An eccentric murder suspect is linked to an unusual video game from the 1990s – a game populated by cute, evolving artificial lifeforms.

The premise is decent enough. What if the threat from AI lay not in the future, but in the past? In Plaything, when Cameron Walker (Peter Capaldi in a greasy wig) is brought in for questioning after being identified as a murder suspect following a shoplifting incident, he appears, to all intents and purposes to be an LSD-addled paranoid schizophrenic. He seems to be stringing his interrogators along with a bonkers story of how he was driven to kill by cutesy 1990s video game characters that can talk to him through the monitor screen.

Of course, we’ve watched Black Mirror before so we know there’s more to it than that. It also helps if you’ve read a classic 1953 science fiction short story by Margaret St. Clair called Prott. I’ve done both so I knew exactly where this was going – down to the detail of its final twist – from really rather early in the episode.

Capaldi is terrific, though, and it’s great to see Will Poulter and Asim Choudhry back, reprising their roles from Bandersnatch (although the episodes aren’t otherwise connected).

Verdict: I think if I’d never seen an episode of Black Mirror before – or read any classic science fiction – I would have been really excited by Plaything. While it is efficiently executed, the ideas are just that wee bit too predictable for this to really surprise and delight. 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com