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This post contains spoilers for “Black Mirror” season 7.
When news broke that Netflix’s long-running dystopia series “Black Mirror” would be revisiting the world of “Bandersnatch,” speculation was rampant. Would the follow-up episode take on the same choose-your-own-adventure format as the groundbreaking interactive film did seven years ago? Would it choose one of that story’s multiple endings as the “true” ending and continue on from that point, or would it embrace the butterfly effect and its many branched paths? The truth, it turns out, is a lot more mundane.
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The episode in question, “Plaything,” opens by speedrunning a police encounter much as a typical crime procedural would. Viewers see Cameron Walker (former “Doctor Who” star Peter Capaldi) — an erratic older man with long, gray hair and a meek attitude — get picked up for shoplifting a bottle of wine in a convenience store. Cops use some handy dandy future tech to identify him as a suspect in a cold case from the ’90s, and once they corner Cameron in an interrogation room, the episode begins spinning its gears by telling a thin story very slowly. That story, to some degree, leads us back to “Bandersnatch.”
Plaything pays lip service to the world of Bandersnatch
The only real connective tissue between “Plaything” and “Bandersnatch” is the presence of Will Poulter, whose bleach-blond tech innovator, we’re told, has recently recovered from a breakdown. There’s no sign of Fionn Whitehead’s Stefan, the programmer whose life was tied into knots (and in some versions of the story, ended) by a multiple choice video game assignment he took on from Colin in 1984. A decade later, Colin is back in the game industry, still working with Asim Chaudhry’s Mohan, and happy to pawn off another malignant bit of code onto an unsuspecting young man. In this case, it’s Cameron (Lewis Gribben in flashback), who soon becomes fixated on a digital “experience” featuring a legion of cute 8-bit characters called Thronglets. Colin, meanwhile, isn’t even central enough to the story to get a second scene — his absence is eventually explained away by a third party.
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Several “Black Mirror” episodes have taken a somewhat cynical view of IP and franchised art, so it’s ironic that this episode feels like it pays the most perfunctory of lip service to “Bandersnatch.” It’s as if someone at Netflix would only allow season 7 to exist if it revisited past standouts (see also: “U.S.S. Callister: Into Infinity”). A half-baked hour that lingers on ideas that Brooker has done better before, “Plaything” includes drawn-out scenes of apparent all-encompassing delusions, conversations about the rights of AIs, and a misunderstood genius turning to violence. Nothing here feels particularly innovative, nor even new for the series. Even the Easter eggs — posters for titles like “Striking Vipers II,” “Space Fleet,” and “Bandersnatch II” are on display in the Tuckersoft office — feel phoned in.
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The episode may be Black Mirror at its most phoned in
While “Bandersnatch” framed its main character as a psychologically tortured man who sees things no one believes in, “Plaything” updates the play book ever so slightly by making Cameron a psychologically tortured man who sees things that people eventually have to believe in. Thanks to the not-so-surprising twist ending, his potential LSD-induced delusions of power-hungry AI critters end up impacting the entire world. It’s in its final moments that “Plaything” shows itself as only half a story, wrapping up just when it was about to get interesting after spending the better part of an hour showing steaming cops listening to a kooky old man tell an unsurprising story.
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Its egregious cut to black leaves us with several unanswered questions, but — in perhaps the most damning indictment of the episode — they aren’t interesting enough for us to wonder about for long anyway. “Bandersnatch” was far from perfect, but at least it was bold; “Plaything” is lukewarm leftovers, an in-universe tie-in of the most tangential sort. It’s also just kind of silly. Move over, season 4’s murder witness guinea pig — mind control Tamagotchis are here to claim their title as the goofiest “Black Mirror” concept yet.
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