danger.
Later, Max reminds Holly (and the audience) that she is a Wheeler, like Mike, like Nancy—and that heroism is not simply the ability to physically fight off a monster. According to Max, Holly’s heroism lies in her intelligence, bravery, conviction, and willingness to step up to help others.
However, as of 5.8, the only payoff for the Mike and Holly parallel is that Holly becomes a great leader, as the kids escape Henry’s prison.
Holly is what Mike should have been.
Mike is a main character, in theory. He needs an arc. But as of 5.8, Mike has had no unique plot points and no character arc in S5.
According to his parallels with Holly, Mike needs to stop separating himself from the character of Mike the Brave, and instead become Mike the Brave, like Holly became Holly the Heroic—become the leader guiding and inspiring the whole Party.
Become the Heart.
4b. Finn’s monologue? Finn carrying emotional weight?
A lesser point, since I haven't personally seen sources on these, but before S5 came out we were apparently told that Finn carried a lot of emotional weight this season, and that he had another “pizza dough freezer"-style epic monologue.
… where are they?
Mike had little to no emotional presence in S5 aside from his goodbye to El, and the only thing he did that could be squinted at and called a monologue is his “Where are they now?” epilogue lines… and that's a stretch.
Why Mike's lack of plot and Finn's lack of… presence matters:
On the Finn thing, either we were lied to, or we haven't yet seen whatever these clues were talking about. I hate it, but fine. But on the Mike thing… to so comprehensively lay the groundwork for his character arc and plot points, only to literally hand them off to his baby sister and give him absolutely nothing whatsoever to do but narrate the finale flash-forwards… is grossly incompetent. The setup was all there. It was all deliberate. We're missing the payoff.
5. Missing songs
If there was not (and was never going to be) any additional S5 content, explain to me why we're missing at least 10 songs that appear on official S5 albums.
5a. The WSQK vinyl
They released two vinyls for S5: Stranger Things Season 5 and Stranger Things: The WSQK Collection.
All the songs from Stranger Things Season 5 appear in the show, even as a brief gag (like Oh Yeah by Yello, which plays when Dustin desecrates the Beamer).
But as many other people have pointed out, of the 10 songs on Stranger Things: The WSQK Collection, only two were played in the show:
I Think We're Alone Now by Tiffany (Holly’s song)
Upside Down by Diana Ross (secret radio message song)
(Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2 by Pink Floyd is… referenced, in the Pink Floyd - The Wall movie poster that’s on the wall in the WSQK basement, the poster in epilogue!Mike's dorm, and possibly in the first shot of the epilogue in 5.8, but the song itself doesn't appear.)
I Think We're Alone Now actually appears on both vinyls, which is weird in its own way.
Both it and Upside Down were used very obviously (diagetically) in the show, so it's actually weird that Upside Down, easily the most pointed use of music in the season, didn't appear on the S5 vinyl (with the other diagetic songs, like Rockin' Robin, Fernando, Human Cannonball)…
… but instead only appeared on the WSQK vinyl… with a bunch of songs that didn't feature in the season?
Again, as with the previous point about spotlighting inconsistencies, this oddity feels like it's drawing attention to itself.
5b. The OST
There are at least two songs on the S5 original soundtrack (OST) that do not, to the best of my knowledge, appear in the show: We’re Friends, Good Friends, and End Credits.
We’re Friends, Good Friends is a beautiful synthy track based on “Friendship” from S1 OST.
It starts with a humming, emotional charge and builds to a swooping midpoint crescendo (at around 55 seconds) that sounds like the backdrop to a major feel-good moment (here's hoping for either a love confession or a big damn kiss!).
It’s quite a distinctive track; and it doesn’t make an appearance in S5. (If it does, and I’ve somehow managed to miss it, someone please enlighten me!).
The title is most obviously a callback to Robin’s line to Will in 5.2 (but is not the music playing in that scene):
Robin: “Vickie, she's a candy striper. She’s my friend. We're friends, good friends. But, uh… The thing is, some people might not understand our friendship.”
