Spoilers Ahoy!
Black Mirror is more a collection of short stories than it is a cohesive series, so I’ll restructure my series review accordingly by providing bite-size reviews of each episode.
Episode 1: USS Callister
USS Callister was a strong start to season 4 and is one of my favourites episode of this season. While I was initially put off by the idea of a parody Star Trek universe being the setting of this episode, I was quickly sold on the idea of the episode as I watched it unfold. It’s like a horrifying version of those passing thoughts you had as a child: What do my videogame characters do when I turn the system off? In the world of Black Mirror, they breathe a sigh of relief, because it means megalomaniac game developer Robert Daly is no longer around to exact his power fantasies on his unwilling clone subjects.
I found the character of Daly to be interesting. As we’re first introduced to him as a harmless game dev who is clearly unpopular in his workplace due to his aloof nature, I found him to be a figure worth sympathising with. Clearly he was lonely, and had nobody to share his passions with. But Black Mirror is Black Mirror, and as events wore on I became increasingly disgusted with his behaviour. I felt they could have attempted to have him justify his actions a bit by making some sort of statement about how he doesn’t believe the clones to be real enough to care about, but instead they just went full throttle into his maniacal rule, removing faces and transforming people into pitiful beasts.
This was also one of the only episodes to have a happy ending. Having escaped towards a closing wormhole through which prepatch data from the internet was being received, the protagonists were hoping for nothing more than an end to their torment. Instead, they were catapulted into the real version of Daly’s modified game, where they could interact with people and explore an “endless, procedurally generated universe.” But while this is presented as a happy ending, is it really? It’s certainly a vast improvement over Daly’s nightmarish fantasy land, but I feel like when the protagonists settled into their new lives, they’d still remember that there was no way back to the lives that they were born remembering. Plus, what happens when people stop playing the game? A lonely expanse of empty space and limited NPCs? And what happens when they die as characters? Will they die to the first unsuspecting troll gamer they come across, or be doomed to live an eternity, just as in Daly’s world?
I think I just found a way to make one of Black Mirror’s only happy endings unhappy. Oops.
Episode 2: Arkangel
What if parental controls, but too much? This is one of Black Mirror’s many episodes which warns against the abundance of a particular type of technological power. Arkangel sees overprotective mother Marie signing her and her daughter up as guinea pigs to test-drive a new product which allows the mother to set filters on what the daughter experiences as she grows. And I guess forever after.
This episode didn’t have all that much of an impact on me, and wasn’t all that entertaining until daughter Sara grew old enough to desire independence and object to the technology in her head. As she’s a growing teen in a mother-daughter drama, she’s quite stereo-typically ambivalent to the dangers of drugs and doesn’t hesitate to have sex with her boyfriend in the back of his van. Perhaps these characteristics are necessary in order for the story in Arkangel to gain footing, but Sara’s character isn’t fleshed out enough to justify her sudden gung-ho attitude, and when the episode builds to a climax, this disparage in character only grows worse. Marie has been monitoring her daughter and spikes her with abortion pills, causing Sara to confront Marie and attack her with the Arkangel tablet. Plausible so far. However, Sara continues to hit Marie over and over until she is seemingly near-death, before leaving her, skipping town and never looking back. Seeing as their relationship before all of this was a positive one, this seems perhaps just out of reach for Sara’s character and pulled me out of the story.
That being said, the impact of the Arkangel experiment and the relationship between overprotective mother and growing daughter made for an interesting episode all the same, and it’s certainly not the worst episode of the show.
Episode 3: Crocodile
The premise of this episode isn’t too dissimilar to the last. A technology exists allowing the subjective visualisation of memories from those who plug into it. This allows for better eyewitness reports, and better claims on insurance. However, this technology is not at the forefront of the episode, but more of a plot device which enables antagonist Mia Nolan to descend down a dark path of murdering eyewitness after eyewitness in an attempt to cover up the previous murders.
Much like in Arkangel, the main problem I have here is that the leading character doesn’t quite have the motivation to commit the acts that she does. Mia’s first murder is due her ex-boyfriend announcing his intention to confess his crime of manslaughter – of which Mia was a witness and subsequent accomplice to in the cover-up – to the still-hopeful wife of the man he killed. Mia claims that this will come back to her and ruin her and her family’s life, but after the ex-boyfriend insists, she attacks and kills him in a fit of hysteria. Unfortunately, the surprisingly prophetic automated pizza-delivery van runs someone over moments later, and Mia is the only witness. So hey, she has to kill Shazia the insurance lady too, when she’s unable to keep the murder out of her mind during the memory-visualisation session. And her husband’s expecting her back from Mia’s place, so better go over to his house and smack him around with a hammer, too. Oops, there’s a crying child. This one won’t be easy. Mia’s a mother herself. But of course, she can’t let all of this murdering get in the way of her and her family’s lives, so it’s time for some Saturday night infanticide.
