The Antidote to “Black Mirror” Virtual Reality

oth of ’s virtual-reality episodes, “USS Callister” this season and “Playtest” in last one’s, presume VR users will be alone, the point of “Playtest”—in which an adventure-seeker gets paid to try out a scary new VR game—was to savor the thrills of the horror genre while holding “a mirror up to now and allow us to stop and think and address, but in an entertaining way.” This can leave many viewers thinking, when the tech exacts some gruesome cost, as it did in “Playtest”—apparently frying the gamer’s brain—“That’s what happens when you take it too far.”