“Intentionally bad”: conformitygate, TJLC, and genre traitors
Most of my Stranger Things season 5 meta has been about what I’ve nicknamed in my head “conformitygate Xtreme” (the interpretation that Stranger Things 5.8 is telling us that it isn’t the real ending), as opposed to “conformitygate Lite” (the interpretation that 5.8 is telling us that the villain actually won).
I don’t write about the possibility that we all just bought into hollow media hype again, basically because… well, that’s no fun.
But “boring and depressing” doesn’t mean it’s not a valid possibility.
This post started off as a rebuttal of the comparisons being made between TJLC (from the BBC Sherlock fandom in 2017) and conformitygate... but when I actually started drafting it, I realised that all my arguments were coming with a glaringly unspoken caveat that the comparison is a valid one, in many ways.
I want conformitygate (Xtreme) to be true, and I do genuinely think it can be true, but I do not and cannot know that it is true. Nobody on here can. And all of us have a responsibility not to lose sight of that reality in our desire to be right. (Or, worse, to be vindicated.)
I don’t consider myself a particularly influential conformitygater, but I do feel a duty of care towards anyone I am influencing.
So I’ve structured this post differently from my original plan:
Part 1: Similarities (a TJLC refresher and gentle reality check)
Part 2: Differences (most of this post)
Part 3: Summary and conclusion
Part 1: Similarities between TJLC and conformitygate
So firstly, what was TJLC?
“The Johnlock Conspiracy” (TJLC) was a broader theory within part of the BBC Sherlock fandom, which held that John Watson and Sherlock Holmes were always intended to become a canon couple in the show and—following the trainwreck of the fourth season—that the finale couldn’t have been the real ending of such a beloved show, because it didn’t make any sense.
Replace Johnlock with Byler, and you pretty much have conformitygate… right?
From this point on, I’m going to use “TJLC” as shorthand for Sherlock fans’ belief (at the time) in “secret good incoming content”, and “conformitygate” as shorthand for Stranger Things fans’ (current) belief in the same. I also think it’s important to conformitygate that it originated and proliferates in Byler analysis—though as with TJLC, conformitygate as a theory goes beyond shipping.
But I’ll get to that later.
There are many fundamental similarities between TJLC and conformitygate, which both:
theorise that a popular show’s ending was so bad, and made so little sense that it cannot be the real ending—that it was badly written on purpose
involve fan discontent with the treatment of a gay ship of two protagonists that, if there is no additional content, would have been a years-long queerbait
have valid textual and metatextual evidence to support their conclusions
started in niche (shipping) fan spaces, before breaking into mainstream awareness
were encouraged by the showrunners’ continuous insistence that their show is meaningful, and that audiences should be analysing details presented in the text
Then there are some additional hyperspecific similarities between how TJLC played out and how conformitygate has played out. In this section I draw significantly on the research and analysis done by Sarah Z in their video “Tumblr's Greatest Conspiracy: The Story of TJLC”, which I do encourage you to watch for more detail on all this.
Here are some of the hyperspecific similarities between TJLC and conformitygate:
In response to the disappointment of the finale, both theories involved fans going beyond analysis of the show as a form of study and media criticism, and venturing instead into predictive analysis treated like a sort of divination.
Both involved fans guessing at multiple possible dates for the anticipated new release based on increasingly tenuous (and numerological) speculation, only to have each proposed date pass with nothing to show for it.
Both theorised that a specific upcoming media release from the studio would turn out to be the secret new content—most notably BBC’s Apple Tree Yard for Sherlock, and the Netflix documentary for Stranger Things.
Both shows had official tie-in content that existed outside the main body of the show, which actively encouraged speculation. For Sherlock this was the official fake blogs for both John and Sherlock. For Stranger Things, it's the WSQK show.
A website claiming to be related to the release of new content popped up online for both shows. For Sherlock, this was “The Lost Special” website—later revealed to have been an unofficial but intentional fan-bait (and vague experiment in confirmation bias). For Stranger Things, this was november61987.com, which featured a countdown to January 7, 2026 (now simply zeroed out).
Both series suffered finale leaks—Stranger Things got a lot of leaked set images that fairly clearly spoiled certain plot points, like El’s death, while Sherlock’s entire finale episode was leaked online the day before it officially aired.
In terms of the history of TJLC, the Sherlock finale leak sent the fandom into a frenzy over (a) how bad it was and (b) how badly the leak was handled by the showrunners. Fans immediately speculated that it was a fake finale pulled together to trick the fandom—an early spark later fanned into the flames of TJLC. The obvious difference between the two finale leaks was the scale: set photos versus the entire episode.
But there’s also a difference in timing and actual intent.
Sherlock’s finale was genuinely leaked, and there was only a day between that and the actual airing—meaning even if it had been intentional, there was no time for the showrunners to capitalise on the leak. But Stranger Things’ finale was aired as expected, almost a month ago, now. And it was shown in theatres (though not, apparently, to Netflix’s profit, due to some baiting and switching with concessions vouchers). The proposition that 5.8 was not the real Stranger Things finale has much more significant implications.
