In December 2018, Netflix released Bandersnatch, a choose-your-path style episode of their Black Mirror series. This episode is effectively movie-length (its runtime depends on the path you take but it can easily run 90 minutes), so I will refer to it as a ‘movie’. And a ‘choose-your-own-movie’ is something many of us have dreamt of for decades. The writers of Futurama already imagined it, for instance, as a futuristic movie theater experience.

Because this interactive movie is about a young man in the 80’s that’s making an adventure game based on a choose-your-path book, it certainly ignited our interest at 4^th Wall Games.  The ‘developer scenes’ hit close to home: staring at lines of code on a computer screen, poring over pages and pages of notes and branching flowcharts, late nights dealing with frustrating bugs, etc. We identified strongly with Stefan, the aspiring game developer protagonist.

I’ve watched it numerous times and have seen most of the endings. Bandersnatch is an outstanding piece of interactive fiction, and I’m going to share my thoughts on why.

SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen Bandersnatch and don’t want to be spoiled about its plot, branches, and endings, go and experience it first; then come back and read this.

Introduction

The first thing one may notice about this choose-your-own movie is the aesthetic of how choices are incorporated into the narrative. Choices don’t interrupt the flow of the story for two reasons: (1) the movie never pauses—even while it’s waiting for us to choose, the characters continue interacting, and (2) when we do make a choice, there is no sudden jump to the next scene: the choices neatly vanish, the current scene finishes, and the next scene (our chosen scene) begins (incidentally, this also places a time limit on choice making: if you don’t make a choice before the current scene ends, a choice is made automatically so that the next scene can start right on cue). It very successfully created the experience of watching a movie where the influences of my choices are integrated seamlessly.

The central themes of Bandersnatch—appropriately, considering ‘choice’ is the basic mechanic underlying it all—are the issues of agency, free will, and the immutability of past decisions.

The Past is Immutable

In the first scene with Stefan’s therapist, he expresses regret about a childhood moment when he chose to not get on a train with his mother and furthermore his indecision delayed her so that she had to take a later train, one that would catastrophically crash and cause her death. The therapist, in an attempt to help Stefan let go of this past trauma, tells him, “The past is immutable… no matter how painful it is, we can’t change things.  We can’t choose differently.” 

Or can we? Anyone that’s read a Choose Your Own Adventure book is probably familiar with this phenomenon: as you follow one of your choices, you bookmark the previous page with your finger, just in case you need to ‘rewind’ and make a different choice. In that sense, the past is not immutable in a branching story. I can rewind to the previous decision and choose differently if I want. What if reality were the same? What if Stefan could go back in time and choose differently? Or, what if Stefan could go back in time and we could choose differently for him?

In what’s perhaps the first pivotal scene in the movie, the viewer is given the option of allowing Stefan to pursue his dream and join a game company; they offer Stefan a pair of desks, and a team including a music guy, and he gets to work under the tutelage of his idol. The smile on Stefan’s face keeps growing wider and wider. So why wouldn’t we accept the offer?

Instead, accepting the job is the ‘incorrect’ choice. Colin, Stefan’s game-developer idol and would-be mentor, makes that explicit by saying to Stefan (and to the viewer), “Sorry mate. Wrong path.” We are then forced to rewind and reject the offer.

The authors lead us into this dead end very much on purpose, because this important moment introduces a fundamental storytelling mechanic that will be employed in Bandersnatch, which I’ll discuss below.  Scenes like this will also come up again later in this article when we address the question of who has the agency in interactive fiction.

In a notable monologue, Colin says, “Time is a construct. People think you can’t go back and change things, but you can. When you make a decision you think it’s you doing it, but it’s not. It’s the spirit out there… that decides what we do and we just have to go along for the ride… There’s a cosmic flowchart that dictates where you can and where you can’t go… We’re on one path, right now… and how one path ends is immaterial. It’s how our decisions along that path affect the whole that matters… There are other timelines.” Colin has just outlined the nature of the Bandersnatch universe for us.

Repeating the Past

After accepting the job offer (which we’ve already been told is the ‘wrong path’), Stefan completes his game but it is ultimately a commercial and critical failure. In frustration, he storms out of his living room saying, “I’m going to try again.”  Right on cue, the movie rewinds to the beginning.  Not only is Stefan going to try again, but so are we. Already, the viewer’s experience and Stefan’s experience are starting to look alike, which is something that’ll be made more and more explicit as the story progresses.  The movie conveniently ‘fast forwards’ after the rewind so that it gives us a recap of prior choices and quickly places us back in the driver’s seat at an interesting juncture.  

