Season 3 - 6 episodes (2016)
Written by: Charlie Brooker
Directed by: Dan Trachtenberg
Starring: Wyatt Russell
Plot
Black Mirror examines the pitfalls when technology and society intersect. What happens when technology goes off the rails, creating a horrifying situation? Ultimately the questions are, does technology make us happier, is being connected at all times beneficial, and does it do more harm than good?
Black Mirror is an anthology. Each episode is self contained with completely different actors.
The second episode of season 3 is Playtest.Video games take the next step from virtual reality and augmented reality to indistinguishable from real life. An implant in the base of the neck accesses your brain directly to modify what you see and hear.
Verdict
Playtest felt the least like a Black Mirror episode because the focus felt so narrow. Is this about the evolution of video games or greedy corporations? It would be more engaging to go the Extreme Measures (1996) movie route and analyze when is human testing acceptable if it's for the greater good. I like the twist ending that's reminiscent of the 1890 short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, but with Black Mirror, I expect the twist not to be a "so that's what really happened", but "I can't believe what that implies for the world."
Watch it.
Review
In Playtest, Cooper is traveling the world and using an app to find odd jobs when funds are low. His father died of Alzheimer's and Cooper wants to create memories while he still can.
An app helped him find a date, and Sonja urges him to take the latest job he found as a video game tester. This game is from well-known developer Shou, and it's an augmented reality video game that uses your own fears to create a game that scares you.
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| Episode 2 - Playtest |
I questioned why this game company has a haunted house on their property, but Shou seemed just odd enough that I believed it.
When Cooper finds Sonja knocking on his door, I didn't buy it. How did she enter a gated complex? How did the cameras not see her? Does she work for the game company?
Things take a crazy turn and we eventually realize that Sonja was a character in the game, yet for some reason she is more realistic that what Cooper saw before. I assumed it was just ramping up to a big scare. Maybe this was going to delve into the boundaries of reality and virtual reality.
This episode gets wild, and I couldn't believe how quickly it went. I couldn't believe an hour had passed when the credits started.
I thought the ending was great when it was revealed that the entire house was the game and in reality only one second had passed. We then get a second twist that Cooper never even started the game. This is like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, where a man is hung but the rope breaks and he runs to find his family. The last scene of the story lets us know the rope never broke. It was a dream the man had in the second he died.
This episode didn't cut both ways. The benefits of a virtual reality game are slight, and while the horrors are crazy, this episode didn't have the depth. How would this affect society at large? With the Alzheimer sub-plot, I was surprised this didn't consider how virtual reality could alter our memories.
While Cooper lives his life through an app for jobs and dating, this gaming app didn't quite make that connection or comment on how we live.
Extreme Measures had Hugh Grant arguing that killing the homeless was murder while Gene Hackman called the dead heroes for helping develop a cure to save millions of lives. While the game company has killed play testers while trying to make the game less lethal, this episode doesn't try to justify or comment on it.
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