Month: January 2019

Note: This post contains tons of spoilers for Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, so if you haven’t watched it, read on at your own risk.

One of the earliest choices in Bandersnatch is a bit of a trap. The feature-length Black Mirror episode is also a choose-your-own-adventure story, and this early choice works to teach viewers unfamiliar with the concept of branching narratives about how the concept works. It’s effectively an immediate game over that results in restarting the story, but the dead-end branch early in Bandersnatch also hints at one of the interactive episode’s most interesting underlying ideas.

The choice is only the third that viewers come across, when Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) first arrives at Tuckersoft and is offered a chance to work with the company, and his game developer idol Colin Ritman (Will Poulter). Stefan has been working on an intricate game called Bandersnatch that’s all about making choices and following various branching paths. When the Tuckersoft guys offer Stefan the chance to work with them, viewers can either choose for Stefan to throw in with the company or continue working on the game alone.

It seems likely that most people would choose to join the company, which is, seemingly, Stefan’s dream and an ideal outcome. The trouble is, choosing to work in the Tuckersoft offices puts Stefan at the whim of Mohan Thacker (Asim Chaudhry), whose biggest concerns are getting the game out on time and on budget. Stefan finishes the game but it’s compromised, thin, and far from his original vision.

It’s by far the least painful of the endings for Stefan, which get much more tragic from here, but a useful teacher for viewers–as Stefan watches a TV show that reviews video games and hears about all the weaknesses of his game, he tells his dad (Craig Parkinson) that he’s going to “try again.” Stefan storms out of the room, and a second later, reawakens in his bed at the start of the film, preparing again for his initial visit to Tuckersoft.

What’s interesting about Bandersnatch is the way the film builds its interactivity into the narrative. It’s not just that you go back to key moments in the narrative and pick different choices to see how things will play out differently; there’s something deeper at work in the story, and some of the characters become aware that they’ve been forced down multiple different paths. As that first dead-end path suggests, Stefan is aware of his ability to go back in his story and attempt a different outcome–essentially, to time travel. What he knows and when he knows it is hard to track, though.

A later conversation between Stefan and Colin lays out some version of what’s underlying Bandersnatch: multiple, parallel realities. Colin basically likens the world to Stefan’s game, where all choices are available, and in other timelines, Stefan can try those choices and bring them to their conclusions. What’s important isn’t the individual timelines, according to Colin, but how they influence each other, and over the course of Bandersnatch we see Stefan seemingly being influenced more and more by those failed timelines and our choices in creating them.

How Stefan accesses these alternate universes is never really clear, but they do give him some limited ability to time travel, and seemingly to take at least some knowledge and familiarity with those other timelines with him. Whenever Stefan fails to achieve his optimal path, he finds himself resetting to that first day when he heads to Tuckersoft. Again, it’s not clear how much Stefan knows or remembers–but since we the viewers are making his key decisions and we can remember what happened, we’re able to help him navigate toward better outcomes.

Like a lot of time travel stories, though, for Stefan, time travel almost always makes things worse. Every time he hits a story dead end and restarts, the changes tend to escalate the horribleness of his life as he tries to complete Bandersnatch. One path results in him killing his father; another choice after that finds Colin arriving at Stefan’s home as he’s trying to hide the body, which can lead Stefan to kill Colin. In fact, there are a lot of endings that result in Stefan engaging in some kind of carnage.

And for all the timelines Stefan accesses, there’s one powerful regret he can never take back. That’s the death of his mother, who was killed in a train derailment after she was delayed by a five-year-old Stefan looking for a toy his father had hidden from him. Stefan blames his dad for his mom’s death, as well as himself, and that event informs just about everything about him throughout the story. Tellingly, a flashback lets the viewer visit the moments before Stefan’s mother’s death, where we’re prompted to stop looking for the toy and go with her, or stay and search for it. It’s the only choice in Bandersnatch with only one option, because no matter how much Stefan wants to change it, he can’t.

Looked at as a whole, it can be kind of tough to track the throughline of what Bandersnatch is getting at. There’s a whole divergent storyline in which Stefan comes to believe he’s being monitored and controlled by a government conspiracy; another has him plagued by the supernatural demon from Bandersnatch. Still another reveals to him that he’s actually controlled by Netflix viewers, which takes him to a couple of weird moments in which he has an action movie fist fight with his therapist and dad, or a fourth wall-breaking interaction with the Bandersnatch film crew.

Looked at as a time travel story, though, things become a little clearer. Though the story plays with ideas of choice, ceding free will to technology, and searching for escapism in digital media, as a time travel story, its primary focus is on obsessing over past mistakes that can’t be changed. Stefan is unable to get over his mother’s death or to stop blaming his father and himself for what happened, and that inability is ruining his life. His obsession with trying to change that event only makes things worse.

