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

polygon.com:

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.

brennango pic.twitter.com/1JihnSrnhV

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