A Fan-Favorite Black Mirror Episode Features Two YouTube Gaming Cameos

There's a lot to love about "USS Callister: Into Infinity," the first official sequel episode in the anthology show "Black Mirror." The episode, which largely takes place inside a virtual-reality video game, features main characters who are digital clones trapped inside it. When they get killed in the game, they die for real. Contributing to this problem is that "Infinity" is an online, multiplayer game, which means the gang is constantly coming across real-life players who don't understand that the stakes are real for them. 

For most viewers, the "real" players feel like a fun satire of the real-life gaming community. Most of the gamers are young, kind of rude, and still live with their parents. (Not that there's anything wrong with that last part, although we do wish Jonathan would be nicer to his mother.) But for viewers who also watch gaming streamers in their spare time, two of those gamers in the show made for a fun surprise. During the final act, when the crew is being attacked by a swarm of angry gamers, two of them are played by popular real-life streamers. 

One of them is Daniel Middleton, AKA DanTDM, best known for his commentary on games like "Minecraft" and "Roblox." The other is Thomas Simons, AKA TommyInnit, also well-known for his "Minecraft" streams. Both are British streamers, so it makes sense that the mostly-British "Black Mirror" would get them on board over some of the other popular streamers out there. 

What's especially fun about their cameos is that the episode shows their characters' gamertags on the bottom of the screen, making it clear that TommyInnit and DanTDM aren't just playing fictional characters; they're playing themselves. Both streamers (and presumably all their followers) canonically exist within the "Black Mirror" universe, or at the very least the "USS Callister" universe.

TommyInnit posted a screenshot of his cameo on X (formerly known as Twitter), to the excited surprise of his many fans, writing, "I am now canonically in the 'Black Mirror' universe."

He also posted a video of himself watching the video on TikTok, with the caption "Didn't get 'The Minecraft Movie' but did canonically die in 'Black Mirror.'" You could see him celebrating when his character appeared, and then laughing as his character's spaceship exploded. (TommyInnit gets about half a second in the episode to show off his acting chops during his "death" scene, and he makes the most of it.)

DanTDM also posted about the episode on his social media pages, writing, "New side quest complete ✅😂 so pleased to be part of the new series of 'Black Mirror' with @tommyinnit 🙌🏻 One of my favourite Netflix series ever and now I get to be in a spaceship in it." His Instagram post showed a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes photos of him, including one taken alongside TommyInnit. 

All the other gamer characters in the episode were played by actual actors, but these two real gamer cameos went a long way in clarifying the episode's point-of-view. They helped make clear that the episode was not interested in mocking gamers, despite how terrible game-creator Robert Daly comes across. As showrunner Charlie Brooker explained in a recent interview, "The players in this are unaware of the stakes for the real characters. ... I think they'd be absolutely mortified if they thought they were absolutely actually injuring or killing real people. Certainly it's not the intention to say that gaming is violent or all of that sort of crap that tends to get pushed around in the media." Brooker added, "I trust people who play games a lot more than people who watch sports."