Game Changer’s “Bingo” episode was a mindfuck for the ages

The current season of Game Changer, Dropout’s endlessly inventive improv/prank game show, delivered its first real banger of a game in last week’s “Bingo.” Earlier episodes of the season were all charming new games or beloved returning formats in their own right, but “Bingo” stands apart thanks to a twist of the exact kind that makes up Game Changer’s metatextual bread and butter.

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

[Ed. note: This post is about to spoil the twist of “Bingo,” the fifth episode of Game Changer season 6.]

“Bingo” begins as, well, a game of bingo. As directed by host Sam Reich, contestants Katie Marovitch, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and Raphael Chestang respond to improv prompts in order to earn a new random draw of a bingo ball, marking off comically large bingo boards with comically large stamps in the shape of Reich’s head. But a few minutes into the competition, footage begins to be intercut with a new set of three bingo boards.

As it turns out, there are three more bingo players, Lily Du, Mike Trapp, and Rekha Shankar, who are watching the shoot from the Dropout greenroom. Instead of numbers, the squares on their boards are filled with the verbal tics, mannerisms, and performance habits of the contestants on the Game Changer set. Du, Trapp, and Shankar are actually writing Marovitch, Mulligan, and Chestang’s improv prompts on the fly, trying to bait them into the actions on their comically large bingo boards, so they can mark them with comically large stamps in the shape of the head of whichever on-set contestant they’ve been assigned.

But this was merely the turn, not the prestige!

A few minutes later, more footage reveals that the true contestants of the game are yet a third set of performers in a third location with a third set of comically large boards and head-stamps — Tao Yang, Carolyn Page, and Jessica Ross — who are playing behavior bingo with Du, Trapp, and Shankar. The middle set was so focused on prompting and observing Marovitch, Mulligan, and Chestang that they seemed not to notice the series of increasingly strange and specific requests from show PA Kaylin Mahoney, acting on direction from Yang, Page, and Ross.

Past this second twist reveal, the episode continues hypnotically, intercutting between the three layers of gameplay — the editing alone boggles the mind — until game’s end. Neither Marovitch, Mulligan, nor Chestang actually gets bingo in the time allotted (certainly because if any of them had, the jig would have been up), and are flabbergasted to find that they were actually the bingo machines in Du, Trapp, and Shankar’s game. And then those six contestants are further bamboozled by the reveal that Du, Trapp, and Shankar were merely bingo machines to an even higher level of this fractal bingo stack. As above, bingo below.

Image: Dropout

It’s exactly the level of madness that has driven Game Changer’s greatest episodes, showing that “I’ve been here the whole time” isn’t just Reich’s host catchphrase, but a guiding philosophy. Something about this isn’t what you’ve thought it’s been from the beginning. A third set of contestants has been here the whole time.

Which is probably why I feel like another shoe is yet to drop

Maybe it’s just the metatextual layers of this bingo baklava, but the whole thing has me pulling back a level and thinking about Game Changer season 6 as a whole. For example, take the prizes so far: a 90-minute couple’s massage. A child’s building block set. A Bob Ross Chia Pet. A midsize gift basket. They’re all pretty small, and, for Game Changer, unusually so.

In a behind-the-scenes feature about the making of the previous episode, “Pencils Down,” Reich said, “Now that we have episodes that are so big and so ambitious, my natural comedic leaning is to make the prizes smaller again. There’s something really funny to me about subjecting players to hell and then saying, ‘You won a Chia Pet.’” And Game Changer has certainly employed that twist to great effect — “Escape the Greenroom,” with its prize of a gift certificate to a local escape room venue, leaps to mind.

But Reich is also a host, and employer, who clearly loves to use Game Changer to compensate his contestants beyond the day 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, like “Don’t Cry” and Game Changer’s battle royale and Bachelor variants, have awarded plane tickets, hotel stays, and even a whole honeymoon trip.

And he’s a host who understands the comedy of competition. One of the ways Game Changer is notably different from its three spinoffs — Dirty Laundry, Make Some Noise, and Play It by Ear — is its firm win and loss conditions, and the kinds of prizes that confer a sense of stakes to winning.

So it’s not that the prizes are small that seems notable to me. It’s that they’re consistently small. Maybe even suspiciously small??? Is this extra budget simply being deployed on the larger casts of these episodes, or is there something more in the works?

Game Changer’s fifth season ended with a finale episode in which it’s revealed that a greenroom renovation noticed in behind-the-scenes videos for months leading up to premiere was actually in service of secretly transforming the whole space into an escape room — and then it turned out that “finale” was a fake-out and there was an unheralded four-part actual finale episode on the way. Reich and the rest of Game Changer’s crew will naturally be looking for a way to top themselves again, and it’s not out of the question that the clues have been here the entire time.

Or maybe I’m just spinning my wheels! But that just means the Game Changer crew is doing their jobs very, very well.

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