An eccentric loner tells tales about 90s videogame journalism in a grungy procedural LSD trip. Here’s our Black Mirror: Plaything review.
The fourth episode of Black Mirror’s seventh season, Plaything, starts with a spot of thievery. Peter Capaldi’s Cameron – sporting stringy, elbow-length hair immediately marking him out as a wrong ‘un – tries to steal a bottle of wine from an off-license. Tsk tsk.
Thankfully for the forces of law and order, he’s not very good at it. When police arrive and detain him under “the Bio Identity Act 2029”, we learn he has no previous convictions. We also learn he’s wanted for a murder in 1994. Wrong ‘un indeed.
On arrival for questioning in the local police station, Cameron regales the rozzers with a story from his time as a games journalist in the early nineties, and the mysterious not-quite-a-game he was once tasked with reviewing…
Continuing to join the dots between what is quickly becoming Black Mirror’s sprawling shared universe, Plaything almost serves as a loose sequel to 2018’s experiment in interactivity, Bandersnatch. Will Poulter’s nasal games designer, Colin Ritman, is apparently back in the programming saddle after some kind of mental breakdown – neatly tying up the multiple possible endings of his 2018 outing, one of which resulted in his death.
Series veteran director David Slade (he helmed 2017 chromatic oddity Metalhead, as well as Bandersnatch) returns to the grungy world of the early videogames industry with style. A sickly green colour palette and no shortage of fluorescent bulbs give the episode the look of something between Trainspotting and Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. Burnt yellow walls and a dishcloth thrown over a computer monitor build an acid-drenched bedroom you can practically smell. Plaything is undoubtedly the most stylish of all the seventh season’s new episodes.
Read more: Black Mirror season 7 episode 3: Hotel Reverie review
But the story beneath never quite matches its visual ambition. The police interrogation structure – spending most of its runtime flashing back to Cameron’s younger days – is as predictable as it is unnecessary. Watching a young man develop an obsession with a strange new computer game could make for a compelling story told straight-through. Instead, any sense of mystery is sucked from a narrative curiously sans-stakes for a murder investigation.
The 45-minute runtime, too, feels like the story has been cut off at its knees. It’s no small feat that the worldbuilding on display here leaves us wanting more – but Plaything feels like a promising first draft more than the finished article. A good pair of editor’s scissors and a bit of narrative padding could make something great here. Instead, the result is another reasonably entertaining sci-fi thriller with not quite enough to say.
Black Mirror is streaming on Netflix now. Check out reviews of the rest of series 7 here.
