Black Mirror Bandersnatch: Theories, Easter Eggs and Good Ending?

Black Mirror Bandersnatch is here to ruin your life as you spend hours trying to get a good ending and trying to decipher everything you just watched over the past several hours. We’ve spent all day running through most to all of the possibilities. Let’s take a look at what we’ve learned. 

We’re going to be covering a lot of things in this article so it should go without saying, there are multiple spoilers here.

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How does Bandersnatch connect to the other episodes?

There is a boatload of easter eggs that connects Bandersnatch to the previous episodes in Black Mirror. Here are the main ones.

The biggest link to the previous episode is the big video game that Tuckersoft has released. Metalhedd Robot featured in a game. This was designed by Colin. Could it be that the black and white episode took place in a video game? Or is Metalhedd set in the future and the robots designed themselves based on the video game?

The next major link between older episode is the Glyph. The symbol seen in the mind control book can be found in other episodes too. Specifically, White Bear featured the symbol a lot. This was used to wipe her memory at the end of every night to restart the tourist attraction the next day.

The video game that Colin is currently working on is called Nosedive. Nosedive (season 3, episode 1) is the episode where people rate each other. The video game seems unrelated to the episode but obviously shares the same name. The game itself doesn’t really have anything to do with the episode.

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Is there a good/happy ending?

Hi, you must be new here. Black Mirror has never been the king of good endings. Even San Junipero from season 3 which is widely considered to be the most upbeat title even has some sinister undertones in its ending.

The good ending here would be to release the game that got 5 stars out of 5 and keep everyone alive. Sadly, there’s no end that results in this outcome to our knowledge.

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How many endings are there?

Thanks to a keen Redditor, there are currently eight different endings with different variations. We’ve pasted their theory below:

1. Stefan agrees to work in the office, game is shitty, the end
2. Stefan jumps instead of Colin, game is shitty and unfinished
3. Stefan goes to dr’s after seeing netflix on his computer, fights with the dr and dad
4. Stefan kills dad after seeing PACS on monitor, gets arrested after calling the therapist, game is shitty
5. Stefan tries to jump out the window during therapy after seeing Netflix on his computer, Bandersnatch filming is interrupted because jumping out of the window was not scripted
6. Stefan kills dad, buries his body, goes to jail, game does not get released
7. Stefan kills dad, chops body, releases game, gets 5/5. In the future, a woman recreates bandersnatch on Netflix
8. Stefan finds the rabbit in his dad’s safe, goes with mom with the 8:45 train, dies, future version of Stefan dies as well during the therapy.

Who is the woman who recreates Bandersnatch?

Some eagled eyed Redditor noticed that the ending for number seven included Colin’s baby Pearl all grown up. We meet Pearl briefly if you visit Colin’s flat but she’s very young.

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What’s the lesson behind Bandersnatch?

In most episodes of Black Mirror, there’s always an underlying message, metaphor or lesson. The lesson here is often the illusion of choice. The gimmick of the episode is that it’s using the brand new Netflix player that allows you to make choices. A lot of choices are often the wrong choice and more often than not, they don’t lead to the desired outcome.

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Is Colin self-aware that he’s in a TV show?

Colin is the only character throughout that seems to be aware of the fact he’s in TV show. It reminded me strongly of the first Matrix movie where Neo was slowly learning he’s in a system but Morpheus knew what was going on.

Multiple times throughout Colin says he’ll see you on another run, universe or straight up says “Sorry mate, wrong path.”

 

The fact that Colin is self-aware makes him a big player in the Black Mirror universe particularly as he created a video game on another episode.

As we’ll explore below, Colin also may have commented on a Reddit post where he tells the world his favorite quote from Black Mirror which comes from White Bear.

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Other Bandersnatch Questions Answered

When and where is the movie set?

These are the two easiest questions to answer. The location of the movie is London and it’s set in 1984 on the run-up to Christmas.

Does the choice of cereal make a difference?

Only slightly, once you chose a cereal it only comes up once later in a TV advert. This once again goes into the feeling of thought control. If you see the cereal in an advert has it inadvertently made a decision for you?

How many codes for the safe are there?

In our playthroughs, we found four different codes worked. These include PAC, TOY, JFD, and PAX. These either lead to dead ends or endings.

How long is the title?

IMDb and many other outlets list the experience at being roughly an hour and a half. The reality is that there are five hours and twelve minutes of footage.

A user on Reddit has been posting teasers for Bandersnatch for weeks

Going by the name of Tuckersoft (the company that publishes the video games) he’s been posting teasers which make a lot of sense now we’ve seen the title. For example, in /r/showerthoughts, he posted “We are all living in Pac Man’s World.”

He posts a video to 80smusic that is Thompson Twins – Hold Me Now, one of the two songs you can listen to on the bus.

He’s also posted a magazine cover (see below) which we see in the episode.

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This post is by no means finished. There’s still plenty of secrets to uncover and I’m going to continue down the rabbit hole on your behalf. If you do spot anything that should be above, let me know in the comments or reach out to me on Twitter. I might be going insane.