One very important takeaway from this episode: many more people are now familiar with XTC, Isao Tomita, and Tangerine Dream.
It is important for me to say right now that much of the rating is due to the concept and how it was pulled off. The story is pretty meta (and at times very much so, depending on your choices) and truth be told this is the first Black Mirror episode I have ever watched. I know many love it but some of the things I've heard about it... I am fine with not giving the series a shot until now.
Like many, I read Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was a child and thought they were the bees' knees. As an adult I have loved games where players have free will to make decisions that impact the game. Of course, those games do not have as much free will as they really think as the games funnel themselves into one or a few different endings and the creators of that property are still the masters... which is one of the biggest themes of this episode. To give some examples, the Mass Effect trilogy is awesome (due to choice and the characters that have arcs throughout; let's just forget how Mass Effect 3 ended...), the Walking Dead games from the late Telltale was cool until I got tired of how it wallowed in misery, The Wolf Among Us was entertaining for a property I knew nothing about, and Skyrim was a lot of fun.
In Bandersnatch, the setting is 1980's England and Stefan is a young adult who lives with his dad and he is great at game design. He goes to Tuckersoft and has the idea to create an interactive game known as Bandersnatch, based on a giant Choose Your Own Adventure book for adult by a late author-the person who played him made me laugh and if you know 80's computer games you'll appreciate that they got him to make some brief appearances. Stefan is allowed to work on his own at home, and he starts to lose grip on reality as he thinks someone else is making choices for him... this is what I meant by “pretty meta”. As in those books, this encourages you to watch this multiple times, making different choices; after all, a few times the whole thing is pretty brief if your selection is “wrong”.
This is not as complex as it could have been and certainly, other works have done deeper dives on such themes (I mean, look at The Matrix or Fassbinder's World on a Wire, which definitely inspired The Matrix). Yet it was an enjoyable twisty loopy adventure where the outcomes are not happy ones, but I understand that's another Black Mirror trope. The cast as a whole did a swell job, but Will Poulter as fellow game creator Colin Ritman was a standout. You'll likely come across him giving a great monologue about the true purpose of PAC-MAN.
Entire paragraphs could be written about if interactivity is the way that viewers sometime in the future will be able to enjoy television and movies at home (along with if improvements in technology will even allow for this to occur; while there are obvious pauses in the film when someone has to make a choice, the entire experience is seamless which is impressive for something on a streaming platform) or this is just an experiment that will exist for years to come yet only be used sparingly. I was amused that one ending was pretty bizarre and totally unexpected, a la The Dog Ending of Silent Hill 2. I have never played any of those games but back like 15 years ago I was in college back in Illinois; someone I know was playing this and via a FAQ he went back to get all of the game's endings. That FAQ only explained the steps needed and did not spoil what those endings were. Lord was there plenty of WTF and LOLZ as we saw The Dog Ending, which is bizarre in or out of context.
One last thing: a keystone moment in this story eerily reminds me of something that happened when I was a toddler... July 6, 1985 to be exact as there are a few newspaper archives of what happened. My family and I were in the Black Hills of South Dakota, by Mount Rushmore. We went up in a helicopter for a tour. That went fine, but the next helicopter that went up (I believe that company had two), it crashed and well, I've known for years that your entire life could be different if one thing changed... or hell, your time on Earth could be cut short. You see, for years my parents have mentioned that if my mother had taken a shower that particular morning, we would have been on the helicopter that crashed... those that have already seen this will know why I am telling this story. It's not a cheery way to end this review but then again, Bandersnatch was not a happy uplifting story.
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