Nearly five months after Stranger Things came to an end, creators The Duffer Brothers, executive producer Shawn Levy and stars Noah Schnapp, David Harbour, Natalia Dyer and Jamie Campbell Bower reunited on Thursday for an Emmys For Your Consideration event in Los Angeles, where they opened up about the finale — and that viral conspiracy theory about a secret last episode.
The fifth and final season of Netflix’s monster hit was released in three parts, with the series finale arriving on New Year’s Eve. After it dropped, some fans latched onto an extensive theory dubbed “Conformity Gate,” that the final episode had portrayed an illusion created by villain Vecna (played by Bower) and that a surprise ninth episode was going to be released, serving as the show’s real ending.
“That was crazy, that was fucking crazy,” Bower said of that time, noting how the fans were further fueled by a social video he did to promote his appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. “The fans held onto that, they were like, ‘He’s saying something about time and he’s stopping on nine!’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no, we’ve just come up with this idea in the back of a car to the airport!'”
Schnapp told The Hollywood Reporter how he was being spammed with texts from people asking about the secret finale “and I was like, ‘I promise you we did not film another episode.’ I don’t know where people got that from, I’ve never seen so many people convinced of something so wrong.”