The “joke", such as it is, is that Robin and Vickie are of course not just “good friends", but rather girlfriends.
Meaning the song title is... quite literally queer coded.
(It may also call back to Mike and Will’s “Friends. Best friends” (which itself is calling back to the Rink O Mania fight, when Mike told Will, “We’re friends, we’re friends”, and Will rebutted with a, “Well we used to be best friends”.))
Meanwhile, End Credits is exactly what it sounds like: a triumphant, rocking sort of song, an epic version of one of the show's major musical themes: “Kids" (S1 OST), later adapted to “Teens” (S4 OST).
But it does not appear in the end credits of any of the episodes: 5.1 plays Upside Down by Diana Ross, 5.2 plays Mr. Sandman by The Chordettes, 5.3 plays I Think We're Alone Now by Tiffany. 5.4 to 5.6 play instrumental songs I can’t identify (but I’m sure someone else has), 5.7 plays an ominous instrumental under ominously ticking clocks….
… and 5.8 plays Heroes by David Bowie, which fades into a rather sombre remix of the title theme (S1 OST).
None of them come close to the punchy, triumphant song on the OST called End Credits.
Why the missing songs matter:
I mean, just, why include these songs in official season albums, or buy them or, in the case of the OST, compose and record and name them if they don’t appear in the show and/or have no actual importance? Musical references have been important in the show since its beginning… so bypassing the vinyl songs seems to be a clear signal of something being missing. This is even more noticeable since (1) one of the vinyls does have all its songs pay off, making the other one stand out in contrast, and (2) two of the songs on the WSQK pay off—in a big, unmissable way—making it even more obvious how many of them do not feature in the show. And the inclusion of at least two OST songs that don’t actually appear in the show is even more baffling to me, not least because We’re Friends, Good Friends is beautiful and genuinely my favourite song on the album (next to Will the Wizard, for obvious reasons), and End Credits is also a phenomenal song… which does not appear in any of the S5 end credits…!? ... Implying, of course, that we haven't yet seen the end credits.
7. Signals (snowball) subplot dropping off
If there was not (and was never going to be) any additional S5 content, explain to me why the “signals" subplot between Robin and Will, radio and hive mind, superpowers and sexuality, was so well-developed in 5.1 to 5.5…
… and then dropped like a rock before its final payoff.
I talked about this (extensively) in On "signals": radio, hive mind, and romance, but will recap here:
In Volume 1, Will’s entire plotline revolves around a very clear connection that’s drawn between three different forms of intentional communication: radio signals, hive mind signals, and romantic signals. This is done using terminology, character context, in-world analogy, and explicit plot points.
The connections are particularly well-established between radio and hive mind signals, and hive mind and romantic signals.
This thematic structure means that once Will has “mastered” one type of signal (hive mind), he should be able to “master” another (romantic signals).
Mastering the hive mind looked like transmitting signals instead of just receiving them—taking control. The romantic equivalent would be something like flirting instead of just waiting to be flirted with, asking someone on a date, or (on the more extreme end) confessing your love without waiting for a confession.
For Will, the recipient of any romantic signals he sends out would obviously be Mike—and he does begin to do this, with his flirty body language and playful little shove to Mike’s chest in 5.4.
So we’re working with two separate—but related—plot points, only one of which was addressed by Will accepting his sexuality in 5.4 (and coming out in 5.7):
Will's sexuality
Will's feelings for Mike
Paralleling these two separate—but related—plot points are Robin’s two bouts of advice and autobiography:
Tammy in the tunnels
Vickie in the hospital
Robin’s advice and story about Tammy is critical for Will’s self-acceptance and very literal empowerment.
But her advice and story about Vickie plays no part in that plotline—the “snowball” scene is very explicitly about finding gay love.
Meaning… as of 5.8, the snowball scene has no payoff.
Furthermore, in 5.4 Vecna didn’t just use Will’s queerness against him—he specifically used his feelings for Mike against him. Meaning Will is still vulnerable to Vecna, because he hasn’t resolved his feelings for Mike (whether by reciprocation or by a let-down).
