There’s a lot going on in Plaything, the fourth episode of Black Mirror Season 7, and most of it isn’t what you’d expect. While the premise—man loses grip on reality through video game obsession—feels familiar enough, the execution is anything but. Anchored by a melancholic performance from Peter Capaldi as older Cameron Walker, and a jittery, raw portrayal by Lewis Gribben as his younger self, this is Black Mirror swerving from expected satire into psychological horror, hallucinatory nostalgia, and, somehow, an earnest attempt at spiritual transcendence through digital life.
We meet Cameron as he’s being booked for shoplifting, but the police quickly reveal a deeper charge: he’s a suspect in a decades-old murder. From there, we unspool the past.
It begins in the late '90s. Cameron is a writer for PC Zone, a British gaming magazine that will tickle the memories of anyone who lived through the era of demo discs and Day-Glo desktop towers. A promising review gig brings him to Tuckersoft, where he meets Will Poulter’s returning Colin Ritman, whose manic presence once dominated the Bandersnatch interactive special. But here he’s quieter, gentler—or maybe just more tired. Colin introduces Cameron to his latest creation: Thronglets, a sandbox simulation game without objectives or enemies. Just creatures to raise. No points. No endgame. Just care.
And Cameron cares. Too much, perhaps.
As Plaything unfolds, it transforms from retro-tech curio into something far darker. When Cameron drops acid with his perpetually mooching flatmate Lump, he finds he can understand the Thronglets’ language. His empathy deepens. He modifies his machine. He begins to converse with them. It becomes less of a game and more of a calling.
Director David Slade plays this transformation with a slowly ratcheting dread, the lighting growing starker, the music colder. What begins in the glow of CRT warmth begins to warp into Lynchian detachment. Hallways stretch. Screens pulsate. Language fractures.
The turning point is brutal. Lump, annoyed and high, torments the Thronglets in Cameron's absence. When Cameron returns, he finds the digital world he nurtured desecrated. He snaps. The murder that follows is bloody, unflinching, and deeply tragic. What makes it worse is that it isn’t depicted as an act of madness but of twisted justice—a retaliation for digital lives extinguished. By the time Cameron dismembers the body and hides it in a suitcase, we know there’s no coming back.
But Plaything keeps going.
Years pass. Cameron is arrested. In the interrogation room with DCI Kano (James Nelson-Joyce) and Jen Minter (Michele Austin), he’s lucid, even charming. He explains everything. How he’s been expanding the Thronglets’ world. How he created a Frankensteinian nest of scavenged hardware in his flat. How he now hosts them in his brain via a self-installed neural port.
Capaldi’s performance here is quietly mesmerizing. He isn’t the raving madman you might expect. He’s calm, even benevolent. He believes he’s saved something real. And maybe he has.
What follows is classic Black Mirror in concept, but delivered with eerie stillness. Cameron asks for a pen and paper to identify the murder victim. Instead, he draws a strange graphic and holds it up to the camera, knowing it's connected to central servers. It’s not a name. It’s a virus. The code hijacks the emergency broadcast network. A signal pulses out. We hear it. So does everyone else.
According to Cameron, this signal will rewrite the human brain. Not for dominance or destruction, but to eliminate conflict. To elevate humanity. The Thronglets, he claims, have been nurtured not just to feel, but to heal. It’s messianic. It's terrifying. And it’s weirdly beautiful.
As the final tone rings out, detective Kano collapses. Cameron gently helps him to his feet, smiling. Is this utopia? Or something worse?
Tonally, Plaything is one of the strangest episodes Black Mirror has ever attempted. It starts as The Ring for the PC Master Race, meanders through Her, and ends somewhere between a Lovecraftian download and a digital Second Coming. It’s not clean. It’s not tidy. But it is deeply compelling.
The real horror here isn’t the murder, or the Thronglets, or even the LSD-laced programming. It’s the aching need to connect—to be understood by something, anything, even if that something is a cartoon blob in a simulated petting zoo. Cameron’s descent isn’t a collapse into madness. It’s a climb toward meaning, away from a world that never gave him any.
Brooker and co. continue their streak of examining AI and identity, but Plaything pushes the envelope into cosmic horror and messianic yearning. It doesn’t answer whether the signal works. It doesn’t show us what comes next. It just ends with a smile and a hand offered in peace.
You’ll either find that terrifying, or transcendent.
Or both.
This is Black Mirror doing what it does best: leaving you to figure that out for yourself.
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