And even within the fundamental similarities between the two theories, there are notable divergences. For instance, TJLC was always mocked by general audiences, whereas there was a brief moment when conformitygate didn’t just enjoy mainstream awareness, but mainstream buy-in.
Bylers alone didn’t crash Netflix on 7 January 2026.
… So that leads me nicely into to Part 2: Differences between TJLC and conformitygate.
But first, another reminder: everything I say below, I say it in the context of recognising all the similarities between the two theories, and recognising that for all our “evidence”, there is a reasonable chance we will all be disappointed, and that conformitygate will go the same way as TJLC.
We do not know how this will end up.
Please read the rest of this post with that in mind, and only engage with this theory as long as you’re having fun doing it—always be appropriately critical of what you read online!
Part 2: Differences between TJLC and conformitygate
I’m starting with the shippy part of both theories, because that’s a pretty objective and slightly less fundamental distinction between Sherlock/TJLC and Stranger Things/conformitygate.
Then I’ll tackle the questions of genre awareness, overall quality, and the relationship between fandom in the era of TJLC, and fandom in the era of conformitygate.
This part is broken up as so:
The butt of the joke
Queercoding and queerbaiting
The ending was (in)evitable
Contempt for the genre, contempt for the audience
The glaring exception
“There’s never a secret episode!”
On precedent
2.1: The butt of the joke
From the start of Sherlock, we got constantly repeated jokes and implications about John and Sherlock being or being mistaken for a couple.
It happened.
Constantly.
The very first episode contains a scene where the waiter assumes John and Sherlock are on a date, and also incidentally Sherlock implies that he might be either gay or asexual.
John: “You don’t have a girlfriend, then?” Sherlock: “Girlfriend? No. Not really my area.” J: “Oh, right. Do you have a boyfriend? Which is fine, by the way—” S: “I know it’s fine.” J: “… So you’ve got a boyfriend, then?” S: “No.”
Johnlock was sometimes referenced at least somewhat seriously, but for the most part it was the butt of the joke.
This became particularly pointed—and started to take on a nastier tone—after S2 (which, coincidentally, was about when the show blew up on Tumblr).
For most of the show, Sherlock and John just kind of… existed around each other. Despite the show being about… them… and they certainly had a lot of interactions, they had increasingly little impact on each other. Neither character went through any particular arc in general… and certainly not as a result of their relationship with each other.
In contrast, Byler has never been portrayed as a joke, and from S1, Mike's relationship with Will was constantly shown to be objectively different from the other characters’.
In the few instances where Mike, Will, and their potential romantic connection has come up explicitly, it was treated seriously—think the S3 rain fight, S4 Rink-O-Mania fight and reconciliation, S4 painting and confession, and Will’s S5 empowerment arc. Even in Will's coming out scene in 5.7, his feelings for Mike are downplayed and arguably trivialised, but they aren't mocked.
Byler is woven into the plot in all 5 seasons of the show:
In S1, most of the narrative focus was on Mike and Joyce’s reactions to Will’s disappearance, including Mike’s early interactions with Eleven. When the fake body is pulled out of the quarry, our attention is first and foremost on Mike’s response—then Joyce and Jonathan, Will’s mother and brother.
By S2, Mike was explicitly aligned with Joyce in terms of his level of investment and involvement in dealing with Will’s possession. He barely left Will’s side.
In S3, Will’s arc is about not wanting to let go of his childhood, which is contrasted with Mike’s desire to be “grown up”—to the point of active conflict between the two of them. Their arcs intersect and almost mirror each other.
In S4, Mike and Will spend almost the entire season at each other’s sides and spend a lot of time dealing with their own relationship drama—which, again, intersects with Mike’s relationship drama with El.
In S5, Mike is the one to suggest to Will that he might have powers, and it’s both Will’s queer self-acceptance and his love for Mike, Joyce, and Jonathan (again) that actually triggers his powers.
It’s not just that Mike and Will spend a lot of time in close proximity that makes it easy to ship them, like John and Sherlock—it’s that Mike and Will’s relationship, both platonic and romantic, was impacting the show's plot in one way or another in all 5 seasons, in a way Johnlock never did.
(… Unless you count John constantly getting kidnapped and needing Sherlock to rescue him.)
Summary:
Whereas Johnlock only ever came up in the show as an in-universe gag (or a dig at the audience), the relationship between Mike and Will—definitely platonically, and possibly romantically—has always been played straight (pun essential) and meaningfully embedded into the show's narrative and their respective character arcs.
2.2: Queercoding and queerbaiting
Sherlock gave plenty of evidence for a queer interpretation of Sherlock and, at points, John as well. But overwhelmingly, the evidence was that John was straight, and that he and Sherlock were not romantically or sexually interested in each other.
Despite all the jokes and implications—such as Sherlock’s ambiguous sexuality, and the fact that Irene Adler was attracted to Sherlock despite being a lesbian [sigh], and basically said outright that this meant John’s heterosexuality wasn’t necessarily an obstacle to Johnlock—there was no firm textual basis for either John or Sherlock being gay or attracted to each other.
And then in S3, they introduced Mary Morstan: John’s fiancée, then wife. John and Mary had a solid, loving, committed relationship… until Mary was fridged in S4 for being cooler and more interesting as a character than John and Sherlock combined.
