Talk:Playtest (Black Mirror)

"All events subsequent"
"Cooper wakes up again, and it is then revealed that he has been in the white room all along, and that all events subsequent to the initial test are part of the "playtest", including him waking up in Shou's office."

Actually, the phone call occurred subsequent to the initialization  headband/'mushroom'-installation in the white room, but before the wack-a-mole (gopher, in this game) event. It is the phone call which disrupted the wireless signal just as the initialization was completed. So the initial (whack-a-mole) test itself was part of the botched game-experience. In other words, the woman herself never saw him playing w-a-m, her presence (during that sequence as she 'observes' his slapping at the to-her-invisible VR gopher) was itself part of his mangled hallucination. When the phone rang as the initialization completed, he finished the last 0.04 seconds of his conscious—but lived in a growing nightmare— life... and then he expired.

(1/25 of a second, incidentally, is the classical time-frame of the blink of an eye. I don't know if that was an intended allusion.)

This might raise questions of either breaching conventions for dream/hallucinations (or else whether there might be a plot hole) with respect to the subject-room monitoring we see. It is strictly canonical for irreal sequences to maintain objects substantially within the the person's field of view, though not (necessarily, and indeed not normally) from his/her point-of-view. But this goes beyond the purposes of talk-page discussion. I will see myself out. JohndanR (talk) 05:24, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks : I've reworded the description in this edit, but feel free to edit the page yourself if you think this still isn't accurate. We can't mention the eye blinking time of 0.04 seconds, or the rest of your analysis, unless a reliable source (like a professional review) discusses this, per the verifiability policy. — Bilorv(c)(talk) 01:46, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

The Mezzotint
The changes to the painting are clearly a reference to the M. R. James story The Mezzotint. Has Brooker mentioned this anywhere? Nick Cooper (talk) 21:03, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * From memory not in Inside Black Mirror and not anywhere else. A critic mentions it in passing but without explaining it (which we'd need for anyone not familiar with the story). — Bilorv ( talk ) 21:40, 29 December 2023 (UTC)