I’ve been playing video games for as far back as I can remember.
No lie, Tetris taught me how to do puzzles, and Dragon Warrior (A Slime Draws Near! Command?) taught me how to read. So, I hold video games very near and dear to my heart. That's why I view video game movies (especially the best ones) as genuine art, and why I'm even willing to defend the bad ones.
So, this might be the reason why one of the best Black Mirror episodes, “Playtest” resonates with me on such a visceral level. Though there are a few episodes in the popular anthology series that some might view as “scary,” “Playtest” genuinely terrifies me, and I have 5 reasons why.
Oh, and some spoilers up ahead if you haven't watched this amazing episode yet. You've been warned.
Augmented Reality Is Very Much A Thing We Have RIGHT NOW, And I Could Envision Everything In This Episode Happening One Day
Do you remember Pokemon GO? Sure, it's still around, but for a time, it felt like the biggest thing in the world.
I'd see people all over the place trying to catch some of the best Pokémon characters in the strangest places.
For example, I'd see people congregating outside of libraries (Heaven forbid that they actually went inside one of them), at zoos, and even in graveyards, swiping up on their phones in an attempt to acquire little pocket monsters that they could only see on their screens.
Pokemon GO is a perfect example of an Augmented Reality (AR) Game, and it's one of the first that made a MASSIVE splash on a global level. So, AR technology is already here. In fact, “Playtest” is one of the few examples of a Black Mirror episode that felt like it was playing catch-up with reality. That’s because Pokemon GO debuted in July of 2016, while “Playtest” debuted a few months later in October of that same year.
Now, there is some other advanced technology in the episode involving a device called a "mushroom.” It gets implanted in the back of Wyatt Russell's character’s neck, and it's meant to connect right to his brain to make the fears in his “playtest” more personal.
But, I feel like we are not that far from something of that nature, and it both excites, but also terrifies me to think about the possibilities, which I'll get into next.
I Could Only Imagine A Horror Game That Targeted Your Actual Fears
I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I am absolutely terrified of centipedes. When I was younger, I used to share a bed with my older sister, and one morning, I found her face-to-face with me. But, what I saw when I woke up didn't make any sense.
Her tongue was whipping left and right between her lips, which were clamped tight. Since I was still sort of in a dream, my frazzled mind both accepted this, but also struggled to process what I was seeing. But then, my sister opened her mouth, and her tongue shot out her mouth and skittered across the bed.
I hopped up, screaming, only to realize that it hadn’t been her tongue that ran across the bed. It had been a centipede that must have crawled inside her mouth while she was sleeping, and somehow got trapped in there.
So, as I’m sure you could imagine, I've had a deeply rooted fear of centipedes ever since.
So, back to Black Mirror. In the “Playtest” episode, Wyatt Russell's character is inside of a mansion, similar to what might be found in one of the Resident Evil movies, and his deepest fears gradually present themselves to him.
First, it's a tiny spider, and then, it's a MASSIVE one (which I'll get into soon). His old bully makes an appearance, and so do other personal fears of his.
And, I could only imagine finding a room full of centipedes (or even worse, a room-sized centipede), in some VR horror game. I would quite literally die from fright if that were to happen, and this episode makes me imagine those possibilities.
The Spider Scene Legit Gave Me Heart Palpitations
I mentioned earlier how there is a giant spider in this episode, and I'm not lying. There is a GIANT FREAKING SPIDER in this episode (with a freaking face!).
If you have arachnophobia, then I highly advise that you not watch one of my favorite Denis Villeneuve movies, Enemy (trust me on this one), and I would also advise that you not watch the “Playtest” episode of Black Mirror.
Now, I don't personally have a fear of spiders. In fact, if I see one in my basement, I let it live because they eat other obnoxious bugs that I don’t like. But, even I have a problem with the one in this episode since it’s so freaking enormous.
As I mentioned earlier, the device in this episode taps into a person's deepest fears, and one of the protagonist's deepest fears is spiders. At first, there's a small one that creeps up quickly to his leg, and that's scary enough. But later, there’s a massive one that gets me every time I see it. It's disturbing to say the very least.
Wyatt Russell's Acting Feels Extremely Genuine
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and MCU star, Wyatt Russell, is one hell of an actor, which makes sense, given that he's the son of Kurt Russell.
His father is in one of the best horror movies of all time with The Thing, and it looks like Wyatt Russell wants to have a similar trajectory as his dad as he’s starred in films like Overlord, and Night Swim.
All of this is to say that Wyatt Russell can really sell fear, and he does it like a champ in this episode.
The great thing about his performance here is that it's so gradual. His character is haunted by the death of his father, and he has been avoiding his mother's calls because he’s having a difficult time processing his grief.
So, by the time he agrees to do this playtest, he's already in a very vulnerable place. And his character slowly, but surely, cracks up and gets more and more terrified throughout the episode until he eventually croaks, which I'll get into next.
The Ending, While Robbing Some Of The Episode's Impact, Does Give Me Real Fears
Okay, so if “Playtest” has any real weakness, I think it's the ending, which does a fake-out before we get the true ending.
Before our hero goes into his experiment, his phone is turned off, only for him to turn it back on again so that he could take some pictures. This will come back to haunt him later, as his mother calls him, and there's interference with the signal, which fries his brain. But before that happens, he imagines himself leaving the experiment and trying to call his mother, who doesn’t remember him.
We learn that what actually happened is that he died within seconds of the experiment due to his mother’s call, and the ending has a sort of Jacob's Ladder, it-was-all-in-his-head conclusion, where none of the events actually happened, and it was just in his dying brain.
I'm not going to lie. This ending leaves much to be desired. But, I am genuinely concerned about the future of connecting our brains to technology. Movies like Total Recall and this episode of Black Mirror give me the heebie-jeebies because I truly do think that we're heading in this direction.
Honestly, I don't want to think about it, which is why “Playtest” scares the hell out of me more than any other Black Mirror episode.