Stefan meets Colin for the first time all over again. However, it’s not the first time for the viewer and, in an interesting twist, it’s also not the first time for the characters. On this ‘second first-time meeting,’ Colin says to Stefan, “We’ve met before…?”  Furthermore, Stefan knows the name of Colin’s newest game before Colin even has a chance to show it to him and he knows the reason why the game demo ultimately crashes, because these things were already revealed in the prior ‘first’ meeting (the ‘first first’ meeting?).  Similarly, Colin now exhibits knowledge of the Bandersnatch story that he didn’t have on the first go through.

So not only does the viewer remember what happened on a prior branch of the story, but the characters have some recollection as well.  Now we understand why the creators very purposely lead us into that dead end with the job offer: part of the viewing experience here is in rewinding and re-watching.  In order to get the entire story, you must rewind.  The creators of Black Mirror have taken a branching story’s occasionally dull and repetitive nature of rewind, repeat, rewind, repeat and have ingeniously made it part of the story’s plot.  

As Stefan’s therapist tells him, “It can be helpful to go through things again.  You might learn something new.”  Of course, she was talking about therapy, but the implication here is clear: Stefan will learn something new on a rewind, and so will we.  

One of my all-time favorite movies, Groundhog Day, uses a similar mechanic in which the repetition of the same events is crucial to the main character’s story arc, and this is made possible because the protagonist can remember what happened in previous iterations.  In a nice homage to Groundhog Day, rewinding the story in Bandersnatch occasionally starts a new loop with an extreme close-up of an alarm clock advancing and starting to play music, a nod to a similar close-up that starts every loop in Groundhog Day.

The most emotionally effective ending, in my opinion, is the one in which Stefan goes back in time and decides to get on the train with his mom, in direct contradiction to his therapist’s remark that five-year-old Stefan “couldn’t have known that his mother was going to die” when she got on the train. This time, Stefan chooses to go with his mother, and both Stefan and the viewer poignantly know that little boy Stefan is going to die. When he says bye to his dad, he knows and we know he means, “Bye forever.” Interestingly, this powerful ending is achieved by making the protagonist do exactly what the viewer has been doing all along: go back in time and make a different decision.

The Illusion of Free Will

Just as the viewer realizes that the characters and the viewer are sharing the experience of the rewind/repeat nature of the story,  Bandersnatch takes it a step further. About turning down the job, Stefan later tells his therapist, “I had the urge to say no but I don’t know where it came from.” Also, referring to therapy in particular, he said “I feel like I’m being…monitored,” which of course holds true not just in his therapy session but throughout the entire movie; he’s being monitored by the viewer. At another point he says, “I’m not in control… [ Not of ] what breakfast I have, the music I listen to…,” both of which happen to be choices we made for him early on in the story. Even the narrator on an in-movie VHS documentary reminds Stefan, “You’re just a puppet. You’re not in control.”

Stefan eventually reaches the conclusion that the viewer is controlling him. He begins speaking to the viewer. “Who’s doing this to me? I know there’s someone there. Who’s there? Who are you?” And, in a moment that sent a chill down my spine, the viewer gets a chance to respond (via choosing what is displayed on Stefan’s computer screen): “I am watching you on Netflix.” We, the viewers, have become part of the plot as well.

Here I’m reminded of two more personal favorites: The Neverending Story, in which a boy named Bastian is reading a book about Atreyu’s heroic quest, and Atreyu starts to realize that he is being watched by Bastian, and Bastian ultimately gets pulled into the adventure when the characters in the book start speaking directly to him; and Umney’s Last Case, a Stephen King short story in which an author of detective novels loses control of his protagonist as ultimately (spoiler alert) the fictional character turns the tables, forcing the author to become slave to all of the protagonist’s whims.

Also on the topic of being monitored and controlled, there’s a scene that delivers a little welcome comic relief after a number of dark and disturbing scenes. Stefan is back in his therapist’s office and the therapist says, “All of this is happening to entertain someone… someone who’s controlling you? [Then] why aren’t you in a more entertaining scenario?… If this is entertainment, surely they’d make it more interesting.  Inject a little more action.” A nice jab at themselves. And, right on cue, the scene turns into a fight scene: the normally calm and rational therapist pulls out two batons and starts throwing rapid-fire roundhouse kicks while Stefan’s normally demure dad bursts into the room throwing haymakers. Everyone goes wildly out of character in order to “inject a little more action.” It’s a funny, self-deprecating, and self-aware moment that made me laugh out loud.