There are plenty of time travel stories that deal with those same ideas, often ending on the tragic note of the main character finally succumbing to their obsession. In Bandersnatch, the ultimate conclusion doesn’t come from Stefan fixing the past–it comes from him tragically accepting that he never will. What feels like the ultimate conclusion of the story is when, after listening to Colin, Stefan discovers that he can use a mirror to travel back to the death of his mother.

With the right choices, Stefan can travel back in time, locate the toy, and place it where he lost it, which allows five-year-old Stefan to find it and change the past. But that doesn’t mean Stefan saves his mom and fixes his life, as one might expect in a more traditional time travel story. Finding the toy doesn’t allow Stefan’s mother to leave earlier and avoid the train derailment. But replaying the moment gives the viewer a new choice: to let Stefan go with her. He spends his final moments with his mother on the doomed train, dying with her instead of lose her.

After all those resets, different paths, and alternate choices, what seems like the culmination of Bandersnatch–which is itself a bit speculative since the story can be replayed over and over–is Stefan coming to terms with his trauma over his mother’s death. Stefan might be able to try different choices, but he can’t fix anything through time travel and venturing through different realities. The only thing he can ultimately change is himself. Or rather, Stefan realizes that he never will.

The attraction of the idea of time travel is in how we might alter our own lives with the benefit of hindsight, but like most of its sci-fi concepts, Black Mirror uses it for a downbeat look at the ways we try to escape the things that harm us. Bandersnatch’s point is that the benefit of escapism, whether it’s obsessing about how to fix our mistakes or getting lost in alternate worlds, isn’t in the escape from reality, but what we learn about ourselves before returning to it.

Actor Patrick Wilson turned plenty of heads with his over-the-top performance as Orm, the self-proclaimed Ocean Master, opposite Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry in the DCEU’s buckwild superhero adventure movie, Aquaman–and he’s ready to come back for more, if he ever gets the chance. While Aquaman 2 is unconfirmed at the moment, the movie’s box office success and favorable reviews seem to be leaning in a positive direction, meaning Wilson might just get the chance to don the extravagant silver mask again in a redemption arc.

In speaking with GameSpot, Wilson laughed, “I don’t really know anything–I mean, I know some things, but I’ll speak as a fan. When you look at that scene before the Ring of Fire, when he says ‘go home, Arthur,’ you see a guy that honestly loves his brother and wishes he didn’t have to do this. Then at the end you see with his mother, you see the payoff and you see a guy, a son, that is broken and beaten but not out. I think the question is, can you trust him? But I certainly think he’s got some good things to do.”

Wilson continued, highlighting that the appeal of Orm’s character isn’t really in his capacity for evil, but his motivation to save his people by any means necessary. “With Orm, we learn from what the character says and what the people say about the character. You hear about him. You hear about his leadership. How he is this angry half-brother. How he rules Atlantis. How Atlantis is in trouble and then you meet him and then you see that really he’s just violently upset at the way the surface world has polluted his ocean,” he explained. “And knowing that, immediately you care, is what I think. That’s the fun thing for an audience to walk in there and at times, it doesn’t matter if you like or dislike these people. You care and you wanna see them work it out. You don’t need to know anything other than what you learn. He’s an angry guy with a distraught family and resentful and jealous of his half-breed brother who’s Aquaman. He’s an evil warrior but he’s really just trying to save his oceans.”

A redemptive turn for the Ocean Master isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility, according to the comic book source material. Like most characters in the Aquaman pantheon, Orm’s published history is riddled with retcons and changes, both major and minor. At his first introduction, he was actually a full-blooded human before being modified to being half-Atlantean, and then finally a full-blooded Atlantean warlord. He’s been proficient in magic with the ability to modify reality, which he’s used to proclaim himself Aquaman on at least one occasion, and he and Arthur have buried the hatchet more than once. In fact, in recent comics, Orm has actually shown total disgust at the moniker “Ocean Master” and a distrust for Atlanteans trying to overthrow the throne.

Naturally, the DCEU isn’t beholden to any published version of Orm’s character as future films are planned, and the generally positive note things ended on as Atlanna reclaimed the throne leaves plenty of room for potential reconciliation between the entire Curry family–even if Orm might be a bit difficult to trust in the future.

However, as we saw in the post-credits stinger, it looks like any subsequent Aqua-films will actually take their focus off the inner workings of Atlantean politics and take a dive into the bad blood between Aquaman and Black Manta. This, of course, could possibly clear the way for an Arthur and Orm team-up, especially given Orm’s relationship to Manta and all the drama that could be stirred up between them.

Look, in a movie where Julie Andrews voices a giant kaiju, it’s safe to say that stranger things have happened and, while a heroic Ocean Master may be a stretch for some die-hard fans, it’s far from out of the realm of possibility.