So, objectively speaking, this is a bad episode, right? Mia the Crocodile makes no sense. And yet, I had a great time watching her fall from grace. Andrea Riseborough acted her perfectly, especially during the moments that Mia realises she has to make another kill. The apology before she killed Shazia, the reluctance as she creeps towards Shazia’s bathing husband with a hammer… and that moment when she hears the child crying. The character’s motivations may have been built on paper, but her motions were expertly portrayed, and the saving grace of this episode. I’d happily watch it again.
Episode 4: Hang the DJ
This one’s my favourite!
What if Tinder was the foundation for an entire society? You have a device which pairs you with a person who matches your preferences. Each time, the device makes adjustments so that the next match may be an improvement, until you’re finally matched with “The One”. Your relationship has a pre-established time limit, and based on this the participants can build whatever kind of relationship they want. 12 hours? One night stand. 8 months? Might as well get to know each other a bit better.
The narrative, then, follows the story of two characters who fall in love outside the system, because this is Black Mirror and the system isn’t going to be as perfect as it claims to be. And the characters – Amy and Frank – are very likeable. They find the system a little absurd. They don’t immediately fall head over heels for each other, but instead find each other hilarious and genuinely appear to enjoy the other’s company. You root for them.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen it already, so I’m going to skip to the end when it’s revealed that they’re all just AI, simulated thousands of times over to see how many times a rebellion is staged against the system, and then calculating the success percentage to send to the user’s app. We see Amy and Frank looking at their phones in surprise as they meet each other in the real world, likely unaware the thousands and thousands of AI have just lived for years in this world to calculate this number for them. And while it’s one of the only other happy endings in the show, it does still present us with the usual ethical horrors that Black Mirror is so adept at creating, albeit without the typical misery that usually accompanies it. They could have fleshed out the implications of running these simulations and hinted at the horrors of sentient AI living without independent potential, but admittedly this would likely derail the latter parts of the episode.
Episode 5: Metalhead
What if Amazon delivery robots, but too much? (Okay, I’ll stop.)
Metalhead is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a parcel delivering company such as Amazon have developed an automated delivery service using robot dogs, similar to Spot here. From what I can gather, these dogs don’t have true artificial intelligence but are instead simply following their programming… programming which has gone very, very wrong. And I like this approach. They’re characterised in their oddly goofy movements, uncanny in their gait and expressionless head gestures. It makes them sort of terrifying.
If you couldn’t already tell. I like this episode, even though it’s received a lot of criticism. “It’s ridiculous,” people exclaim. “It’s too on-the-nose. How am I supposed to be afraid of a robot dog?” And the answer is simple: Because it can kill you, and it doesn’t care why. But I actually like this episode for a different reason, and that’s that it takes the piss out of itself. Which I hope is intentional, or I’m about to look daft.
Black Mirror is a show about the worst things that our future could hold if we move in the wrong direction, and due to this, using technology to do wrong is a prominent theme. Usually it’s something horrifyingly plausible, like a modification we make to our bodies that ends up ruining our lives because of how we use it. But in evil robot delivery dogs, we have a threat that is very physical, very uncontrollable, and very… dumb. Very, very dumb.
The episode is shot in black and white, and I think that’s to remind us of some of the earliest horrors on screen. I’m not a big movie guy but I’ve seen a couple of old horrors, and while I can laugh at the retrospectively over-dramatic shower curtain scene in Psycho, there were people physically fainting in the movie theatre at the time. Metalhead, then, may just be a take on Black Mirror as a series, and how in the future when a lot of this technology does exist, our fear of it in the form of Black Mirror will seem as ludicrous as being afraid of a killer robot-dog drilling its knife-arm into the wall.
I found it fun, anyway.
Episode 6: Black Museum
A couple of seasons ago, we had White Christmas, an episode which focused on three shorter stories, with the third being the over-arcing story the ties them all together. Black Museum follows the same format, and is similar in a lot of other respects. Not only this, but it ties together a lot of Black Mirror episodes in the form of technology and the artefacts on display, which brings up a lot of continuity issues and questions that I think they might regret introducing.
I enjoyed the episode and the shorter stories found within it, but during it I found myself wondering. Is this less horrifying than some of the previous episodes? Or am I suffering from horror fatigue? The idea of someone being stuck in a horrible, inescapable situation has been a theme for a lot of episodes by this point, and I suppose I’m getting used to it. Or maybe I’d simply watched all the episodes in season 4 too close together and this was simply a temporary fatigue. Either way, I don’t have much to say about this episode other than it was enjoyable, if slightly predictable towards the end. I was getting White Bear vibes when it was unveiled that the museum’s curator was torturing the consciousness of an alleged murderer to make money off of outraged Daily Mail readers, but then the protagonist reverses the situation and creates a cookie of the curator living in eternal agony, seemingly undermining White Bear’s entire message in the first place.
Either way, it was a decent episode. Monkey loved it.
Perpetually Perturbed 