Mary’s inclusion in the show can easily be interpreted as the showrunners trying to prove John’s heterosexuality… though your mileage may vary with that one, especially given the fridging.
But what is not remotely open for interpretation was the showrunners’ outright, often hostile insistence that Johnlock wasn’t going to happen from at least 2016 onwards.
“It is infuriating frankly, to be talking about a serious subject and to have Twitter run around and say, ‘Oh that means Sherlock is gay,’” said Moffat. “Very explicitly it does not. We are taking a serious subject and trivializing it beyond endurance.”
“[Sherlock] explicitly says he is not interested,” [cowriter Mark] Gatiss said, referring to Sherlock's implied asexuality in the show. “Doesn’t mean he couldn’t be. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. I’m a gay man. This is not an issue. But we’ve explicitly said this is not going to happen—there is no game plan—no matter how much we lie about other things, that this show is going to culminate in Martin [Freeman] and Benedict [Cumberbatch] going off into the sunset together.”
By comparison, in Stranger Things it is explicit canon as of S4 that:
Will is gay
Will has romantic feelings for Mike
It takes two to tango, but having one half of a gay ship being canonically gay and in love with the other half is one hell of a different proposition from whatever was going on with John and Sherlock (and Mary), and their ambiguous queercoding.
Plenty of creators have weighed in on the queercoding of Mike Wheeler, though this remains non-canon. And, obviously, the equivalent character to Mary as a defender of Mike’s heterosexuality in Stranger Things would be Eleven—
—but although El and Mike's platonic, even proto-romantic relationship was shown to be very strong in S1, it was kind of all downhill from there.
Mike and El spent all but about 10 minutes of S2 separated. In S3 they were either kissing, at odds, or broken up for most of the runtime. In S4 they were either lying to each other, at odds, or broken up (?) for most of the runtime. Mike’s S4 finale love confession was made under duress—El and Max were literally dying, and their friends’ lives (if not the fate of the entire world) were at stake—and it was framed as more of a response to Will’s love confession in the van than to El herself.
Then in S5, Mike and El yet again spent almost the whole season apart, hugged a few times, and didn’t kiss until El was about to die.
Their romantic relationship was shown to be rocky from the start and deteriorated from there… until by S5 it wasn't clear whether they were even still together, even to people who shipped them, until less than 5 minutes before El’s (apparent) death.
And finally, though Johnlock was subject to both outright denial and apparent scorn from its showrunners, we have not, to date, had an outright denial of Byler from the showrunners.
No, it is not canon either, but that is a different point.
For example: if it’s now clear that Byler is not, and was never going to be canon, why not say so?
It was an interview with Collider (published 1 January 2026) that spawned the conclusion that the Duffers had "debunked" Byler, but note that… they did not actually… do that:
Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer were asked directly how aware the creative team was of the Byler fandom—and whether they ever felt pressure to explicitly shut it down so it wouldn’t distract from the show’s larger story. “For us, there’s always noise,” Matt Duffer said. “But when we sit down to write a season, the goal is—I mean, you have to block it out, and you have to tell the story that you are always intending to tell.” That philosophy, according to Duffer, has been in place since the very beginning of the series. “This story and the story of Will has been planned and has been building to this moment for eight years now,” he explained. “So, that’s all we really wanted to do, was to just be truthful to what we wanted to do and what we’d always been planning to.”
The author of that article, not the Duffers, then “summarised”:
And that gets directly to the heart of it, because while Stranger Things ultimately made Will’s sexuality explicit and central to the final season — and received its fair share of criticism for it from critics — a romance for Will and Mike was never on the cards for the Duffers. They stayed the course, making sure that Mike and Eleven were the actual endgame. By refusing to “course-correct” based on fan pressure, the show avoided reshaping character motivations to satisfy discourse. As Duffer’s comments make clear, the writers viewed the Byler conversation as external “noise,” not a storytelling mandate.
Ah, “Byler was never in the cards”—the phrase that spawned a thousand ragetweets.
All the Duffers said in that Collider interview was that the Byler fandom did not influence the story they were always intending to tell.
Now, this isn’t an argument for or against Byler being a queerbait—but it’s worth noting that if Byler is not (and never was intended to be) endgame, then the Stranger Things showrunners’ silence and ambiguity on the matter, especially in response to direct questions, and especially in the face of stronger textual support, makes Byler a more serious, more outright queerbait than Johnlock was a decade ago. Not optimal.
Summary:
The Sherlock showrunners explicitly denied Johnlock, presented John as straight, and left Sherlock's sexuality ambiguous, at best. In S3, they introduced John’s beloved fiancée and soon wife, Mary: offering an imperfect but plausible denial that John was either queer or interested in Sherlock. The Stranger Things showrunners still have not denied Byler, made Will canonically gay and romantically interested in Mike, and gave Mike a girlfriend whose relationship with him is so rocky that it doesn’t plausibly refute the possibility that Mike returns Will’s feelings.
