If you thought Black Mirror‘s interactive, choose-your-own-adventure Bandersnatch movie had too many potential endings to count, brace yourself! Season 7 of the Netflix sci-fi series just added another one to the mix, seven years later.

Creator-writer Charlie Brooker tells Entertainment Weekly that new episode “Plaything” — which takes place after the events of Bandersnatch, and sees the return of Will Poulter‘s Tuckersoft game designer character, Colin Ritman — is “now canon” without canceling out the 2018 movie’s multiple endings.

“We set up in another episode this season that there’s parallel realities, and that’s also set up in Bandersnatch,” Ritman says of the new episode, which follows an old man, former video game journalist Cameron (Peter Capaldi), who’s arrested on suspicion of murder and subsequently tells the authorities a chilling tale of a bond he formed with a digital “Throng” of video game creatures designed by Ritman.

Lewis Gribben as younger Cameron in ‘Black Mirror’ season 7 episode ‘Plaything.’. Netflix

Cameron’s story reaches back into his past, when a younger version of himself (Lewis Gribben) was sent on an assignment to retrieve and review one of Ritman’s new games, Thronglets, which tasks the player with raising a group of living, artificially intelligent (and irresistibly cute) critters.

Cameron grows increasingly obsessed with raising the Throng and understanding their language — to follow instructions to help them complete an unknown mission — thanks to several trips on a hallucinogenic drug. When Cameron leaves home one day, a friend and local drug dealer crashes at the writer’s apartment, logs on to the game in his absence, and gleefully murders many of the Thronglets.

Enraged upon returning home, Cameron kills his pal, and spends the rest of his days gathering updated gaming systems to enhance the Throng’s strength, building toward the episode’s final moments that see the Throng gain enough processing capability to unleash a global transmission from every device on the planet.

Unbeknownst to the authorities interviewing him, Cameron sketched a QR code onto a piece of paper during the interrogation, and holds it up toward a security camera in the corner of the room, activating the Throng’s transmission, which knocks out the world’s population — except for Cameron, whose outstretched hand lingers as the final shot of the episode.

Given that “Plaything” is set 10 years after Bandersnatch, this means (at least in this version of reality) that Ritman is obviously alive (his death is depicted in a pair of options from the 2018 film) and that game developer Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) survived the events of the film that previously saw him attempting to adapt a fantasy game book into a playable title in 1984.

Colin’s boss Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhry) also returns in “Plaything” as the head of the Tuckersoft office, but Brooker tells EW “the story idea was floating around for a little while” and that he initially “wasn’t thinking of it as a Bandersnatch sequel” when he began writing. He simply wanted to tell a story about ’90s games, given that he once worked as a video game journalist during that era.

Asim Chaudhry as Mohan Thakur, Will Poulter as Colin Ritman, and Fionn Whitehead as Stefan in 2018’s ‘Bandersnatch’. Stuart Hendry/Netflix

“I knew I wanted Cameron to meet this programmer, but [I thought], wait a minute, I created this character, Colin Ritman, played by Will Poulter in Bandersnatch. I loved that character, and Mohan Thakur, Asim Chaudhry, who played his boss in the original Bandersnatch, I’m going to write the best version of that,” Brooker observes.

“I prayed and hoped we can get Will and Asim back to reprise their roles,” he notes. “It came about that way.”

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So, the multiple endings of Bandersnatch are just as legitimate as the one that led to “Plaything.” Adds Brooker: “What that says, in terms of the Black Mirror multiverse or whatever you want to call it, I’ll leave up to the viewer, because I think all endings of Bandersnatch are as valid as the next.”

Lewis Gribben as younger Cameron and Asim Chaudhry as Mohan in ‘Black Mirror’ season 7 episode ‘Plaything.’. Netflix 

As for what exactly the Throng’s message does to all of humanity? “It’s somewhat ambiguous,” Brooker teases, and won’t confirm whether the world’s populace is alive or dead at the end of “Plaything.”

“In the original script, it’s somewhat different than you see. You see people waking up and opening their eyes. They’re smiling. We made it clear that [the Throng] had merged with people,” Brooker recalls of early drafts. “Cameron says that this is not great for all of us. I was channeling the thought of IOS upgrades for humans.”

Brooker says the plot shift was inspired by his kids. “Sometimes you’d go to bed and when you woke up in the morning, it felt like your kid had upgraded an OS update and could do more things,” he says. “I was thinking about that. If you listen carefully to how Cameron describes what the process is, that’s what’s happening there.”

Black Mirror season 7 is now streaming on Netflix.