I’ve seen a number of TikToks lately where gamers show their friends or family the infamous “No Russian” mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 — a controversial level where players get the option to gun down civilians at an airport in Moscow. It’s a shocking, graphic mission that many of my friends played as teenagers or younger, and many of the comments on these TikToks feature similar sentiments: “8-year-old me ran and chased the runners.” “The fact that we all made sure there were no survivors was insane.” “We played this with zero hesitation,” accompanied by a laughing-crying emoji.

Do violent video games make kids violent? It’s an age-old discourse, and the answer is mostly no, though they can contribute to aggression. What does it say about many of us that we do enjoy inflicting pain on imaginary people, whether that means taking part in a mass shooting at a realistic airport, carjacking random bystanders in Grand Theft Auto, or drowning a family in The Sims? Honestly … it can be an interesting topic, but the answer itself is kind of boring. Most of the time, I don’t think these things say all that much about us, at least on an individual level. We definitely didn’t need four Westworld seasons about it.

“Plaything” also kind of revolves around this subject, using the world of 2018’s choose-your-own-adventure special Bandersnatch to return to the video-game theme. Most of the episode takes place in 1994, ten years after the events of the interactive film, with genius programmer Colin Ritman (Will Poulter) back at Tuckersoft with owner Mohan (Asim Chaudhry). Colin has a particular critic in mind to write up his newest, most ambitious project: PC Zone writer Cameron Walker (Lewis Gribben), whose writing suggests a “weird yet receptive mind.”

We hear this story, by the way, from the point of view of a much older Cameron (a wacky, long-haired Peter Capaldi), arrested for attempted shoplifting and on suspicion of murder. At the station, he’s questioned by Detective Chief Inspector Kano (James Nelson Joyce) and psychologist Jen Minter (Michele Austin) about an unidentified body that turned up inside a suitcase. From there, Cameron goes back to the ’90s, where this story began.

When Cam meets Colin and witnesses Thronglets, he immediately becomes obsessed with the idea. It’s not a game so much as a digital world where you create sentient life, hatching an egg and taking care of your little squeaky Thronglet — sort of like Neopets or Tamagotchi, and honestly, not much more visually sophisticated. (Imagine Colin delivering that same monologue about the game’s noble focus on humanity’s improvement, but he’s referring to feeding your puffle on Club Penguin.) Where this world diverges from those other games is in the malleability of the code, which will evolve like life itself as the collective Throng grows and interacts with humans like Cam.

Cam takes the software home with him and starts his own colony, treating the Throng as his friends. After all, he doesn’t have any human buddies besides Gordon, and a drug dealer nicknamed Lump, who often crashes at his place. When Cam does acid with Lump one day, he realizes the extra synapses firing in his brain allow him to understand the Throng’s singsong language. Their first message is a greeting combined with a shopping list for specific computer equipment, which he purchases for them.

From here on out, Cam is pretty much tripping balls every day for the rest of his life, subsisting for the first few weeks on a bulk purchase from Lump. On the upside, the Throng is really learning and evolving from the constant communication. On the downside, Colin goes crazy again and wipes the source code and backups, leaving Cam as the sole guardian of this civilization. The Thronglets on his computer are the only Thronglets, and that makes them extra vulnerable. So when Lump discovers the game and starts dropping boulders on the squealing creatures, he doesn’t realize he’s basically doing digital genocide. Cam’s hysterical reaction is no surprise: He hurls a glass bowl at Lump’s head, then chokes him to death while the fledgling species watches on his camera.

The older Cameron has many thoughts on the significance of Lump’s actions; they apparently demonstrate that today’s humans still have the same inclination toward violence and selfishness as the early savages. We treat less intelligent lifeforms as our playthings, especially artificial intelligence. To be fair, though, Lump didn’t know the little creatures on the computer were “real” and advanced lifeforms, even if he took an alarming amount of pleasure in setting them on fire. There’s a lot of irony packed into Cameron’s words about nonviolence when this is a guy who murdered someone in cold blood. But killing Lump and stuffing him in a suitcase to cover his tracks makes logical sense to him; the value of this life pales in comparison to the burgeoning Throng civilization, a species that has already surpassed humans in communication and perhaps intelligence in general.

Cam continues to devote his life to the Throng, upgrading them over the years with graphics chips from new consoles. At a certain point, he drills into his own brain to install a neurological interface so they can study the human mind and ensure peaceful coexistence. The enlightened Cameron we see with Kano and Minter is a man free of fear, anger, and jealousy, just one piece of a collective whole. He only stole that bottle early in the episode to get here and deliver the Throng’s message.

Minter and Kano fit into the good cop/bad cop roles pretty easily; Kano repeatedly dismisses Cameron’s ideas and insists on a legal name for Lump, still way too myopic in his thinking. In the end, though, Minter makes an even more foolish decision by urging him to play along and give Cameron the paper he’s requesting.

“Plaything” plays a bit with the possibility that Cameron is actually mentally ill and fried from decades of consistent LSD use. But it’s Black Mirror we’re watching, which means the ambiguity usually comes down on the side of “Oh yeah, it’s real.” When Cameron gets access to a paper and pen, he draws a code and shows it to the camera in the corner, successfully creating a backdoor for the Throng in the state computer and converting it into a blaring signal that can be broadcast to connected devices everywhere. Before Kano and Minter know it, they’re at the mercy of the Throng, merged with an advanced collective intelligence.

What does this actually mean in practice? Is the Throng everywhere now, or just in Britain? Are humans essentially extinct and supplanted or controlled by the Throng, or is the relationship as symbiotic as Cameron suggests? In theory, a human race sapped of violent impulses could be interesting to witness, but this isn’t exactly framed as a “dark happy ending” in the same way as, say, “Demon 79.” I might’ve liked an epilogue where we get to see the aftermath of the colonization; it sure feels creepy and nefarious, but Cameron’s narration suggests the Thronglets might think of this as a way of ensuring peace.

So yeah, another episode with its fun and eerie moments that doesn’t totally stick the landing, and that feels more like a remix of previous episodes than something truly new. This series has always been interested in AI, but is that becoming all Brooker cares about?

• Cam goes into the office and starts cranking out copy for Gordon while mega-high, but it’s Thronglet gibberish. What does he even think he’s doing here if not writing a review?

• “Intelligence” in this context is so abstract, and I wish we could’ve somehow gotten a sense of what types of ideas the Throng is able to convey. I know that would defeat the purpose — the ideas are too complex for our human minds — but it leaves Cam’s emotional connection to the creatures kind of difficult to understand, even with the context of his loneliness.