Agency and Control

Bandersnatch delivers its next interesting twist when we tell Stefan to pull his earlobe (or bite his nails), and he refuses. Now the character is starting to resist what the viewer is dictating. This highlights a dilemma that anyone that’s written interactive fiction has encountered: Who has the agency to make things happen in a story such as this? The character? Or the viewer/reader? And, most intriguingly, how do you handle the situation when the objectives of the character and the viewer/reader are at odds? 

Again, I’m reminded of Umney’s Last Case, in which the detective/protagonist wrests control from the novelist that created him: initially, the novelist has 100% of the agency and, by the end, the protagonist has 100% of the agency. Most works of interactive fiction (as well as computer games and tabletop games) lie somewhere in-between those two extremes. Yet again, Bandersnatch has taken a design dilemma in crafting interactive fiction and made it an interesting feature of the plot.

Taking the discussion of agency in another direction, even in the case where the viewer/reader is given 100% of the control, how much control do they really have versus how much agency does the author of the story have?  The first time I received an ending that wasn’t a dead end was when Bandersnatch (the eponymous computer game being written by Stefan) is released to critical acclaim. In describing the secret to his successful game, Stefan mentions that he was “giving the player too much choice.” He stripped those choices out so that what was left is the illusion of choice. This is a clear metaphor for interactive fiction and for Bandersnatch (the interactive movie which we are watching) itself: some or all of the viewer’s perceived agency is really just the illusion of agency.

In Colin’s apartment, just before delivering his monologue, Colin offers Stefan a hallucinogenic drug, saying “It’s completely your choice.”  And if we turn it down Colin says, “Just thought I’d offer you the choice.” He later drops it in Stefan’s drink anyway. In retrospect, we see that Colin’s statements about choice are a wink to the fact that there never really was a choice. It was the illusion of choice.

What feels like ‘railroading’ here is actually very intentional, as it served an important purpose by introducing the movie’s central theme: Stefan’s developing crisis concerning agency and free will. Does Stefan have free will? Does the viewer? We are forced to share Stefan’s frustration that choices are being made for him, because choices have been made for us too. The parallel nature of Stefan’s experience and the viewer’s experience continues to become more concrete.

When Stefan starts to feel the effects of the drug that Colin slipped in his drink, he asks, “What have you done?”  Colin says, “I chose for you.  Are you alright with that?”  Stefan, enjoying the sensation of his recently-altered consciousness, confirms that it’s alright.  Here Colin and Stefan have just made the same contract that the viewer and the author must make in any work of interactive fiction: in exchange for some of the viewer’s agency, the author will deliver an enjoyable experience.

As any author of branching narratives quickly learns, pruning branches (by limiting choices) is required in order to keep the scope of story tractable. Only the illusion of choice is necessary for an interactive narrative. Let’s watch that Futurama clip again. In it, the writers are making a similar joke concerning the agency of the viewer.

Bandersnatch took something that can be frustrating about choose-your-path stories—in this case, railroading—and incorporated it directly into the plot as an interesting narrative device.

Conclusion

‘Railroading’ (being forced to take a certain path) and ‘insta-death’ (suddenly hitting a dead end and being forced to rewind) are both present here, because they are facts of life in choose-your-path games.  And Bandersnatch embraces them both.

Perhaps most interesting is the way in which Bandersnatch utilizes its medium to do things not possible in a non-interactive medium. In one case, I started to feel real sympathy for Stefan because it was my choices (or illusion thereof) that were causing him so much misery. The parallels between his experience and my experience created an unusually strong sense of identification. This could only be possible in an interactive medium.

Other things possible only in interactive media include the viewer having control of the characters, the characters rebelling against the viewer’s choices, and direct communication between the viewer and the character, all of which appear in Bandersnatch.

The Black Mirror team at Netflix could’ve delivered a straightforward choose-your-path movie and I would’ve been happy. But, they were much more ambitious and did something far more interesting. Bandersnatch is an homage to interactive fiction that is not only fun for its novelty, but also because it lays bare the quirks of an interactive storytelling medium. The creators of Bandersnatch fully embraced their medium and, in the process, crafted an experience that only an interactive narrative could deliver.