CES 2019 kicks off January 8, bringing all kinds of new products and prototypes to Las Vegas for one of the biggest tech industry conferences of the year. With 4,500 tech companies in attendance, the show is a great way to get a sense of how the technology of all sorts of industries is developing, from transportation to computer hardware, virtual reality, and more. CES is a showcase for things you can expect to buy in 2019, as well as pie-in-the-sky ideas that may or may not ever be a reality, but are always interesting.

We’re slowly seeing information leak out about what to expect at CES this year, but a lot of what will appear at the show is still speculation–undoubtedly, it’ll be a place of continuing trends while spawning some whole new ones. One thing’s for sure: CES will offer a look at how we use technology in the year to come, and beyond. Here’s what we think will be on offer in Las Vegas during 2019’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Streaming Games And More Powerful PCs

Google might have started something with the introduction of Project Stream, its beta program that allows players to stream Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to their computers rather than purchase and download the game. We’ve seen streaming services before (remember OnLive?) but internet technology has advanced quite a bit since then, and Google’s attempt at the service seems pretty solid. Microsoft also announced a game-streaming service, xCloud, last year, and with the greater and greater push in the gaming industry toward games as a service, it wouldn’t be surprising to see some companies show off the possibilities of streaming games in the future.

Meanwhile, the biggest push in PC gaming at CES is likely to be on the graphics side. We’re expecting news from both Nvidia and AMD about upcoming graphics chips, and the rumor around the internet is that Nvidia is preparing to announce its RTX cards for laptops. And hardware makers such as Alienware, Asus, and Razer are sure to have new gaming products to show off at the show, including new computers, headphones, keyboards, mice, and lots of other peripherals.

Smarter TVs, More Pixels

We know already that LG plans to show off some new 8K TVs (including an 88-incher), which also sport new AI integration that’s supposed to make them better at upscaling content and mixing sound, so your old DVDs and standard definition TV shows will look crisper and sound better. It sounds like 8K will be the trend at CES this year–even if there isn’t much in the way of content that can support those screens–so be on the lookout for even more huge, high-res TVs from lots of different TV makers. There’s also some speculation that foldable and rollable displays that have popped up in previous shows might make a splash at CES this year, as well. With that tech and 8K resolutions unlikely to get wide adoption from many consumers just yet, though, there will probably be a lot of different ways TV makers are trying to set their products apart from one another, like voice and virtual assistant integration, so expect lots of smaller additions and improvements.

New VR Offerings

HTC took to Twitter with a cryptic image that will likely make a lot more sense during CES. The photo suggests the company has more virtual reality offerings coming to join its Vive room-scale headset and cheaper, standalone Vive Focus headset. It could be that HTC wants to compete a little more closely with Oculus’ recent release of the standalone Oculus Go headset, which makes VR a little more affordable at $199, but sacrifices the more robust features of PC-based VR. We wouldn’t be surprised if there are several new products in the VR arena, like new versions of Valve’s knuckle controllers for the Vive, as companies try to keep up the hype of the technology and make it more accessible to more consumers, without draining their wallets.

More Things At Which To Yell “Hey Alexa!”

If you’re the kind of person who likes yelling at their appliances, good news: it’s very likely we’ll be seeing virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa integrated into a whole lot more products at CES this year. Amazon will have a big presence at the show, as will Google, and both are vying to get their AI assistants in new products to help make smart homes, appliances, TVs, and more even, uh…smarter. There are tens of thousands of devices with integrated virtual assistants at this point, and CES is likely to show off quite a few new ones–whether you want to be able to talk to your headphones, your refrigerator, or your hair dryer, or not.

The Reign Of 5G

The next big thing in mobile networks, 5G, is supposed to come to fruition in 2019. The thing that makes the tech so appealing is its super-fast speeds of 10 gigabytes per second. While the networks that allow such capabilities won’t be ready to go until 2020, we’re still expecting plenty of companies to be touting the amazing possibilities of the 5G future. Wireless carriers Verizon and AT&T are both set to give keynotes at CES, where we’ll probably see the companies touting what the speeds will be capable of delivering. Expect a lot of other companies, like smartphone makers and hardware developers, discussing 5G’s capabilities as well.

All Kinds Of Transportation Tech

CES will see Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao deliver a keynote this year, focusing on self-driving cars and drones. Finding a way to create safer cars that drive themselves is a big push between the technology and automotive industries, and we’re likely to see new takes on a lot of different tech that’s necessary to make self-driving cars an everyday reality. That’s to say nothing of the further integration of various technologies to make riding in the car more entertaining, even when you’re stuck driving one.

We’ll have plenty of coverage of all the most interesting tech out of Las Vegas, so stay tuned to our CES 2019 hub for all the latest.