The twist is that it’s Cooper himself who turns out to be responsible for his own demise. If you look at their behavior, the people Cooper meets are actually all there to help him. “Stranger danger” doesn’t exist in this world.
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The expectation, since Black Mirror is all about tech horror, is that Sonja or Katie and Shou are secretly evil - that the world is full of strangers who want to murder you.īut that never comes to fruition. What’s most fascinating about “Playtest” isn’t how naturally it treats the apps Cooper uses, but rather a suggestion that turns out to be a red herring: that the strangers Cooper lets into his life might hurt him. Cooper’s phone also allows him to live in a bubble, keeping people like his mother out and letting other people like Katie and Shou into his life. It also finds him companionship, with apps that stand in for Tinder and Bumble setting him up with intriguing strangers. We learn that Cooper’s phone is the source of his income, as the Oddjobs app allows him to make money when his world travel funds are tight. In the beginning of the episode, the camera follows him as he gathers what’s important to him: his passport and his heaving bag, yes, but really the only thing he needs is his smartphone. “Playtest” evokes this part of our lives through the manner in which protagonist Cooper travels the world. Strangers, and the way we use our smartphones to get in touch with them, are essential parts of our lives now. Fast-forward some 25 years later, and here we are conjuring up strangers to drive us places with the touch of the button.Īnd it isn’t just Uber and Lyft. “Playtest” imagines a world where “stranger danger” doesn’t existīack when the world was young, the two biggest warnings my mother instilled in me were to a) not talk to strangers, and b) not get into a stranger’s car. And how our grandest desires, even our most sublime dreams, might just be artificial manifestations of our smartphone dependency. How we’ve turned our lives into a giant game. Unfortunately, like every Black Mirror episode (they can only be so happy, right?), once the episode starts unfurling its evil grin, it turns into a harrowing look at how we live today: how our experiences might just be extensions of our apps, games, and smartphones. But it never fully materializes, and they all trust Cooper to a certain degree - much more than he probably warrants and much more than he trusts them. Throughout the episode, there are flashes where you could swear they’re about to do something nefarious.
The people Cooper meets, as horror movies and other episodes of Black Mirror have taught us, should be bad people. And Katie and Shou at the video game company Saito Gamer, whom Cooper hits up for a quick job - testing a video game that manifests your darkest fears - to earn cash for a ticket home, are more than accommodating. Along the way, he meets Sonja ( Hannah John-Kamen), a one-night stand he encounters in England, who actually gets to know him and lets Cooper come back and stay with her after he loses his money and gets stranded. He goes to India and Thailand, and skips around the world in an effort, he says, to find himself. And, yes, looming over the entire episode is the threat that the protagonist might dig an implant out of his neck and thrust the episode into gore.īut folded into all of this is the most optimistic view of humankind that Black Mirror has ever shown, featuring humans who actually seem like decent people - something that’s often in short supply on Black Mirror.Ĭooper ( Wyatt Russell) is a dopey flâneur who travels the world after the death of his father, who Cooper says suffered from Alzheimer’s. Yes, there’s a creepy, dick-faced spider that’s one of the most disgusting things that’s ever been on Netflix. Yes, it’s an episode of terror where the protagonist dies after 40 minutes.
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This article is a recap of Netflix’s Black Mirror episode “Playtest.” There are spoilers and discussion regarding the episode’s plot.Īt the heart of “ Playtest ,” the second episode of the third season of Netflix’s sci-fi horror series Black Mirror, is a grim tale - but in the sneakiest of ways.
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