2.3: The ending was (in)evitable
In the fantastic breakdown video Sherlock Is Garbage, And Here's Why, hbomberguy asks:
“Why do so many people like [BBC Sherlock]? Or rather, why did so many people think they liked it until season 4 came out and everyone collectively realised it was bad and always had been? “… And why did that happen?”
Despite general consensus that Sherlock started off well and then went downhill after S2, hbomberguy’s thesis is that Sherlock was always bad, and just used trickery and lies to keep stringing its audience along.
“If there’s one thing this show was always good at, one thing Moffat as a writer always did, it’s keep you thinking an explanation was coming—that the show was going to get good. […] “The show’s bread and butter is revealed to have always been implying the show is about to turn out to be deep. Implying characterisation and backstory that’s way more interesting than what ends up on the screen. After four seasons (and a special) of implying, people started to realise they were being played. “The drug of this manipulative writing style started to wear off.”
According to hbomberguy's well-evidenced argument, Sherlock's con staggers along until the fourth season, when it finally becomes clear that there never was any substance to all the flash—
—and that there never would be.
“[Sherlock season 4 is] really bad. So bad that people who wanted to like the show had to invent a secret good episode that would, if it existed, somehow fix it. It’s orders of magnitude worse than the rest of the show—and I’m pretty sure I’ve established that’s already pretty bad. […] “It’s not just that [season 4 is] worse written, the characters are facsimiles of themselves, and the driving thrust of the story’s utterly fallen apart. It’s that ultimately it trips on the curtain and tears away all the flaws of the entire show from front to back, revealing it to have always been the worst.”
As a result, he concludes that the people who championed the “secret good fourth Sherlock episode” theory “simply [took] more seriously than anyone else the promise they were made by the show”. The promise that it was good… or it was going to get good…
… or that anything you saw in the show ever meant anything at all.
So hbomberguy’s argument is that:
Sherlock was always bad, but
the showrunners manipulated the audience to disguise that fact…
… until it caught up with them in the end.
In other words, the appalling ending of Sherlock was basically inevitable.
Fans who believed in TJLC did so in the mistaken belief that the show they were so invested in was actually worth analysing—when in reality, that was not and had never been true.
Sarah Z adds that Sherlock was always cherry-picked by its fans—as many shows are—and therefore what fans felt they were watching was actually a sort of fantasy, reverse-engineered by focusing on the “same seven or eight scenes out of 15 hours of content” and ignoring “scenes and episodes that were of more mediocre quality”:
“The show […] was worshipped as one of the greatest shows of all time by its fandom for a while, and very few things are ever going to actually live up to that. Like the majority of fandoms at the time, the fans less so liked what the show actually was, and moreso liked the version of it they could create for themselves by picking around the parts that were enjoyable and ignoring the parts that weren’t.”
So are these criticisms also true of Stranger Things?
Was Stranger Things always actually just mid, and only likeable—or bad, and only salvageable—by picking and choosing which parts of it to focus on, and ignoring the rest?
For S5 Volume 2 (and particularly 5.8) I think you can plausibly argue that it had objectively worse writing than the rest of the show, and that the uniqueness of the characters, and the core themes of the plot, and the mood and tone… kind of fell apart (more on that later). Though, 5.8 did at least resolve the narrative threads it picked up… even if the resolutions were dumb.
But was the ending of Stranger Things so bad that it makes us look back and think the rest of the show was actually bad all along, too?
Personally, I’d argue there’s nothing in S5 that retroactively ruins anything from S1 to S3. And while S4 might be a little tarnished by association, it did and does still stand on its own. As Sarah Z notes, any fandom will pick and choose which bits of a show to focus on—for example, I have only ever seen 2.7: “The Lost Sister” one time, always skipping it on a rewatch—but is Stranger Things only good if you ignore half of it?
Above, I specified that “S5 Volume 2 (and particularly 5.8)” was worse than the rest of the show—because S5 Volume 1 was actually very well received by fandom and general audience (GA).
A rewatch might be bittersweet, knowing where things ended up…
… but I don’t think the fumbles in the latter half of the season make you look back on Volume 1 and realise it wasn’t actually as good as you remembered it.
In fact, if anything, the disappointment of 5.8 is making people regard Volume 1 even more favourably, in comparison.
A sort of “we could have had it all” mentality.
The overall fandom and GA consensus appears to be that S5 dropped abruptly in quality from Volume 1 to Volume 2. “Dropped abruptly in quality” is a fundamentally different criticism from “was always bad, which becomes clear in hindsight”.
Why would a show drop in quality? It’s not that there aren’t reasons this might have happened—time pressures, internal disagreements, writers strikes causing script issues—but it’s quite a different proposition from something like, “Looking back on the show, the narrative bones and production capability for a good ending were simply never there.”
Stranger Things S5 Volume 1 showed us they can do a great job… whereas everything that went before the Sherlock finale demonstrated the opposite.
Sherlock experienced a slow, but—in retrospect—inevitable collapse.
Is that true of Stranger Things?
Was 5.8 destined to be awful… or is it more reasonable, in this case, to have hoped for better?
