David Farnor | On 24, Apr 2025

Hands up if you had a Tamagotchi when you were younger. Hands up if you managed to keep it alive. Hands up if you killed it on purpose. Plaything, the fourth episode of Black Mirror’s seventh season, will tap into each one of those formative memories – and that’s before its ideas really start to evolve.

The story starts with the arrest of Cameron (Peter Capaldi), a dishevelled loner who, the police’s high-tech database reveals, appears to be DNA-matched to a murder of an unknown person decades ago. Taken in for questioning, he’s more interested in doodling on paper to try and explain himself than answer their demands – but, caught between a good cop (Michele Austin) and a bad one (James Nelson-Joyce), he ends up divulging his whole story.

And so we flash back to the 1990s, when Cameron (Lewis Gribben) worked for PC Zone – the same magazine that Charlie Brooker was once a writer for. Into his lap falls an interview request from Tuckersoft, the games company you may recognise from 2018’s interactive Black Mirror special, Bandersnatch. Will Poulter reprises his role as programming guru Colin Ritman, who – after his Bandersnatch-related breakdown – is back at his job pioneering computer game concepts. Encouraged by his boss, Mo (the always-entertaining Asim Chaudhry), Colin has come up with a new idea: Thronglets.

Somewhere between a Tamagotchi, Lemmings and The Sims, it’s a simulation that lets the player look after a group of tiny creatures. With their Minion-like appearance and their cute bleeping language, they’re instantly adorable and lovingly rendered by director David Slade and the production team with just the right amount of retro-pixelated charm – it’s a fable as nostalgic as it is forward-thinking.

Cameron, we quickly learn, becomes obsessed with looking after them, and Lewis Gribben is wonderful at capturing the manic intensity of that passion and protective urge. He grins, laughs and stares at his cathode ray monitor with the awe of someone discovering life itself – and, in some ways, perhaps he is, as Poulter’s unnervingly intense Colin warns him that it’s not actually a game at all, but a genuine creation of a new digital species. Cameron’s nearest thing to a friend is the drug-dealing Lump (John Finan), who’s mostly using him for his apartment, and Gribben’s vulnerable, tragic performance makes it easy to see how Cameron would want to see that inside his screen.

What ensues is a thoughtful exploration of how invested we can become in an alternative world – whether that’s Animal Crossing or Rollercoaster Tycoon. Is it because we like to position ourselves as gods over something else? Is it because we’re fascinated by the idea of life forming and finding a way to become our equals? The presence of LSD in Cameron’s life, thanks to Lump, either confirms or denies both, and the story’s provocative fun lies in the uncertainty that exists in the grey areas between those two options. Peter Capaldi’s haunted conviction, and almost childlike excitement, only leaves our brains racing through the possibilities. Think you loved your Tamagotchi? Think again.

 

 
Through a glass darkly (spoilers)

It’s inevitable that, just as Cameron devotedly wants the Throng to expand and thrive, Lump should want to destroy simply for fun – and Plaything chillingly captures the extent to which people can become attached to their digital creations, as Cameron lashes out in revenge and kills Lump – then hides the body.

That’s not really the unsettling part of the story, though: the inspired twist, which you will see coming, is that Cameron wanted to be arrested to begin with, in order to get access to the police’s super-computer. What you won’t see coming, though, is Cameron’s secret plan to draw a QR code to be scanned by the CCTV camera, so that the Thronglets’ code can be downloaded into that computer system.

Cameron’s passion has extended to bio-hacking, with a wonderfully crummy PS/2 port – the kind used for a mouse in the 1990s (another great touch – surgically inserted into his head, so that he could become part of the Thronglets’ hive mind. Is that all in his head? Or are they all in his head, and really do exist as their own entity? (The existence of an eerily similar game from 1996, called Creatures and created by Steve Grand, only makes it all more intriguing.)

Before we can start to process that humdinger of a mystery, you might well be wondering about the idea of AI development today – are we helping and enabling its growth and expansion by playing with it? Is that someone we should be doing or not? Because, like, the Throng, there’s the question of what their end goal and motivation is: is it to live harmoniously alongside us, in peace, as we all understand each other a new way? Or is it to steal places in our brains, take over our bodies, and exist in a corporeal way that doesn’t involve a 16-bit computer screen?

The final shot of the episode simply sees Cameron reach out a hand to James Nelson-Joyce’s impatient, bullying cop – just after a blast of sonic waves is broadcast out from every mobile device in the country, apparently by the Throng. Is that extended hand one of friendship or retribution? Have we just witnessed some kind of terrorist attack, or the beginning of an unexpected utopia? Colin’s rantings about a basilisk face, before having another breakdown and erasing everything but the copy of Thronglets that Cameron stole, suggest it might actually be the latter. Either way, we’re a long way from that Tamagotchi.

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