What’s the Stranger Things match-gate craze — and why is Netflix down? | Strange things

IIn recent days, my 14-year-old daughter has shown signs that she is becoming a conspiracy theorist. But this is not your joint business or the business of landing on the moon in the grassy twin towers. She has happily fallen into the guesswork trap known as match-gate, and she’s not the only one.

For non-Gen Zers, Conformity Gate is the theory that the much-vaunted ending to Netflix’s mega-series Stranger Things, released on January 1 in the UK, wasn’t the real ending at all.

Fueled by energy drinks and pie due to the lack of sunlight, fans of the show have been scouring basements around the world to produce a fanciful hypothesis that the 40-minute finale was merely an illusion created by the mind-controlling villain Vicanna. A secret final episode, explaining what really happened, will be released on January 7, at 8pm ET (1am UK).

Explaining the complex intricacies of the “evidence” cited by adherents would take thousands of words. Basically, it involves some people sitting with their hands in their laps wearing orange graduation dresses, too many people wearing glasses, a roll of a dice that totals seven, the color of a dial changing, a wonky timeline of a milkshake, strategically placed exit signs, a woman with short hair, a doorknob that switches sides, a character missing some scars, and one character remarking that Hawkins City “looks different” — not surprising, since it’s no longer filled with murderous monsters, and cracks. In the ground, a psychopath made of tree roots.

With Hive Mind producing fans with more fanciful theories, a screenshot from the latest episode has been widely circulated on social media. It showed the main characters’ Dungeons & Dragons tomes lined up on a shelf. If you read some of the letters on each folder, you will find “XA-LIE”.
This wasn’t an indication that you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the site formerly known as Twitter, but instead proof that everything that happened in Dimension X (AKA The Abyss) was a lie. Or something. I’ve watched every episode and don’t even know what that means.

But I don’t need to know. Because it turns out that the screenshot was tampered with. In the show itself, the row of letters reads XAILE, which may have just been a warning to the show’s more zealous conspirators to remember to breathe.

As hysteria mounted, Netflix posted a cryptic message on its social media accounts, saying, “Your future is on the way. #WhatNext, January 7, 2026.” This, coupled with belief in the importance of the number seven in the show (Will Byers rolled the dice with a seven before the Demogorgon took it in Stranger Things’ first-ever episode), led fans to believe that the new show would drop on January 7. In fact, at the exact hour last night, several fans tuned into Netflix to check that the site was down, resulting in an error message. Netflix has been overwhelmed with fans looking for a show that doesn’t exist.

It was never like that. In recent days, Netflix has added, in strict capital letters, to its Instagram bio the following message: “All episodes of Stranger Things are streaming now.”

In an interview with Variety on January 1, the show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, addressed some fan theories regarding the series finale. “The show has just grown tremendously. On the Internet, there’s so much misinformation. Just so much of it. We’ll be here for hours trying to weed out the stuff that’s not true. But at the end of the day, I hope the work speaks for itself, and that’s the show that Ross and I wanted to make.”

But perhaps the work speaks for itself, and not entirely in a good way. It seems likely that the countless fans who pointed out that there was a secret ending yet to come were motivated by disappointment. For some, the ending was too saccharine (although I did like passing the baton to the younger generation of D&D-ers, a throwback to the Friends finale where they walked into Central Perk to find their usual seats occupied by a younger group).

Ultimately, the match gate was probably the result of a number of things: the Duffer brothers’ desire to get people discussing the show by placing red atoms; The desire to leave things open, and preserve the opportunity to milk the cash cow in the future; Even more shameful is the degree of neglect.

Sure, there were mistakes. The door handle, dial, and missing scars were just continuity errors. Meanwhile, we were expected to believe that Hopper returned to his job as police chief even though he had killed so many American soldiers? Why did we never get to see Dr. Kay Linda Hamilton’s dastardly retribution? And what happened to poor Vicki, Robin’s ex-girlfriend?

It’s no wonder, then, that a petition posted on Change.org demanding that Netflix release the full finale, including deleted scenes, reached nearly 400,000 signatures within days. Remarkably, after a 128-minute finale that includes an infinite number of endings, the main story arcs were forgotten, and fans were left feeling changed.

Today, many would feel deprived that no new episodes came out overnight (although I suspect many were just having fun). But others seem to be sticking with their theory. The latest suggestion, my daughter tells me, is that the behind-the-scenes documentary on January 12 will actually be a meta-episode, where fiction seeps into the reality of the actors’ lives (as happened in A Nightmare on Elm Street 7). The “documentary” will be the secret final episode. Hmm.

Looking back at the match-gate craze, and how it captured the show’s young viewers, we can at least be grateful for one thing. Imagine for a moment that the legendary finale was expected to end at midnight on January 6/7: the two most infuriating Gen Z crazes of recent times, rolled into one. He can’t bear to think about it.