Every Black Mirror: Bandersnatch Ending Explained

Welp, it was a nice run while it lasted. On May 12, 2025, Netflix pulled "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. The Reverend" from the platform, completing its initially quiet efforts to remove all interactive specials. Unless the streamer has a change of heart and brings back "Bandersnatch" at some point in the future, viewers will no longer be able to go back in time to 1984 and control the life of Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead), a troubled young programmer who's working on a darkly ambitious Choose-Your-Own-Adventure PC game.

While it typically places somewhere in the middle in "Black Mirror" episode rankings, "Bandersnatch" broke new ground for the series upon its December 2018 release, and its importance to the franchise cannot be denied. It was the first (and may ultimately be the only) of its kind in "Black Mirror" — an interactive movie with the same Choose-Your-Own-Adventure mechanics as the video game in its story — and fans like myself spent many hours replaying it to get all the possible endings. Now that "Bandersnatch" is gone from Netflix, the best way to look back on its legacy would be to revisit those multiple endings and break them down. Take note that this doesn't include the "secret" ending, which allowed viewers to download and play the in-universe game "Nohzdyve," because much like "Bandersnatch" itself, the special website where you can get the game no longer exists.

It's debatable to call the first zero-star scenario an "ending," but it's still worth mentioning because of its commentary on how saying "yes" to big business often compromises one's artistic vision, resulting in a trite and unsatisfying product. Besides, it's the fastest way to end "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" ... until it isn't.

After arriving at the Tuckersoft headquarters, Stefan meets the company's blusterous founder and CEO, Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhry). Impressed by the young man's pitch for "Bandersnatch," Mohan invites Stefan to join Tuckersoft, where his work can be closely supervised. If Stefan accepts, the movie flashes forward to December, where the game receives a pathetic zero stars out of five on a TV show called "Micro Play." You'll then be taken back to Tuckersoft and asked once again whether Stefan should join the company's team or work on the game on his own.

There is clearly a juxtaposition between the Tuckersoft boss and his ace programmer, Colin Ritman (Will Poulter) — the former is a tech bro obsessed with earning big bucks, while the latter is devoted to the art of making video games. We also get to see what inspires his creativity in the second zero-star ending.

Here, Stefan takes LSD with Colin at his apartment, where the latter goes on a long tangent about interconnected parallel realities — an obvious reference to the film's multiple endings and the decisions made to get there. To prove his point, the eccentric programmer asks Stefan to choose between the two of them — who's jumping off the balcony? If Stefan jumps, he dies, and "Bandersnatch" gets poor reviews for its "abrupt" ending — as if someone finished the game for him. That's certainly meta, but not as much as the next two endings.

There are many instances in "Bandersnatch" where Stefan loses his grip on reality, and most of them involve someone else getting killed. One of them might not even involve Stefan at all, but how is this possible?

At one point in the interactive movie, Stefan, while intently working on "Bandersnatch," detects that someone may be watching him. Choosing "Netflix" (more info on the other options in a bit) allows you to explain what the streamer is and how you're in control of Stefan's destiny. This leads to another visit to the office of his therapist, Dr. Haynes (Alice Lowe), and not surprisingly, she's baffled by the concept, even wondering if Netflix is a planet. It doesn't take long for things to go off the rails; Stefan throws tea in the therapist's face, and this prompts her to whip out a pair of batons and challenge him to a fight.

If Stefan jumps out the window, the film cuts to what looks to be the "Black Mirror" set — turns out he's actually an actor named Mike who seems way too immersed in his role. But if Stefan sticks around to fight Dr. Haynes, his dad joins the brawl soon after; regardless of whether Stefan karate chops him or kicks him in the Butler family jewels, the movie ends with the programmer getting dragged out the office by his dad, yelling maniacally about how he and his "friend from the future" ruined the therapist's day with their brand of "entertainment."