And worse still: despite the fact that we’re told that Will is empowered by his love (for Mike, his mom, and his brother), he has not actually attempted any sort of romantic relationship with Mike.
Why the dropped "signals" narrative structure matters:
Yes, this could just be bad writing… but it would have to be a sudden shift to bad writing! Up until about 5.5, it was great writing! And it matters because this storyline went out of its way to promise something… which it didn’t deliver. We got the payoff for the radio/hive mind/sexuality connection… … but not for the radio/hive mind/romance connection. This dropped plot also had a material impact on the story we did get. It’s (one of the reasons why) Will’s coming out scene felt forced and pointless—this underlying “signals” structure told us that even though he accepted his queerness and came out to the group, Will is still vulnerable to Vecna because he hasn’t resolved his feelings for Mike. But… luckily… apparently... Vecna never planned to use Will’s sexuality or secret love against him in the first place. Will’s self-acceptance earned him powers (and one of the highest rated ST episodes) but his coming out achieved nothing (except the lowest rated ST episode). Dropping this narrative matters because it meant that that entire plotline only half paid off. The romantic aspect (snowballs) had no relevance whatsoever to the plot. This is bad, unsatisfying writing because it set but then did not meet its own criteria. And to add further insult, the path to a satisfying conclusion to this plotline was basically handed to us: Mike needed to at minimum find out about Will’s feelings and, ideally, reciprocate them and give love-powered Will a power boost.
7. Fourth wall breaks (or, S5 already is meta)
People have cited probably dozens of shots in S5 as fourth wall breaks. I am sceptical of many if not most of these, which I think are just front-facing shots and/or are just up for interpretation…
… but I do think we had some indisputable fourth wall breaks in S5.
Here are two big ones.
7a. Henry!Vecna looking into the camera
At the end of 5.7, when the children are all chanting “back to the light”, Henry!Vecna stares and smirks literally right into the camera.
It's a sustained shot, lasting around six seconds. It's also an unambiguous break in the fourth wall.
Vecna is looking at you 🫵
… but why?
7b. Steve’s death fake-out
In 5.8, when Steve falls off the radio tower, there’s a glaringly obvious cut to black, after the shot seems to clearly establish that nobody is in range to catch him.
But then the screen goes black for about seven seconds… with some weird clanking noises…
… and we come back at a completely different camera angle to find that Jonathan has (teleported over there and luckily!) grabbed Steve’s arm.
I see this as a clear fourth wall break for three intertwined reasons.
Firstly, Steve was the undisputed “favourite” character to die, and has been for a while (him or Jonathan, I guess, but Steve’s death would hit harder at this point). In 5.7 he and Dustin literally traded the lines, “You die, I die”, priming the audience to expect one or both of them to, uh… die. (Even that dialogue was a subtle nudge at the fourth wall, stoking audience expectations or fears.)
Secondly, seven seconds of a blank screen is so incredibly long that you have ample time while watching to contemplate how jarringly long it is—jolting you right out of the narrative.
Which brings me to…
Thirdly, the cut to black after Steve falls is so obnoxiously obvious, and the shots on either side of it are so spatially incompatible and non-continuously composed that I can’t read this as anything other than a spotlighted deus ex machina.
The editors saved Steve’s life, then winked at us and said, “You thought he was a goner, didn’t you?”
Doing a clear death fake-out with editing trickery—on a character all but earmarked to die by the narrative—is, as far as I’m concerned, a direct shot at the audience and our expectations.
Why the fourth wall breaks matter:
Firstly, why have that incredibly obvious fourth wall-breaking shot with Henry!Vecna for literally no payoff? And secondly, if you must do a fake-out Steve death, why make it so obnoxious, and why stop with just an almost-silly near-death moment… with no payoff whatsoever? The payoff for a fourth wall-tapping narrative beat like this (if there is indeed any screenwriting talent in the room) would be that it is later subverted when there is a twist death—Steve the obvious candidate is saved, but Jonathan, or Nancy, or Robin, or literally anyone dies in a way we did not anticipate, maximising the shock of it. (El’s painfully foreseeable suicide absolutely does not count.) The fourth wall breaks matter because they should serve a purpose and, as far as we know, they do not.
