Out of all the episodes in the excellent seventh season of Black Mirror, it's Plaything that sticks out to me and I suspect to anyone else who played video games in the 1990s. It's the story of socially awkward freelance games journalist, Cameron Walker, who steals the code to a new virtual pet sim named Thronglets from the developer he's meant to be interviewing. When he gets the game home, he realises the cute, intelligent little critters he's caring for on the screen have a darker ambition than simply to perform for his amusement – cue nightmarish exploration of AI and our complicity in its rise. The episode is interesting to me because … well, I was a socially awkward games journalist in the mid-1990s. But more importantly, so was Charlie Brooker.

The latest season of Black Mirror feels almost therapeutic as we peer over the cliff of civilizational collapse. Everything is awful, but at least we don't have to worry about renting out access to our brains from skeevy startups, or dealing with the consequences of a PC game's super-intelligent AI. While Black Mirror felt like a horrifying harbinger of an over-teched future when it debuted in 2011, now it's practically an escape from the fresh hell of real world headlines. That's not to say that the show has lost any of the acerbic bite from creator Charlie Brooker. But now Brooker and his writers -- Ms. Marvel showrunner Bisha K. Ali, William Bridges, Ella Road and Bekka Bowling -- more deftly wield their talent for cultural analysis. Not all of the new episodes revolve around nefarious new tech, sometimes the tools themselves are genuinely helpful -- it's humans who are often the real problem.