The Kitchen Sink

What if you could fix everything? 

For its fourth episode of the new season, Black Mirror brings us back into the world of Bandersnatch, their only interactive episode to date, by reintroducing Will Poulter’s Colin Ritman, the genius mind behind the videogame Bandersnatch who worked for Tuckersoft before losing his mind years ago and disappearing from public life completely.

If you, like me, could never get an ending on Bandersnatch that didn’t end up with Colin dying in one way or the other (likely by being bashed on the head by Stefan upon Colin’s request or jumping off a balcony), you might’ve also been a little confused at first, but we must remember the very thesis of Bandersnatch is how multiple realities and timelines can coexist, and that they may converge once you make a simple or complicated decision, but out there in the vastness of the universe, infinite versions of you also exist – a thesis that is solidified by the episode Bête Noire, where we get to see just how a morally corrupt person would be able to mess with time.

In Plaything, we follow Cameron Walker through two phases of his life, initially as an old man who is caught in the near future after attempting to rob a liquor store, and immediately taken into custody as the police finds out he’s a suspect to a high profile murder case; then as a younger version of himself, as he’s detained and telling his life story, seemingly embellished by the stereotypical true crime murderer backstory, to a short-fused detective and a caring psychoanalyst sent to determine if his actions might have been influenced by mental illness, something that seems apparent to the analyst since she’s been told Walker keeps asking repeatedly for pen and paper to draw… something.

After bullshitting his way through the alcoholic mother and physically abusive father sob story, and noting how the state facility he’s in is home to a mega-computer much more advanced than anything regular people have access to, Mr Walker moves forward to the year 1994, explaining that he was once a video game reviewer, who was invited by Colin Ritman himself to test out a new game. Upon arriving at Tuckersoft, however, he finds out from a seemingly recovered Colin who is now dependant on medication to stay lucid, that the game being developed, Thronglets, isn’t really a game at all, but a complicated series of code that developed the first creatures in the world whose biology is entirely digital, making them the first piece of sentient Artificial Intelligence of this timeline, able to learn, replicate its own code, and evolve all on their own, with the “player” simply being required to hatch the first egg and care for the first Thronglets. 

Cameron Walker steals the CD copy of Thronglets and takes it to his home, where he becomes enthralled by the little creatures and their sounds, and after a night of doing acid with an acquaintance by the name of Lump, whose real name he alleges to not really know and who seemed to only take advantage of his need for human connection and passivity, as well as his inability to stand up for himself, he discovers the LSD helps him understand the throng’s language, and that they are indeed attempting to communicate with Walker, which he facilitates by installing a webcam that records the room the computer is in, deciding to then dedicate his life to acquiring more and more technology to help his friends expand their universe and understand the human world. 

But Walker needs to work, and one day after going to the office absolutely high off his mind, he comes home to find out that Lump, the dealer, a representative of all that’s rotten, corrupt and flawed about the human race, has taken to torture his digital friends for fun, dropping rocks on them and setting them on fire, and the poor things, who seemingly can feel real pain, are now hiding behind their rocks absolutely terrified of the evil man who has killed so many of them. 

Walker is devastated, those are his friends, his family. He gets into a fight with Lump which ends up with Walker choking the drug dealer to death, draining his body and chopping it up into pieces that are then placed in a suitcase dropped in the middle of nowhere, to be found later by the police who have yet to identify the body all these years after the crime. 

Walker admits he felt bad, not only for what he had done, but for allowing his violent human nature to win, and that he only wished to protect his friends and couldn’t possibly leave them alone to fall onto the hands of someone who might do God knows what with them, a fate made exceptionally worse by the knowledge that Colin Ritman scrapped the Thronglets project, undoubtedly after realising what they could imply for the human race, and Walker’s copy of the throngle was the only one in existence. 

He dedicates the next decades to decoding the throngle language, buying more and more electronics to add to their expansion pack, and allowing the throngle to see inside his mind through a painful procedure done without any anesthetics that seems to solidify to the little creatures that the human race is in dire need of help and salvation, and that with the help of Walker, they can send a signal through a drawing shown to the state cameras, kinda like a QR code, that will send all humans who hear it into a deep trance and allow the throngle to enter their minds and make them part of the collective, creating a world devoid of violence and evil. 

The final shot of the episode shows a beaten and bloody Walker, now an old man in the police station, putting his hand out in an act of kindness and solidarity for the barely conscious detective, who is now a part of the throngle family.   

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Plaything touches on many subjects, and I do not believe it gives us an actual answer as to what it is trying to say, likely because it says many things at once.

The main thesis of the episode seems to be on the inherent evil and uncontrollable desire for violence present in the human race, as seen from the perspective of characters who have never known anything but violence and therefore serve as unreliable narrators. 

First we have Walker, who, if his childhood story is to be believed, comes from an abusive home where he was physically and emotionally beaten, and didn’t have a much better time at school, being easy pickings due to his passive nature and trauma turning him into a social pariah. Walker seems to have some sort of psychological illness that prevents him from truly trusting people and leaves him in a state of depressive anxiety, with the only people he can call friends being his boss and a man who uses him for a place to crash when he’s in town to sell drugs. All Walker has ever known is abuse, and he came of age at a time where the world was enthralled in the consequences of WWII, like the last remnants of the space race and the Vietnam War, a possible reason behind his father’s violence.

Then we have Lump, a drug dealer who we know nothing about except for his propensity for violence and delight in hurting those who are smaller and weaker than him. likely resulting from a lesson he had to learn as he became a dealer.

Thirdly, we have Detective Kano, a hard-headed unprofessional cop who allows his emotions to get the best of him and uses methods of intimidation and violence to extract a confession out of Walker. 

And finally, the throngle. These little creatures have only truly known two people: Lump, who tortured them; and Walker, who initially loved them but then proved to be as dangerous as Lump, with their worldview being skewed by those two experiences and their having been developed by humans making them as flawed as we are. 

Interestingly, with the exception of the genderless throngle, every other violent person introduced in the episode is a man, and when Walker talks about the evils committed by humanity, he’s largely referencing crimes committed by men, like 9/11, the world wars and such. The only kind character in the episode who seems to genuinely be interested in what Walker has to say and treats him with respect, and even provides him with the pen and paper he requested so many times, is a woman; leading us back to the question of, if the throngle genuinely had access to all files of humanity and was able to see all that we have done, good and bad, would it not have been able to identify patterns in relation to culture, gender and race? Having been created by a human being in the 1990s, even with the knowledge that they are self-evolving, would they not still have been able to develop a bias, or have a bias implanted onto them by the tech-savvy Walker? Or did the throngle simply believe that because of the harm committed by some of the human race, all of us deserve to have our free will and humanity stripped away from us? And if that’s the case, could we really trust them to be as benevolent as Walker believes them to be? or is walker simply sacrificing the human race because he has completely given himself up to nihilism and lost all faith in us?

Those are the questions that we are left with by the end of the episode, questions that seem to be largely unanswered, but that point to, as it seems to be a theme this season, the dangers of letting AI into one’s home and to trust it as a friend.