It wouldn't be a typical "Black Mirror" episode without some sort of twist that defies the laws of time and/or conventional logic, and that's where this "Bandersnatch" ending comes into play. You can get this ending first by refusing Thakur's invitation, after which Stefan finds himself stressed out by the development process and in Dr. Haynes' office. If you decide that Stefan should talk to Dr. Haynes about his mother (Fleur Keith), who died in a train accident when he was five years old, he will be taken to that point in his life, where he refuses to catch the 8:30 a.m. train with his mother without his beloved toy bunny.

It turns out his dad, Peter (Craig Parkinson), confiscated the toy, and if Stefan goes with his mom to the train station without it, they take the 8:45 a.m. train due to the bunny-related delay. Unfortunately, that train derails, killing both Stefan and his mother. This also kills 19-year-old Stefan right in the middle of his therapy session, as his five-year-old version's decision to leave home without his favorite toy pretty much means he died around 1970 and no longer should be existing in 1984. It's a mind-blowing way to go, but hey, it's "Black Mirror," so it's par for the course.

Alternately, you can kill Stefan in this "classic 'Black Mirror'" way later on in "Bandersnatch" by breaking into Peter's cabinet and entering the password "TOY" to unlock it. This time, Peter won't confiscate the rabbit, but that won't change Stefan's fate if his five-year-old self opts to catch the train with his mom.

"Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" gets pretty dark quite often throughout its combined five-plus-hour runtime, and the end result typically involves Stefan murdering his father by hitting him on the head with a glass ashtray. This can be a result of the young man discovering that Peter had been using him as part of his "P.A.C.S." (Program and Control Study) experiments for years — in that Easter-eggy way "Black Mirror" is so famous for, this ties in with the in-universe inspiration for "Bandersnatch," the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book of the same name that features a demon called Pax. Or it can be a result of choosing the "branching path" glyph symbol (as previously seen in the "Black Mirror" episode "White Bear") when Stefan asks "who's there?" in the above-mentioned scenario where he senses he's being watched.

Following the P.A.C.S. scenarios, Stefan is given the option to dial a number, and regardless of the choice, he ends up in prison, with "Bandersnatch" getting released to middling 2.5-star reviews. There are also instances where Stefan can choose to kill other key characters in the movie, and if he opts to kill Colin, this results in "Bandersnatch" never seeing the light of day and Tuckersoft going under. As you'd expect from a slimy character like him, Thakur is far more concerned about the fate of his company than the fact that his top employee has just been murdered, as has the killer's father.

Last, but not least, there's one "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" ending where the game gets released to rave reviews — a perfect five stars from "Micro Play." But that ending also finds Stefan getting arrested for the murder of his father — again, this is "Black Mirror," not a show known for unambiguously happy endings. To get this ending, you'll need to have Stefan chop up his father's body instead of burying him. While the programmer gets away with it at first, his crimes are eventually discovered, and "Bandersnatch" gets pulled from the shelves after Stefan's arrest.

But wait ... there's more! After this sequence, we get to see an adult version of Pearl Ritman (Laura Evelyn), Colin's infant daughter from the apartment scenes. She's grown up to become a programmer just like her dad, and she's working on a "Bandersnatch" reboot. But just like Stefan some 30-plus years earlier, Pearl is having major trouble with the game's development, and the viewer's final choice is to have her either throw tea on the computer or outright destroy it, echoing an earlier scene with Stefan. Either way, that wraps up the interactive film, with a grim foreshadowing of Pearl possibly losing her sanity in a similar manner.

"Bandersnatch" may be a piece of Netflix history as we speak, but even if it never returns, "Black Mirror" creator Charlie Brooker has hinted at a potential sequel. And while it's not inconceivable to see Colin Ritman and Mohan Thakur for a third time (they returned in the season 7 episode "Plaything"), it may be too much to expect the same Choose-Your-Own-Adventure setup, given Netflix's pivot away from interactive content.