8. False, alternate, twist, or meta endings
If there was not (and was never going to be) any additional S5 content, explain to me why there are so many textual references to (and examples of!) false or fake-out endings.
There are loads of examples of S5 referencing media with false, alternate, twist, or meta endings, which many, many other people on here have noted. A lot of them were on the S4 inspiration board, so we can be very confident they were intentional references.
In addition to references to other media, the show itself contains at least two examples of false endings and major plot twists—in S5, even.
The purpose of all this should be to foreshadow a false, alternate, twist, or meta ending to the audience.
8a. So many media references
Because so many other people have covered this, I'm not going any further down this particular rabbit hole than giving two examples.
The first is Little Shop of Horrors:
seen in a poster in Will’s room in S4
famously filmed a cop-out alternate “happy” ending in response to test audiences’ critique of the original Broadway ending—where the monsters win and “attack” the audience…
The second example is Prince’s Purple Rain - a song about love in the apocalypse, which had a secret ending message revealed if you played the record backwards… you nerd.
6b. Game with a false ending
In 5.3, we’re clearly shown that Derek is playing Ghosts ‘n Goblins:
The player controls a knight who must defeat various monsters to rescue a princess—who has been kidnapped by the king of Demon World. Ghosts ‘n Goblins is often cited as one of the most difficult games of all time: after defeating the final boss, the player must then replay the entire game on a higher difficulty level to reach the genuine final ending.
(I went into more detail about this in On unreliable narration: possession, the fourth wall, and you 🫵)
(And note that the first shot we get of the game is ‘full-screen’, as if we ourselves are playing it... another brush against the fourth wall.)
This made me think of a different post I saw about the pointlessness of Holly’s ultimately futile "escape from Camazotz" plot—especially since a shocking amount of time was spent on her in lieu of the original cast (particularly Mike, see point 4a above).
But what if that escape from a mind prison was a blueprint, “easy mode”, or Act I…
… setting us up for Act II, which ups the stakes: now everyone needs to escape Vecna’s mind prison.
Hard mode.
6c. D&D fake-outs
In the epilogue in 5.8, Mike messes with the Party while they play D&D, just like he did in S1:
In 1.1, he fakes out that they’re facing an army of troglodytes… but it’s actually the Demogorgon!
In 5.8, he fakes out that the summoning incantation did nothing… but there was just a delay!
These scenes are mirrored down to the shot composition. The beats of both false endings are almost exactly the same.
(I went into more detail about this in On unreliable narration: possession, the fourth wall, and you 🫵)
6d. A play fake-out
In 5.8, we know the play in the 1969 memory in Henry's mind is meant to be Oklahoma!, because Max (and we) saw Joyce's flyer for it in several different shots in 5.4 (a scene we were reminded of immediately before Max and the others went onstage).
I don’t think any play could more obviously not be Oklahoma! than what Max leads El and Kali through—with its dark lighting, jagged purple set, creepy chanting, writhing dancing, and the ensemble in animal skull masks and black cloaks.
Even viewers who know nothing about The First Shadow could have picked up on this discrepancy, or at least been a bit… confused.
For those of us a little more in the know, this is a reference to Joyce’s subplot in the play which involved putting on a show called Dark of the Moon…
… but telling everyone it was a different, classic (boring) show to dazzle them, or shock them, or something something bold and memorable when the real play was revealed.
Why all the false endings matter:
In short? Foreshadowing. Currently, empty foreshadowing.
9. Whatzit? board game (x3)
A comparatively minor point, but if the plot is all wrapped up and Vecna / Henry / One / Mr. Whatsit is truly dead and defeated…
… why does the (pointedly named) Whatzit? board game appear in both Hopper's cabin (where El’s bathtub used to be) and Mike's basement (behind Will, and later Derek)…
… also calling back to when it fell on Holly when she was being attacked by the Demogorgon in 5.2 (indicating Mr. Whatsit's responsibility)?