Summary:
Sherlock started off on shaky ground, and inevitably collapsed under the weight of its own plot holes and contradictions. Stranger Things started off with a banger in S1, and maintained a high (though perhaps not quite the same) level of quality through three and a half more seasons… only to falter in the final half-season, and collapse in the last episode. This abrupt, mid-season drop in quality begs an explanation: run-of-the-mill production failures, or something else?
2.4: Contempt for the genre, contempt for the audience
In terms of manipulating its audience, Sherlock persistently masqueraded as a mystery, detective, or crime-solving show. This is a well-established genre—not least in the, you know, genre-defining source material—with encoded rules and inherent expectations from its audience.
For the audience of a detective show (or novel, or game, etc.), the whole point is being given clues alongside the characters, and having a chance to puzzle through the evidence and figure out for yourself what it might mean…
… and right from the start, Sherlock didn’t even do that right.
Here’s hbomberguy again:
“In most investigations after this [first] one, Sherlock starts either making wild assumptions that don’t have any basis in reality, or straight-up learns key information [off-screen] the viewer isn’t even told about.”
Famously, the showrunners left Sherlock’s inexplicable survival at the end of S2 unexplained, so that people would speculate on it in the years running up to S3…
… but then they never explained it.
“In fact, season 3 features several characters whose sole job is to portray fan theories and theorists and make fun of them, and call them stupid for bothering to try and figure out what happened based on the information given to them by the show. […] They spend a huge chunk of this episode literally calling people stupid for reading into the story’s clear, intentional subtext instead of… you know, writing better text!”
Not only did the showrunners not seem to get it, they repeatedly went out of their way to mock people engaging with the show on the level of the genre it purported to belong to.
“[Sherlock is so] hateful towards people for expecting things to make sense and trying to form a theory out of what they were shown that it’s almost avant-garde.” (hbomberguy)
It became a common occurrence on the show that you would be presented with a little mystery or trick that any normal piece of detective or crime fiction would gleefully explain to you—perhaps after giving you some time to think about it and make your best guess—
—but Sherlock treats these moments as sweet nothings that you, the audience, are stupid for being intrigued by.
As hbomberguy and Sarah Z both put it:
“This [reveal that Sherlock didn’t actually find Mary through any sort of deductive reasoning] is played for a joke, but it’s not a comedy fun-time jokey-joke, to laugh at for comedy hijinks—it’s a joke at the expense of the audience for even wanting to know how Sherlock did something. Sherlock finds Mary, and fuck you if you hoped for or expected something clever.”
This is important to the whole question of TJLC, because part of what created the conditions for TJLC to spawn and thrive in was the dissonance between:
A. Being told that Sherlock was a detective show, and B. The showrunners mocking audiences for treating Sherlock like a detective show.
As Sarah Z puts it:
“The [Sherlock] showrunners would actively egg fans on [as they tried to work out how Sherlock faked his death]—with comments like, ‘You guys are doing great, but there’s one crucial detail you’re all missing!’ In effect, the show very much framed this as a mystery that could—and would—be solved with the information that fans were given.”
(I'm somehow still amazed by this, but it really was never actually explained how Sherlock faked his death. The one plausibly correct account—from Sherlock himself—was subsequently presented as either a lie to or a hallucination of one of the other characters.)
That is to say, there was also dissonance created between:
C. The showrunners seemingly reinforcing the idea that Sherlock was a detective show by constantly encouraging analysis and attention to detail, and D. The showrunners being either unaware that Sherlock was a detective show, or going out of their way to “subvert” the show and its genre.
That is to say, TJLC was born out of the belief that Sherlock would deliver on its own implicit and explicit promises, despite increasing evidence to the contrary.
The only other real alternative for fans was to believe that they were being lied to and treated with contempt—and it’s perfectly reasonable not to (want to) believe that a show you love would go out of its way to be a bad example of its genre, and also to mock you for expecting otherwise.
As hbomberguy points out, Sherlock was always trying to be sooo “clever” and “subversive”. The showrunners were more interested in shocking the audience than in telling a good story or providing coherent characterisation (especially for the antagonists). This demonstrates a clear disdain for the show’s own source material and genre: it’s not good enough for these super-smart writers to simply lay clues that lead to the resolution of a mystery—
—no, what matters is that the audience is always shocked.
Always kept guessing.
But, in the end, Sherlock aimed to be subversive to the point of not paying off its own plot points:
“This endless twisting and untwisting runs through season 4 to such a degree that you can never be certain of anything, and this makes you unable to give a shit about any of it.” (hbomberguy)
Considering all this, can we make a similar critique of Stranger Things?
Does Stranger Things fail its own genre—intentionally or otherwise—to the point of becoming a mockery of its influences, itself, and its fans?
I’ll go into more detail on the genre question in the next section, but overall, in contrast to Sherlock, one of the major genre-based criticisms of Stranger Things is actually that it’s derivative nostalgia-bait: that it leans too heavily on its influences and “source material”.
And I think it’s fair to say that up to episode 5.8, the tone and content of Stranger Things are both pretty internally consistent, and also consistent with the various media that influenced the show. It’s just not creating that same kind of dissonance between how you’re implicitly and explicitly told to read the text.
That’s not to say there haven’t been some wobbles… but it would be hard to argue that up to episode 5.8, Stranger Things has ever treated its source material, inspirations, genre, or fans with contempt.
