The following assumes that you have
watched every episode of new Black Mirror, so contains spoilers.
USS
Callister
Starting off with probably the biggest
budget and the wobbliest script, USS Callister
begins as a Star Trek parody, morphs into a cringey workplace comedy,
becomes a hellish digital nightmare and finally a take down of angry
nerd-bro male entitlement.
It's
the latter two where the episode does it's best work. Robert Daly
(Jesse Plemons, great as
always) is using the DNA of
co-workers who have wronged him
(e.g. by not fancying him)
and created digital copies of them in the VR MMO game he created. As
always in Black Mirror,
existence for digital copies is hugely unpleasant, with the avatars
completely at Daley's whim. He physically and psychologically
tortures them for disobedience or the lolz. In a nice nerdy touch,
none of the copies have genitals and Daly only every chastely kisses
the female clones, real intimacy being beyond his comprehension.
USS Callister
is too long, the Star Trek
style heroics at the end as the avatars rebel is undercooked and the
happy ending totally tacked on and unearned. The themes about angry
male nerds resonate however and the plight of the copies is genuinely
unsettling for a while – 7
Arkangel
A
common criticism of Black Mirror is
that it only ever says “Computers are bad lol”. However, what
every episode actually says is that humans are (usually) bad and
technology can help push their worst instincts to horrible if logical
extremes.
Arkangel
is season 4's best example of this. A chip allows a mother to see
what her daughter sees and even filter the
things which stress her out (like the nasty neighbourhood dog). It's
already horribly intrusive when the daughter is a toddler, but it
becomes worse as she ages. Though the mother claims to have thrown
the monitor out, she pulls it out of the attic when the teenager
daughter lies about where she is. Unfortunately she sees her having
sex and doing her one and only line of coke with her dealer
boyfriend. Things inevitably spiral downwards.
Arkangel is
full of lovely storytelling details (the daughter nearly not
surviving her birth triggering the overprotectiveness of the mother,
the fact that the Arkangel system is banned in Europe, the daughter
making friends with the dog as she comes out of her shell), along
with nice direction by Jodie Foster. A lot of people focus of the
twists in Black Mirror,
but for many episodes (including this one) are more about the themes
they develop. The plot may be a little flabby, but it totally
succeeds in showing how even parental love can turn toxic when
technology allows it to be pushed to awful extremes – 7
Crocodile
The
idea that your memories can not only be seen but used as evidence is
an effectively nightmarish one (in that I literally had a nightmare
about it after watching this episode), but it's not used to great
effect here. The spiral of
violence as Mia (Andrea Riseborough, predictably awesome) rushes to
cover her tracks is as bleak and grim as Black Mirror ever
gets, but much of the episode feels like treading water. The
investigation into an insurance claim by Shazia
(an endearing performance by Kiran Sonia Sawar) using the memory
scanning device seems to drag on forever, and while it is necessary
to show how she moves closer to Mia and has the odd nice touch it
doesn't make for thrilling viewing.
So
Mia has to kill Shazia
so she doesn't report the murder of the former's ex-boyfriend seen in
her memories, then Shazia's
likeable, dopey husband because he knew where she was going, then
their baby son so his memories can't be scanned. To twist the knife
further the latter is blind, but in the shittiest plot twist in Black
Mirror history, his pet guinea
pig saw everything and can have his memories scanned! Yeah...
There
are some nice performances, it's filmed in Iceland (for some
undisclosed reason, no-one
actually seems to be Icelandic)
which obviously looks absolutely gorgeous, but this is a weak episode
- 5
Hang
The DJ
Following two people as they embark on
a series on relationships dictated by The System, Hang The DJ
has an intriguing premise which just about follows through on in a
satisfying way. The hints of a more dystopian undertow are nicely
done and the twist is up there with the series' best.
The
idea that the characters we are following are simply simulations and
part of a dating app is a good one, though it does raise a few
troubling questions based on the rest of the series. What makes the
fate of these clones any different from the ones in USS
Callister or White
Christmas? I guess that in this
case the simulations are (mostly) enjoying themselves (they can
actually have sex at least). But Frank (Joe Cole) ends up a year long
relationship with someone who despises him, while Amy (Georgina
Campbell) starts to question whether the system is working.
The
episode ends with real life Amy and Frank meeting in a bar, with
their dating apps showing they are a 99.8% match for each other. This
after 1000 simulations were run are they rebelled 998 times. Hang
The DJ wants to be this season's
San Junipero
with it's ostensibly happy ending, but it's not quite up there with
that series high point. It's well acted with some nice character work
in the script, but seems a bit hollow. - 7
Metalhead
A
woman is chased across an apocalyptic landscape by a murderous robot
dog. That's it, the sum of the plot for this episode. There's no
moral about technology pushing human behaviour to it's worse
excesses, no bleak satire, no twist at the end. Yet it still manages
to be the best episode of the season.
The
reasons it works so well are many. There's the spare, taut script
which gives nothing away about why society collapsed and focusses
instead on the desperate fight for survival. There's the tense
direction (from 30 Days of Night
helmer David Slade) and beautiful monochrome photography. The “dog”
is both terrifying and endearing, like a cuter version of Yul Brynner
in Westworld. Best of
all there's the central performance from Maxine Peake, doing a lot
with very little.
Much
as Hang The DJ wants
to be this season's San Junipero,
I think that honour actually belongs to Metalhead.
This both because it successfully upends the normal Black
Mirror conventions and
is easily the best episode of
it's year. - 9
Black
Museum
Being
three linked stories which inevitably conjoin by the end, the
previous episode this is most reminiscent of is
the “festive” special
White Christmas. Unlike
said episode this one isn't particularly great.
The
nightmare situations seems to be Black Mirror by
numbers, the characters all cyphers. This may be intentional, given
that they're being told by heartless antagonist Rolo, but it doesn't
make for interesting viewing. The ideas aren't bad per se,
and Carrie's predicament in the middle story is particularly
unpleasant, but we've seen these “digital copies being put through
hell” stories a few times now. Could it be that Black
Mirror is running out of ideas?
Black Museum
does actually feel like a series finale. There are references to
every other episode throughout (which annoyed me quite a bit if I'm
being honest). It also feels like the series becoming a parody of
itself (on purpose rather than accidentally like with Shut
Up and Dance last year). Could
Rolo really be Charlie Brooker, dishing out cruel punishments to
those who use cutting edge technology? Are we the tourists who come
to electrocute the digital copy of a condemned prisoner over and over
again?
I'm
not sure if this episode is deep enough to warrant the above
pretentious waffling. It's a below average episode of TV either way,
the lowest point of another hit and miss season – 5
