Black Mirror: Bandersnatch has been eating up Netflix’s users’ time this New Year as the groundbreaking interactive episode allows the viewer to control the narrative, playing and replaying to explore the various twists and turns of the plot depending on which decisions they make at each fork in the road.
“Bandersnatch” is so complex and filled with so many alternate scenes that it means that some of the sequences will either rarely be seen or never be accessed. In fact, while speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, director David Slade revealed that there’s at least one scene that even the production team can’t seem to get to.
“There are scenes that some people just will never see, and we had to make sure that we were OK with that. We actually shot a scene that we can’t access.”
We’ve already explored the various endings that can be achieved, ranging from abrupt ones early on in the narrative to increasingly gory ones or even a vaguely happy ending (even though it involves the death of the main character). Moreover, fans think they’ve mapped out the whole sprawling narrative already, accounting for every possible choice or replay.
It’s been confirmed that “Bandersnatch” was such a complicated undertaking, and took so much time to produce, that season 5 of Black Mirror has now been delayed. However, Netflix has stated that the new batch of episodes that’ll no doubt leave us crying over the state of the world will definitely arrive at some point this year. We just don’t know when.
As for “Bandersnatch,” it’s currently available for your viewing pleasure and follows Stefan Butler, a video game programmer in the 1980s who becomes so obsessed with completing his passion project – an adaptation of Choose You Own Adventure novel Bandersnatch – that he begins to lose his grip on reality. And it seems as if Black Mirror fans are starting to feel the same, as they keep playing the episode over and over again as they wait for season 5 to drop.