Game Changer’s first great mindfuck of the season was a “simple” bingo game

The current season of Game changer, Dropout’s endlessly inventive improvisational and prank game show, delivered its first real cracker of a game in last week’s ‘Bingo’. Previous episodes of the season were all charming new games or beloved returning formats in their own right, but “Bingo” sets itself apart thanks to a twist of exactly the kind that Game changer‘s metatextual bread and butter.

But somehow I can’t help but feel like there’s another, bigger twist coming. “Bingo” makes it feel… almost inevitable.

(Ed. remark: This post is about to spoil the twist of ‘Bingo’, the fifth episode of Game changer season 6.)

“Bingo” starts out as, well, a game bingo. As directed by host Sam Reich, contestants Katie Marovitch, Brennan Lee Mulligan and Raphael Chestang respond to improv questions to earn another random drawing of a bingo ball, where comically large bingo boards are marked with comically large postage stamps in the shape of Reich’s head. But a few minutes into the match, the images start to alternate with a new set of three bingo boards.

It turns out there are three more bingo players, Lily Du, Mike Trapp and Rekha Shankar, watching the shoot from the Dropout greenroom. Instead of numbers, the squares on their board are filled with the verbal tics, mannerisms and performance habits of the competition participants. Game changer set. Du, Trapp, and Shankar write Marovitch, Mulligan, and Chestang’s improvisational cues on the fly, trying to trick them into doing the actions on their comically large bingo boards so they can mark them with comically large head-shaped stamps . from whichever participant on set they are assigned.

But this was just the twist, not the prestige!

A few minutes later, more footage shows that the WHERE participants in the game include a third set of performers at a third location with a third set of comically large signs and head stamps – Tao Yang, Carolyn Page and Jessica Ross – playing behavioral bingo with Du, Trapp and Shankar. The middle set was so focused on prodding and observing Marovitch, Mulligan and Chestang that they didn’t seem to notice the series of increasingly strange and specific requests from show PA Kaylin Mahoney, who was acting at the direction of Yang, Page and Ross.

After this second twist reveal, the episode continues hypnotically, with the three layers of gameplay intersecting (the editing alone boggles the mind) until the game’s conclusion. Neither Marovitch, Mulligan, nor Chestang actually get bingo in the allotted time (especially since if any of them had done so, the jig would have been up), and they are stunned to discover that they were actually the bingo machines in Du’s games , Trapp and Shankar. game. And then those six contestants are further fooled by the revelation that Du, Trapp and Shankar were merely bingo machines to an even higher level of this fractal bingo stack. As above, bingo below.

Image: Outage

It’s exactly the level of madness that has led Game changer‘s best episodes, proving that “I’ve been here all the time” isn’t just Reich’s host catchphrase, but a guiding philosophy. Something about this isn’t what you thought from the start. A third group of participants did so been here all the time.

That’s probably why I feel like another shoe needs to drop

Maybe it’s just the metatextual layers of this bingo baklava, but the whole thing makes me go back a level and think about Game changer season 6 in its entirety. Take for example the prices so far: a 90-minute couples massage. A building block set for children. A Bob Ross Chia pet. A medium sized gift basket. They are all quite small, and, for Game changerunusual.

In a behind-the-scenes article about the making of the previous episode, “Pencils Down,” Reich said, “Now that we have episodes this big and this ambitious, my natural comedic inclination is to make the prizes smaller again. I think it’s really funny to subject players to hell and then say, ‘You won a Chia Pet.’” And Game changer has certainly used that twist to great effect: ‘Escape the Greenroom’, with the prize of a gift voucher to a local escape room location, comes to mind.

But Reich is also a host and employer, who clearly enjoys using Game changer to compensate its participants above the daily rate they earn just for playing. Games like “Secret Samta,” “Race to the Bottom,” and “Do I Hear $1?” revolve around giving away expensive prizes and wads of cash – historically as much as a full month’s rent! — while other games, such as “Don’t Cry” and Game changer‘s Battle Royale and Bachelor variants have rewarded plane tickets, hotel stays, and even an entire honeymoon.

And he’s a host who understands the comedy of competition. One of the ways Game changer differs significantly from the three spin-offs: Dirty laundry, Make some noiseAnd Play by ear – are the firm conditions for winning and losing, and the kind of prizes that give a sense of stake to winning.

So it’s not that the prices are small that strikes me. It’s that they are consistently small. Maybe even suspicious small??? Is this extra budget simply being used for the larger casts of these episodes, or is something more in the works?

Game changerThe fifth season finale episode revealed that a greenroom renovation spotted in behind-the-scenes videos months prior to the premiere actually served to secretly transform the entire space into an escape room – and then it turned out that “final” was a fake-out and there was an unannounced four-parter factual final episode on the way. Reich and the rest of Game changerThe group’s crew will obviously be looking for a way to top themselves again, and it can’t be ruled out that the clues been here all the time.

Or maybe I’ll just spin my wheels! But that only means the Game changer The crew does their job very, very well.

Game changer season 6 premiered on Monday, March 12, with a new episode dropping every Monday the streaming service Dropout.tv.