The very short wait for the next season of Black Mirror could soon be over, reportedly. Netflix’s @NXonNetflix, a science fiction-dedicated Twitter account, dropped then deleted the Season five debut date and the first episode’s title.
The @NXonNetflix account leaked that Black Mirror would drop December 28, and that the first episode is called “Bandersnatch”. It was quickly deleted.
Bloomberg reported back in October that Netflix would debut the fifth season before the end of 2018. Sources also said that Netflix was experimenting with a ‘choose your own adventure’ interactive episode – “Bandersnatch” could be just that.
The leak should still be viewed with a bit of skepticism though – there’s been no official confirmation from Netflix since the Tweet and delete, and the slip only included one episode, rather than a whole season.
“Bandersnatch” as an episode title is already stewing fan theories and rumours. One fan spotted that it’s the name of a video game on the cover of a prop magazine in “Playtest”, a season three episode. It could also be a reference to the creature in Through the Looking-Glass, the 1872 novel by Lewis Carroll. The fictional creature is referenced across fragments of pop culture, from Final Fantasy to Resident Evil, algorithm design projects, graphic novels and sci-fi TV.
As Indiewire reports, “Bandersnatch” is also the name of a never-released game project from 1984, that apparently inspired the sci-fi game “Brataccas”. On-set production photos seem to show that the episode is set in the 80s.
Read back on our expansive oral history of the sci-fi anthology show, as told by its stars, here.