Oh, but episode 5.8…
Summary:
Sherlock created a bizarre dissonance for its fans between its apparent genre and how they were supposed to be engaging with it. That dissonance was part of what caused some fans to disbelieve that the show could invite so much investment and yet actively disdain and discard the people who invested in it, which was part of what led to TJLC. Stranger Things, for all its flaws, does not create that kind of dissonance… with the glaring exception of episode 5.8.
Which brings us to...
2.5: The glaring exception
Episode 5.8 is an outlier, and there’s no way around it.
I already noted above that:
up to episode 5.8, the tone and content of Stranger Things are both pretty internally consistent, and also consistent with the media that influenced the show
S5 dropped abruptly in quality from Volume 1 to Volume 2: Volume 1 was very well received by fandom and the GA, but Volume 2 (and particularly 5.8) were objectively worse written than Volume 1, and arguably the rest of the show
Specifically, I noted that in 5.8, the uniqueness of the characters and the core themes of the plot, and the mood and tone in general, just kind of fell apart.
Let’s dig into that a little more.
You could, unfortunately, imagine a certain sort of contempt in the way 5.8 is so glaringly dissonant from the rest of the season, and the rest of the series.
For example, you could imagine the writers going:
“You thought this show was a psychological thriller? You thought all those clocks and rainbows and character parallels meant something? You thought our protagonist might live, or at least die while fighting to save the people she loves? “Fuck you: giant Spider Flayer fight with lots of slime and fire and bullets! Joyce finally gets to use that axe on someone! What Demogorgons?? El commits suicide in service of the B-plot we didn't introduce until 5.5! Everyone but the female protagonist lives hap-satisfied ever after!”
… sir.
It's not impossible to believe that this was what happened, but it’s… difficult. Unlike with Sherlock, this kind of mentality would be inconsistent with the show and the showrunners’ history.
Additionally, even you don’t believe in conformitygate, you can—and basically everyone else has chosen to—accept 5.8 as a bit of a failure of a finale, but at least made badly in good faith. For example, the Spider Flayer is a stupid Marvel-esque gimmick… but you can’t argue we couldn’t have seen something like that coming, based on the fleshy chamber and beating heart hints we were given, starting in 5.4. Everything we got in the finale was internally consistent and set up more or less properly throughout the season.
Again, as with Sherlock, the bad ending didn’t come out of nowhere—but unlike with Sherlock, it was a complete tonal departure from what had gone before. Did they suddenly fuck up that badly, or did they set up a deliberately unsatisfying, transgressive ending?
… if so, why?
There’s also a formal difference to consider, here. Each Sherlock episode is a roughly self-contained 1.5 hour-long story, so it’s not entirely necessary or reasonable to conclude that the finale would have picked up and tied off plot threads from previous episodes.
In fact, Sherlock S4 wasn't even intended to be the final season. It was just another season, 4/?. The reason it ended up being the last was because of... every awful thing I've mentioned so far in this post, plus some. Nobody wanted more, after that.
The story of Sherlock ended there, but it didn’t culminate there.
But Stranger Things S5 was a proper TV season, where all episodes ultimately served the same story. The finale really was meant to be a culmination—at minimum of S5, really also of S4, and arguably of the entire series. We did very reasonably expect it to tie everything together and, at minimum, not stick out like a sore thumb.
So let’s go back a step.
What is the genre of Stranger Things? (Netflix lists its genres as drama, sci-fi, teen, and says, “This series is: Ominous, Nostalgic, Scary.” ... Eh.) The show is generally accepted to bridge multiple genres, but let’s say by S5 the genre is something like “supernatural horror / psychological thriller”.
And what are the themes of Stranger Things? There’s plenty you could say about that too, but let’s just toss some obvious ones out there to start:
championing the freaks and outcasts—you win by staying true to yourself
love wins over fear—you win by fighting for your loved ones
brains over brawn—you win by being smart, not just by being strong
From that perspective... does the resolution of the S4/S5 A-plot (reflecting the main concept, premise, and message(s) of the show), at minimum, satisfy the requirements of its genre(s)?
Is 5.8 a supernatural horror? It is not: you can make an argument for the supernatural, obviously (though supernatural fiction tends to focus more on suspense and mystery than action and adventure)… but horror (intended to disturb or frighten an audience)?
Is 5.8 a psychological thriller? It is not: this genre focuses on mental, emotional, and psychological states—hallmarks include distorted perceptions/reality, and elements of mystery, drama, action, and paranoia. We certainly had the setup for all that, but not the payoff. The only real element of any of this in 5.8 is Vecna’s attack on Hopper.
Does it provide a satisfying conclusion to the show’s themes?
Does 5.8 champion freaks and outcasts? It does not: there's a reason the theory is called “conformitygate”, even setting aside the concept of Mike’s repressed sexuality.
Did the heroes win in 5.8 by staying true to themselves? They did not: in the finale—the fight, in particular—every character was essentially interchangeable, and the victory didn’t come from anyone’s particular personality traits, except perhaps Nancy’s bravery.
