As if the new season of Black Mirror wasn’t mind-boggling enough, Netflix has released two different versions of episode 2, Bête Noire.
Warning! Contains spoilers for Black Mirror season 7 episode 2, Bête Noire.
Charlie Brooker returned to the world of Black Mirror, his tech-dystopian anthology series, with a new season which has been streaming on Netflix for just under a week at the time of writing. Black Mirror season 7 took us to a virtual, 1940s film set, inside a video game and had us ponder if we’d upgrade to a more expensive subscription deal to have our brain damaged spouse stop spouting ads during sex.
But it’s episode 2, titled Bête Noire, that people can’t seem to stop talking about. The episode follows Siena Kelly’s Maria, a food researcher at a chocolate company, who begins to doubt her reality after an old school mate Verity (Rosy McEwen) joins the company. Suddenly, her memories seem to constantly fail her and in one of these cases, Maria tries to convince her friends and colleagues that there once was a chicken shop called Bernie’s ā her boyfriend even worked for it! ā but, to Maria’s amazement, everyone else seems to remember the restaurant chain to be called Barnie’s. Something that is then confirmed by a quick Google search.
However, viewers have noticed that there seems to be two different versions of the scene going around. One plays out as described above and in the other version, the names of the chicken franchise are swapped around.
As Radio Times notes, it seems to be down to luck which version of the scene you get. The official Netflix and Black Mirror social media accounts haven’t commented on the matter, but Netflix simply posted on Twitter “bernies”, which was then quote tweeted by Black Mirror with the word “barnies”.
That’s the kind of British banter we love to see.
Black Mirror season 7 is now available on Netflix.
