The days after Christmas were the perfect time for Netflix to drop Bandersnatch, the twisty, creepy interactive Black Mirror movie.
Below you’ll find a heap of spoilers for most of Bandersnatch, just FYI.
Not only do most people have extra hours to spend playing out the different paths and endings, but they also have an amazing amount of time to spend finding Easter eggs like the in-universe game you can actually play, arguing over whether it’s a game or a movie, picking out every reference to other Black Mirror episodes, and mapping every possible option.
Or so they thought.
black mirror: bandersnatch is only 1:30
me at 11pm: i guess i’ll watch before bed
black mirror: rewinds after you make the wrong decision and has 5 alternative endings that you have to find
me at 3am:#BANDERSNATCH pic.twitter.com/3LvblstVmo
— angela (@crazyrchasian) December 28, 2018
According to The Hollywood Reporter, director David Slade told reporters at a media screening that there are scenes that were shot and included that might never actually be seen – presumably because the specific path to get to a certain scene or ending is so obscure that the odds someone will follow it exactly are slim to none.
“There are scenes that some people just will never see and we had to make sure that we were OK with that,” he said. “We actually shot a scene that we can’t access.”
The project is so complex, in fact, that it delayed Black Mirror‘s fifth season.
There are walkthroughs on game site IGN (arguably a point for the “Bandersnatch is a video game” camp) that can guide viewers on how to get to certain endings, which choices are Dead Ends that force you to go back and make different choices, and details about the mechanics of the story, like the fact that there are two “true” endings that trigger the credits automatically, or that you can play out four of the five endings in one viewing but never all five.
https://www.twitter.com/FvckEnrique/status/1079522480279220224
One thing you may have noticed if you’ve explored a bit of this is that there’s no real “good” ending for our poor protagonist Stefan – he ends up either in jail or dead, unless you navigate out on one of the meta endings.
So perhaps, in true Black Mirror style, the hidden scene is the happy ending we might never see.
So if you’re feeling a bit bad for putting Stefan through all this trauma, maybe imagine this: somewhere out there, there’s a path where he’s making a game that’s at least a solid 4 out of 5, not murdering his dad or roundhouse kicking his therapist, and happily listening to the Thompson Twins on a bus.
the problem with bandersnatch is none of the choices resulted in a romcom
— speedy ortiz haunted presence? (@sad13) December 31, 2018