Like many anthology shows — Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story and Mike White’s The White Lotus come to mind — Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror is starting to become less standalone and more interconnected in nature. Serving as a pseudo-sequel to the interactive film Bandersnatch, season 7’s Plaything shows a lot of promise, but its short runtime holds it back from ever delivering on its potential.

Black Mirror: Plaything Review

Plaything follows a former journalist over two periods: a near future in which he is being interrogated as a murder suspect, and the 1990s when he is experimenting with a mysterious, unreleased video game. This is one of the more twist-centric episodes this season, with its success riding or dying based on the audience’s reception to a reveal that happens about two-thirds through, and that moment, unfortunately, does not tie the episode together quite as well as its creators clearly hoped.