(Also note that Vecna called himself Mr. Whatsit—we know Holly didn’t name him that because the other kids also called him that independently (Derek and Debbie in 5.4).)
Why the Whatzit? appearances matter:
This isn't necessarily a reason to believe more content is incoming, but it's certainly a reason to believe in conformitygate. The reference—to Vecna and his plans—is clear and deliberate, even if the relevance is open to some interpretation.
10. X marks the spot: Will, the exotic matter, and Nancy's smoking gun
At the end of 5.5, two significant things happen that seemed to bode very ill… but actually amounted to very little:
Will getting trapped in Vecna's (?) mind, and
Nancy shooting the exotic matter
Nancy's shot was the climax of 5.5, and was framed as a massive deal that would kill “everyone"—the opening shot in 5.6 focuses on her literal smoking gun (a well-established metaphor for indirect proof of guilt of a crime).
And in fact, these two things that go wrong near-simultaneously—Will’s capture and the exotic matter shooting—are later linked together again by one of the most (if not the most!) on-the-nose shots we've seen this season.
In 5.7, Dustin draws a diagram of the bridge/wormhole on the glass of the WSQK recording booth, annotated with an H for Hawkins, an A for the Abyss, an X for the Upside Down (?), and a central circle for the exotic matter.
Dustin: “[The bridge] is wildly unstable, but held together by exotic matter—which we found dead centre, right above the lab.”
Later, we are shown Will overlaid with that diagram—twice!—with the exotic matter over his head (mind?) and the X over his heart. This (repeated!) shot is so pointed that anyone with a reasonably well-functioning brain would notice its apparent significance…
… but it ends up going nowhere.
(I talked about that shot more, including “X/M marks the spot", in On bravery and heroism: Mike, Holly, and the Heart.)
That shot also connects Will(’s heart) with the rifts in the Upside Down, via the big red X—the beginning of 5.8 is the first time, I believe, we ever see the rifts from above, to see that they form a big X through Hawkins.
(Also consider the red X on Max's map for Holly!)
Another thing that goes wrong in 5.5 is the ol’ conformitygate classic, point 3a on this list: the radio tower voltage dial changing colours (to red!)… closely connected to the plot point of “Will attacking Vecna” going wrong…
Why this 5.5 connection matters:
I personally felt that 5.5 was more or less a coherent continuation of Volume 1 (in terms of the storyline and how the characters (especially Mike) were behaving). But shit definitely started to get weird in 5.6, right after these two intertwined plot points—Will’s attack on Vecna and Nancy’s attack on the exotic matter—both go wrong at the end of 5.5. But neither of those events had any major impact—El and Hopper could have found another way out of the Upside Down, and surely Vecna had other ways to find Max (including, but not limited to, applying basic logic). So why was this episode such a turning point?
Bonus round:
Any and all real-world clues that we are missing content, such as:
the “For Will” mixtape that was pushed heavily in merch, but never appeared in the show
BTS shots of Noah filming the mind fight with Vecna in 5.5 inside a circular camera track that was never actually used
other BTS shots we haven't seen used, such as Noah in a stunt harness and at Rink O Mania, both in the S4 orange plaid shirt; (possibly Will with an earring and “Harrington hair” in the 5.8 epilogue); Will in his 5.1 school outfit (and Miwi actors in their basement outfits) set up in a camera array for creating digital doubles for VFX
the fragmented “love——” message the writers put out on Twitter
… and plenty more which others on here have discussed at length.
Why real-world clues matter:
If the showrunners do have something up their sleeve, it's certainly feasible that they've managed to keep it pretty well under wraps. We saw a similar manoeuvre pulled for Spider-Man: No Way Home, which included the actors involved lying through their teeth about their involvement. ... but something will always slip through the cracks. Each of the real-world clues we've received on their own mean, at minimum, that there is something we aren't seeing. Taken all together, they hint at a whole lot that we are not seeing.
So basically, against my will… and at least 50% of my better judgement… ...I remain on the bus 🙃
📍 My Stranger Things Meta Masterpost
