Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an interactive story that lets you decide what happens. The protagonist, Stefan, is trying to create his own interactive video game — also called Bandersnatch — and as you navigate through the plot, your decisions shape how he responds to family trauma, his own mental illness, potential conspiracies, and a gaming design process that quickly goes off the rails. Will Stefan do acid? Will he murder his father with an ashtray? Will he listen to a Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation, or will he pick a Thompson Twins cassette? It’s up to you!
As a part of that interactive experience, though, Bandersnatch only gives you a few points that allow you go to back and see the other story options. After watching a particular narrative route play out, occasionally you’ll get a chance to revisit one of two previous scenes and make a different choice. But for long sections of the story, you remain in forward motion. There’s no way to loop back and deliberately see what might happen if you, say, “go to your therapist” rather than “follow your friend” — unless you run through that entire route and then circle back.
If your fondest wish is to experience every moment of Bandersnatch, here’s the fastest way to actually do it: Just pick nothing. (This might be a deeply nihilistic statement about how the world works, so thanks for that, Black Mirror.) If you opt out of making any choices and instead let Netflix pick every option for you — which it will automatically do — Bandersnatch will play all the way through one of its many endings. Then, if you let it continue to autoplay rather than select the “exit to credits” option, the movie will work its way through each of its major narrative permutations, allowing you to see the end result of every major choice.
Be warned, though: It’ll take you quite a while. But it’s easy to get lost in all the potential decision points if you’re making each one on your own, so if you’re a Black Mirror completist, picking nothing is the best route available.
That said, even the autoplay option won’t go through every permutation of Bandersnatch. It will show you all the endings, and you will see all the biggest scenes that diverge from one another. It’ll be plenty of Black Mirror. But if you want to go back and change which breakfast cereal Stefan eats in the morning — the very first interactive choice that’s offered in the movie — you’ll have to start the whole thing from the beginning again. So choose wisely: Frosties or Sugar Puffs?