Does 5.8 show love winning over fear? It does not: El’s death is a prime example (though not the only example) of the message that, sometimes, love isn’t enough—sometimes you have to give in to fear.
Did the heroes win in 5.8 by fighting for their loved ones? They did not: nobody’s loved ones ever really seemed to be at risk, aside maybe from Holly, and the fight generally came off very impersonal—even El and Vecna’s showdown, despite their personal history.
Does 5.8 show brains triumphing over brawn? It does not: the dénouement of the A-plot involves two physical fights. (Even Holly ends up physically attacking the monster (Henry) with a fire poker, despite Max telling her earlier that bravery isn’t about that… and that fighting a monster with a fire poker would be a silly thing to do.)
Did the heroes win in 5.8 by being smart, not just by being strong? They did not: the A-plot of S4 and S5 is about defeating a master manipulator with literal psychic powers, and it is resolved by our protagonists… erm, ripping off his arm, impaling him through the heart, and beheading him. They win against Vecna and the Shadow/Spider/Mind Flayer—a creature whose MO is to infiltrate and possess its victims—through brute force. Chipping away at their hit points.
Any one of these would be an obvious betrayal of the material that came before it.
All of them together… is downright suspicious.
Thus conformitygate.
All of this is to say: 5.8 was an extreme outlier in Stranger Things, in every possible way, from the production quality and characterisation right down to the very bones of the messaging.
Again, there is a reason conformitygate is called that—the finale feels like a betrayal of the show’s themes about nonconformity. But not just that. It’s a betrayal of the themes of the power of love and friendship, and of the value of intelligence and heart over fear and force. It’s a betrayal of its blended genre, characterised by suspense, mystery, psychological states, distorted perceptions/reality, and disturbing and frightening ideas.
5.8 is a one-episode inversion of all that went before it.
Throughout this post I’ve compared this to the ending of Sherlock—a common point of comparison in fandom space—to point out that though the ending of Sherlock was appalling, it wasn’t, itself, a betrayal of all that had gone before it.
Sherlock was just… like that.
But this leaves us at a crossroads: was the betrayal of 5.8 unintentionally appalling…
… or was it done intentionally as a set-up for the real payoff?
Summary:
Episode 5.8 is an outlier in Stranger Things: a one-episode inversion of all that went before it in tone, in message, in characterisation. The consistent hallmarks of the show’s supernatural horror / psychological thriller genre seem to vanish, replaced with a seemingly new genre of action adventure / teen drama, and accompanying new messaging. The narrative beats are technically coherent, but it all feels… off. This was either an astoundingly comprehensive and shocking fuck-up, or a deliberate choice. Jury's still out.
2.6: “There’s never a secret episode!”
Not entirely correct, but close enough.
For the sake of argument, let’s take this on its face:
We have done this before. You have all been convinced before there’s more content incoming that will ‘fix everything’—you even had plausible evidence for your theory then, like you do now. But you weren’t right then, and you aren’t right now.
First, let’s look at the most obvious logical fallacy in that statement: either denying the antecedent or a fallacy of necessity. As this TJLC/conformitygate comparison is normally presented, it’s an overly simplistic argument: “there’s never a secret episode!”, or “TJLC did not happen, therefore conformitygate cannot happen”.
Here is what I take to be the underlying logic:
(1) TJLC and conformitygate share many meaningful characteristics (outlined in Part 1). [(2a) If TJLC had happened, then conformitygate could happen.] [(2b) This means we can make assumptions about one based on the other.] (3) TJLC did not happen. (4) Therefore, conformitygate cannot happen.
(1), (2a), and (3) are all true, while (2b) is only potentially true, not necessarily true. Either way, (4) does not follow from any of them. This argument does not prove (4) to be true. (This barely even needs to be pointed out, but still.)
TJLC and conformitygate are certainly similar, but they are not actually correlated—it’s not logically coherent to make an argument about one based on the other. In other words, TJLC not happening doesn’t make it any more or less likely that conformitygate will happen (with one exception, which I’ll get to in a moment).
And even if you presented this general argument in the broadest possible sense, you would hit the same problem:
(1) There has never been secret “good” content revealed after the finale in any comparable situation to conformitygate. (2) Therefore, conformitygate cannot result in the revelation of secret “good” content.
This is obviously illogical, even if I agreed that (1) were true, but to be crystal clear: the fact that something has not happened does not, in logical terms, mean that it cannot happen.
All of these fallacies are rooted in the assumption of correlation based on similarity—but there is no correlative factor that would cause TJLC and confirmitygate to end up the same way.
They are different shows produced by different people in different countries, by different studios, for different audiences, in different formats, at different times, in different sociopolitical contexts, and, most interestingly, in different fandom contexts.
Summary:
In brief, no argument based on precedent can ever concretely disprove a future event. No matter how similar TJLC and conformitygate are, they are not actually correlated.
2.7: On precedent
By “different fandom contexts”, I specifically mean that conformitygate is happening in the world that TJLC left behind.
Conformitygate (2026) could not have had any impact on TJLC (2017)—but TJLC (2017) could have had an impact on conformitygate (2026).
