- Warning: There are spoilers ahead if you have not watched Netflix's interactive movie, "Bandersnatch."
- Netflix released the "Black Mirror" movie December 28, 2018 about a young man trying to make the perfect video game, and it has many different endings.
- Vulture rounded up nine main endings that include getting a five-star ranking for the game and telling the character he's in a Netflix movie.
If you want to see every version of the Netflix interactive movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, you better be prepared to watch many, many permutations of the same story.
Essentially a "choose your own adventure" special, Bandersnatch follows Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead), a doomed ’80s programmer who slowly begins to suspect that he’s the subject of a conspiracy — unless, that is, he’s actually just losing his mind.
Along the way, the viewer gets to shape Stefan’s path, in ways both cosmetic (should he listen to a Thompson Twins cassette or a Now That’s What I Call Music!compilation?) and much more serious, which veer into bloodshed, paranoia, and Black Mirror’s characteristically macabre humor.
Given that interactive quality, don’t be surprised if you wind up asking yourself all sorts of questions after you’ve watched Bandersnatch. Or if you rewind the whole thing to start all over again.
Below, Vulture has put together a condensed guide to Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s main endings and what happens in each of them. While this list covers the major conclusions to Stefan’s story, it isn’t a comprehensive guide to every possible story route in Bandersnatch — there are more than we could possibly recount here — but it’ll help you understand where and how they all end.
1. The sudden ending
The first "ending," if you can call it that, comes early in Bandersnatch. After Stefan Butler gets the chance to meet his idol Colin Ritman (Will Poulter) and develop his dream video game for Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhry), he’s asked if he wants to "accept" or "refuse" an offer to join the Thakur’s team.
If you make Stefan accept the offer, Bandersnatch flashes to an ending in which a rushed version of his game gets zero stars from a critic, as Stefan resolves to "try again"— inviting the viewer to go back and make him develop the game on his own. It might seem like a sad ending, but given the carnage of the conclusions to come, this one won’t seem too bad in retrospect.
2. The broken-computer ending
When Stefan's father Peter (Craig Parkinson) comes in to his room after the boy's spent solitary weeks working on his game, you face another choice: You can either force Stefan to shout at his dear old dad, or make him "throw" his tea all over his computer. Yelling is actually the "better" answer here, as destroying Stefan’s computer ends the story. Tea and electronics don’t mix.
3. The balcony ending
When dad takes Stefan to see Dr. Haynes, the kid spots Colin walking down the street. If you decide to make Stefan follow Colin instead of attending his therapy session, a long night of pot, acid, and philosophical musings leads to a terrifying moment in which Colin says it doesn’t matter if one of them jumps from his apartment balcony.
(The logic is tricky, but basically, Colin tells Stefan that he believes in multiple realities. If either of them dies in this one, it’s no problem because they’re still alive in another.) The viewer is told to either force Stefan to take the leap, or make him tell Colin to do it. The former choice ends the story with Stefan’s suicide, and his game is finished "abruptly" without him.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider