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You may not have heard, but Stranger Things has ended. Or at least, the central series has. There’s still spinoffs, a stage show, an animated series, comics, and all that coming down the pipeline. But the Duffer Brothers are headed to Paramount, and Netflix is saying goodbye to their most consistently successful original series of all time.

The final season was controversial almost all the way through. Having not seen it, I can’t speak to my thoughts on its quality, but as an entertainment writer, I certainly heard people debating whether it was the best or worst thing ever done on TV. Then came the finale, and the shit really hit the fan.

The finale was broadly unpopular, enraging fans in that internet-friendly way that How I Met Your Mother and Game of Thrones did before it. And the response was predictable.

Again, I haven’t actually seen the final season of Stranger Things, but I started to hear rumblings on social media that there were outlandish fan theories about a special, secret, “good finale” that would drop on Super Bowl Sunday. That immediately pinged something in my brain.

Back when Sherlock ended, there was a similar phenomenon. The final season was considered far and away the worst, and the finale was very dissatisfying. It was almost unanimously disliked, but some groups were particularly outraged, including the “Johnlock” shippers, who hoped for a queer relationship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson at the end of the series.

Obviously in the canon of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, there’s no precedent for such an ending, but Sherlock was not only set in a modern era, it was also a show that seemed to constantly hint at one or more of its three male lead characters — Holmes, Watson, and Moriarty — being gay or bisexual. While there was nothing explicit that hinted at “Johnlock” being “endgame,” fans certainly felt queerbaited.

Some of those fans — and others who weren’t specifically shippers, but it was certainly spearheaded by Johnlock shippers — believed that there were clues hidden throughout the final season that suggested a “secret episode” was coming to make things right.

This phenomenon was the focus of roughly the second half of a brilliant video essay by HBomberGuy back in 2017. You can see the full video below, with the finale backlash addressed starting at around 1:08:00.

If you don’t want to watch all of that (which you absolutely should), the long and short of HBomberGuy’s argument is that fans shouldn’t be faulted for believing in a “secret episode” that would come and wrap up all the loose ends and prove the show was actually brilliant — because that’s more or less how Sherlock had programmed its audience to think. Showrunner Stephen Moffat was constantly setting up eleborate mystery boxes and shocking cliffhangers, and many of them never paid off in any meaningful way, leading fans to expect that this very smart show made by very smart people couldn’t possibly have such a dumb, dissatisfying ending.

“[Moffat is] very good at implying there’s something smart or deep happening…but he’s not very good at actually doing these cool things that are referred to,” HBomberGuy says in the video.

For Stranger Things, the theory has taken on the name of “Conformitygate,” supposedly because some fans (especially LGBTQIA+ fans) think the safe, predictable ending of Stranger Things‘s finale amounted to taking their beloved group of misfits and forcing them to conform to society at the end.

Using clues assembled throughout the season and in particular the finale, some of these Stranger Things fans have convinced themselves that there is a secret, good finale coming. Netflix, for their part, promises there are no more secrets left.

And Drew Gooden…well, he’s here with the American version of HBomberGuy’s Sherlock video, to celebrate the American version of the Sherlock finale debacle. Again, he argues that the fundamental problem with the finale is that it fails to deliver on clues that were constantly planted and teased and hyped up by the creative team. Again, you can check out the video essay, or not, but you should, especially if you liked the HBomberGuy one.

“If you go back throughout the show, there’s so many lines and visuals that seemed to be foreshadowing something,” Gooden explains. “That’s why people had such high expectations — not because they’re delusional, but because they thought all the time they spent paying close attention and analyzing every detail would be rewarded at the end.”

So…uhh…what’s your bet on the next thing that’s going to have a “secret good ending” conspiracy theory?

If things don’t start looking up soon, maybe it’ll be Avengers: Secret Wars.