Stranger Things: Season 5. (Left to Right) Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield and Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven in Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
These past few weeks have been a little crazy stranger things Front. Volume 2 started a movement, which started another movement followed by Volume 3, which I’ve never seen for a Netflix show in my ten-plus years of covering the streamer. A mass psychosis resulted in people actually believing that they had a blind eye pulled, and more episodes, especially the ninth episode, were to come.
As we’ve already covered, since the finale aired, the perception has been that the epilogue was completely a sham and the ending we got left things vaguely incomplete and left L’s fate entirely up to the audience, and an actual final episode would ditch that ending and tell us what really happened. This has been an elaborate exercise with people pointing out inconsistencies, unexplained social posts, and other coincidences in Season 5 (of which there were many).
For several reasons, January 9 was the date that some fans of the show thought episode 9 would be released. He pointed to false claims such as Netflix France’s tweet with a photo of “J-7” as evidence. Considering that “days” are called “jours” in French and Netflix FR has consistently used the small “j” to count down, and in this instance it was posted on December 19, 7 days before Volume 2 was released… then they kept changing times throughout the day, with 8:45 pm ET eventually cited as its release time based on the WSQK radio station number.
fans pointed Netflix has made surprising changes to it before the Sandman receiving a bonus episode in its first season, and rebel moon procurement Two extended cuts (which came out before Netflix wanted).
He pointed to old, stale social media bios that had yet to be updated after reading “one more episode” of the New Year. He told that Netflix’s own search will reveal stranger things When you typed words like “fake ending” or “Stranger Things episode 9”.
That doesn’t mean that fake websites, AI-generated videos and images have been spread far and wide on social media, and many other elaborate ways fans have convinced themselves that something else is coming.
And then there are the videos, and they are compelling…
Then. Yesterday was the moment of truth. What new episode has come? No, the episode never came out, and while Netflix reportedly crashed for a while, we never got the popular episode.
Was someone or multiple people playing all this on Netflix? We’ll probably never know, but given how social media algorithms work, once you came in contact with one of these guys, you were in. Heck, it even inspired Hollywood trade publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter to cover the fan-led event. Many people say that diversity get Official confirmation from Netflix on the matterHowever, reading his post, I don’t know if you can read Say it for sure, since they don’t specifically say it, but a Netflix representative has confirmed it.
Were all the fans broadcasting this just chasing views, being deadly serious, or trolling? Again, we’ll never really know to what extent the accounts fall into each camp, although many who have made Baylor their passion clearly fall into the deadly serious category.
Many are calling for Netflix to make a public statement on the matter, but this seems to be a slippery slope. Just because it gained popularity, what’s stopping more than 100 fake fads from emerging in the future? Should they really issue a statement to everyone? Netflix not putting this matter on the record doesn’t surprise me in the least, and my understanding is that this entire matter has caused consternation (and some frustration) throughout the company.
The Duffer Brothers and their interviews have made matters 10 times worse. In the last few months, he has said a lot. It hasn’t always been consistent, and while I appreciate that they wanted to give each outlet something new to quote rather than repeat the same lines, as we’ve talked about before, they’ve failed their show in a number of ways and often contradicted what we’ve seen on screen. I wish they would say less, especially after that finale, and let the work (whether you think it’s good or bad) speak for itself.
Whenever the late David Lynch is questioned about his films, a classic quote comes to mind… “Elaborate on that,” asked an interviewer. “No,” Lynch replied.
But alas, now it’s January 8th, and there’s nothing stranger things Episodes are coming. Our time at the Mothership Show and Hawkins, at least for the foreseeable future, is virtually over.
It’s been a strange experience for someone covering this. We have been accused of homophobia There are other journalists like Paul Tassie for ForbesJoe has been tracking (and feeding off) this phenomenon for the past few weeks.
For some, we will undoubtedly see a change in the goal post now. “He actually meant January 12th,” we’ve already seen from the finale, referencing the letters and colors of his D&D books. We are not kidding.
Even more adventures are coming to Hawkins in 2026, with two seasons Stranger Things: Stories from ’85 And there are plans for even more beyond that, including a live-action spin-off. Don’t forget that we’re getting a 2-plus hour documentary on Monday that will hopefully shed more light on some of the creative and storytelling decisions for Season 5.
Did you really think Conformity Gate was real? Let us know in the comments.