The people responsible for executing conformitygate (if it were true) are likely to be aware of TJLC—what factors caused it, the backlash it caused in turn, and how the embarrassment of it still festers in the roots of fandom.
How it might cause people to react to the possibility of a repeat situation with immediate hostility and vehement denial… making it much easier for showrunners to hide their intentions than before we were all burned.
And we know for a fact that the Duffers were studying other shows’ endings to understand what to do and what not to do:
“Speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, the Duffers revealed that they studied their favourite finales and tried to figure out what worked well, with Ross Duffer explaining: ‘We were looking mostly at the ones that were successful. There are probably more whiffs and misses than there are people that have stuck the landing, because I think it's hard when you've been running for a long time – there are so many expectations.’”
“‘They have had their hearts broken by shows that they loved that failed fans in the end,’ says Stranger Things executive producer Shawn Levy […]. ‘They did not want, and do not want, and refuse to be one of those shows.’”
Whether or not Sherlock was one of those “whiff or miss” shows that failed fans in the end is an unknown, but it’s certainly plausible. Sherlock was a notable example of a show with a failed ending—TJLC obviously wasn’t as seismic in the mainstream as it was in contemporary fandom, but it did get reported on smugly in the media, for example in The Independent.
To be blunt: the people responsible for executing conformitygate (if it were true) may have been influenced or inspired by TJLC. From that point of view, if you compare the two situations, conformitygate is actually marginally more likely to happen in response to TJLC.
And it's worth noting that after the Sherlock finale, Moffat and the other showrunners immediately, definitively, and derisively debunked the claim that there was going to be an additional episode.
Unless I’ve missed a major development, we still do not have definitive denial of some sort of additional content from the Stranger Things showrunners.
Summary:
Not only is it not true that the failure of TJLC means that conformitygate will go the same way, it's actually marginally more likely that conformitygate is true given that the showrunners may well be reacting to TJLC, or other disappointing shows like Sherlock that spawned TJLC in the first place.
Part 3: Summary and conclusion
Although it’s superficially reasonable to compare conformitygate to TJLC as a debunking measure, when you get down to it, the comparison falls apart.
It’s pretty clear in retrospect that Sherlock was never really a good show, and that the shitty ending was a logical conclusion. The same is not true of Stranger Things. Even accounting for 5.8, the previous seasons still stand on their own quality—including the first half of S5.
Whereas Sherlock exhibited a slow decline from a questionable start, Stranger Things’ decline was very sudden and very noticeable, making the ending feel jarring and out-of-character.
Sherlock seemed to intentionally lack:
enough depth or thematic structure to facilitate meaningful analysis
any apparent interest in, respect for, or knowledge of its own (presumptive) genre of crime fiction—it went out of its way to mock, subvert or “outwit” the source material and its own generic requirements, and scorn its audience for attempting to engage with it in good faith
If anything, the inverse critique is truer of Stranger Things: that it is too reliant on its own sources and influences, to the point of being derivative nostalgia-bait. Up until the glaring exception of 5.8, Stranger Things in general and S5 in particular maintained a clear appreciation for and deft execution of its own genre(s), and its own major themes.
The utter failure of this in 5.8 is an obvious inconsistency and betrayal… obvious to the point of being suspicious.
The conformitygate theory holds that the reason 5.8 was such a glaring outlier was because it’s telling us something is wrong, whether that’s:
conformitygate Lite (it’s telling us the villain actually won), or
conformitygate Xtreme (it’s telling us this isn’t the real ending)
Now, I will firmly repeat what I said at the beginning of this post: I want conformitygate (Xtreme) to be true, and I do genuinely think it can be true… but I do not and cannot know that it is true. Nobody on here can. And all of us have a responsibility not to lose sight of that reality in our desire to be right. Or, worse, to be vindicated.
It’s important to approach all this with the understanding and acceptance that if 5.8 is the real ending, then all the inconsistencies and plot holes you found that supported conformitygate… were just inconsistencies and plot holes.
And, historically, fandoms clamouring about “secret extra content on the way that will fix everything!” has not ended well for anyone.
… but:
it is logically incoherent to argue that something cannot or will not happen because it hasn’t happened before, and
conformitygate is happening in the world that TJLC and other conspiracy theories left behind—conspiracy theories which could serve as inspiration
And finally, there is one specific, fundamental element of Stranger Things—and its primary antagonists—that went essentially untapped in 5.8: the element of the psychological thriller. Vecna is a master manipulator with literal psychic powers…
… which, in the end, amounted to nothing.
He was defeated in a 5-minute brawl. I’ve had longer fights with a stubborn orange peel.
Suppose the psychological thriller is yet to come?
(Couldn't resist the Pirates reference.)
Conformitygate is no less likely because it would be the first of its kind. Given its global popularity, its psychological themes, and its creators’ creative clout, Stranger Things certainly has the means to pull off a conformitygate Xtreme.
And also?
It would be so fucking cool.
And there’s no way the showrunners haven’t considered that. They have motive.
And in a world where almost nobody would willingly believe that they would dare, after we’ve all been burned, humiliated, and disappointed by shows we loved and had high hopes for so many times before… they have opportunity.
📍 My Stranger Things Meta Masterpost
