Frosties or Sugar Puffs?
Black Mirror’s feature length choose-your-own adventure episode Bandersnatch dropped over Christmas, and since then it’s been discussed to death by Netflix bingers and casual fans alike (you can read our review here).
Even so, many on social media have struggled to comprehend where the head-scratcher fits in with the rest of the Black Mirror universe — or whether it fits in at all.
Fans of Black Mirror love to spot connections between episodes, and creator Charlie Brooker seems to know this — including Easter Eggs aplenty in many chapters of his anthology.
Bandersnatch was laden with references to past episodes. Tuckersoft, the fictional video game company at the heart of the story, produced a video game called Metl Hedd — a callback to Metalhead, a Season 4 episode of the show that saw humans hunted by robot dogs in a dystopian future.
Similarly, another game made by Colin Ritman is called Nohzdyve, a reminder of the Season 3 episode Nosedive.
Director of the episode David Slade has pointed out another major Easter egg, noting that Tuckersoft is itself is an early reference to TCKR, a tech company that exists in many Black Mirror episodes. Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, Slade said: “Yes, Tuckersoft may have become TCKR, in the future. This would be the time that TCKR was started, in ’84 in Britain.”
On where the episode fits in with the other episodes, Brooker said “With any of our episodes, you can watch them in any order and you don’t need to know any of this stuff. It’s there as an extra bit of texture for fans of the show.
“There are lots of variants of other episodes within Bandersnatch. But I don’t have an atlas to the Black Mirror universe. I think that would start restricting what we can do. We always prefer to go in and include a nod to something else if it’s logical and fun, but we don’t like to be bound by that.”
“With the Easter eggs and with the wide mythology surrounding the show, it’s useful for us to think of it that it’s a nice nod for superfans who notice that Tuckersoft becomes TCKR. It can function like that.”
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