Black Mirror Season 4

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

Black Mirrior Season 3

Hurray! Charlie Brooker's 10 minutes in the future sci-fi anthology-ma-jig is back! With twice as many episodes! On Netflix!

I am going to review them in order. I'm also now going to give a score out of 10 rather than 5, for “nuance” May contain spoilers.

Nosedive

Lovely Bryce Dallas Howard is obsessed with keeping up her score out of 5 in a world where everyone is rated. People beg for good reviews because the lower your score the worse a person everyone thinks you are.

I imagine it was based on almighty shit-for-brains “Yelp for people” app Peeple, but for me the giant elephant in the room is the “Meow Meow Beanz” episode of Community which mines the same concept but with more laughs, While “Nosedive” is probably a more realistic interpretation about how this bullshit would work, Community was more inventive and had a ton more fun with it.

“Nosedive” also deals in cringey, squirmy social embarrassment, something I genuinely struggle to watch these days (in comedy or drama). It ends on a hope spot but getting there was gruelling in a non-entertaining way – 6/10

Playtest

Massive bellend tourist who refuses to talk to his mum loses all his money and takes a job playtesting a new VR gaming thingy. Things predictably go massively shit shaped in horror movie style.

If you've watched as many horror movies as me it was as scary as it was surprising, which is to say not remotely. The lead was too annoying for me to really care about what was happening and I found the implied link between dementia and the unreality of the game mildly distasteful. At least a triple fake out there though which was impressive – 4/10

Shut Up and Dance

People who have done bad things are bullied into other bad things by the world's most patient internet arseholes (seriously, how many people must they have been watching and for how long to catch the handful of people we see in the episode?) I guess that there was some point to be made online vigilantism but it's hidden behind the suffocating nastiness and cheap shocks

Vaguely nightmarish in the way it escalated and the feeling of powerlessness (and the fact that it could basically be done now), but felt a bit Brooker by numbers. I've seen people reacting like it's the most horrifying then they've ever seen but I was mostly bored. - 4/10

San Junipero

The best time travelling VR romance story of the year! Genuinely heartfelt and heartwarming and showing that Black Mirror can do upbeat and nice, San Junipero is one of its best episodes to date. The way the concept is never hidden as such but still revealed gradually is masterfully done, the evolving relationship between Yorkie and Kelly is beautifully written and acted and the 80's soundtrack is on point.

Technology is never exactly the enemy in BR, it just allows us to bring out our worst instincts (JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE YEAH), but here everyone is nice to each other and everything works out! Even though people die they get to spend eternity in digital heaven reliving the youth they may never have had. Plus the relationship is a same-sex one and this is not much of a plot point, a depressing rare occurrence. 9/10

Men Against Fire

Soldiers in some unnamed future warzone (in Eastern Europe perhaps) are fighting horrible genetic mutants. They use massive guns as well as weird augmented reality implants which give then tactical info as well as reward them with explicit sex dreams when they kill the enemy.

Expect (dramatic sting) the mutants aren't the arse-ugly monsters the implants are showing them, which our protagonist realises when one of them zaps him with a...thing. Yep, turns out that the military and the government are using tech to dehumanise the enemy. Guess the point is that the shitbags in charge always try dehumanise the enemy (just look at the language that the media use about refugees right now).

Anyhow, well shot and acted, but again hugely obvious in where it was going 6/10.

Hated By The Nation

Your common-or-garden police procedural spiced up by Twitter hate mobs and robot bees. And Kelly McDonald, who is always brilliant (I want a series just based around her character tbh).

Another heavy handed moral but delivered some panache, despite thinking that a rapper would ever call themselves “Tusk”. The reveal that the celebrity hate figures weren't the real target was neat-o, but the criminal mastermind behind it all had pretty vague and undefined motivations. Given that they took half an hour longer (and was needed) to roll this one out that seems weird – 6/10

I now have no friends because they all love this series. Ah well.

All of your happy belongs to Negan

Spoilers for the latest Walking Dead and the last but one Ash Vs Evil Dead follow. I'm only comparing them because I watched them both last night.

God that was bleak. Even by the increasingly grim standards of The Walking Dead. The show runners now seem to be on a mission to suck all of the joy out of their vast army of viewers, leaving shambling, desiccated husks who can only scowl and buy merchandise.

And the violence. Hoo boy the violence! People beaten to a bloody pulp with a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat! Some severe hatchet work! A young boy nearly getting his arm cut off by his dad! And you just thought Negan was going to talk everyone to death the way he was incessantly prattling on for two hours (which is quite a feat during 45 minutes of television).

But no. First Red Haired Army Man (I rarely remember the names of TWD characters, there's little point and they're basically cardboard cut outs) went out telling Negan to “suck his nuts”, which was bad ass in a juvenile sort of way. It took bloody long enough to get to this point, the show holding off from resolving the cliffhanger as long as possible. Red getting it elicited little more than a roll of the eyes, given that he'd done nothing but mope around for at least half a season by now.

But then out of nowhere Glen gets it as well. I have to admit, I wasn't expecting it and this feels like a death that means a tiny bit something to the show going forward. For one, he's one of the handful of characters whose name I remember, meaning that he at least had a character. For seconds, how much more shit are they going to heap on poor Maggie (hey, that's two!)?

Thing is though, it doesn't mean enough, not any more. Even the characters with names only seem significant now because they've stuck around for a while. I'm not expecting a ton of thematic depth or sweeping character arcs from TWD, but when the death of someone who's been around since the begin only elicits a second a shock then a bit of a shrug, something has gone a bit awry.

TWD has fallen into a massive rut and has gone back to it's usual two wells for drama: a “shock” character death and a new villain. But shock character deaths are no longer remotely shocking on this show, like at all. If Rick (3!) or Carl (4!) had died then maybe that would've been something, but mostly it's just meh-time now.

As for Negan, he's probably the most annoying in an expanding list of irritating TWD villians. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is clearly having a blast, but is ill served by a script which mistakes endless yammering for threatening.

The combination of wearying, cynical, anyone can die nihilism and nerve grating new big bad means that TWD is no longer anything remotely approaching fun to watch for me. I think I'm going to part ways with it here and maybe just read other people's hate-watch commentary. Go me!

By contrast, Ash vs Evil Dead is ridiculously fun to watch. It exists on a plane of berserk hyper-kinetic ultraviolence; a profane, blood spattered cartoon which only slows down for a few seconds before the next slapstick horror routine. It also has a kick ass soundtrack. While the latest episode I saw didn't match the last week's jaw-dropping morgue shenanigans (both one of the funniest and most disgusting things I've ever seen on television), it was still a riotous half hour.

AvED's characters are necessarily broadly drawn, but they still have more depth than TWDs moping identikit cast. Ash's dad has only been in 3 episodes (up to now, this show being what it is), but his death at the end of the episode felt more meaningful than whole cemetery full from the other show.

It even outdoes the other show in terms of villains. As funny and fun as AvED is, I've had a nightmare about the Deadites every single night I've watched an episode. They're fucking awful things, indiscriminately possessing, slaughtering, maiming and torturing their way through whole swathes of complete innocents, cackling gleefully all the while. The utter bastards even laugh while getting carved up or boomsticked to death.

I'm not going to make a case for AvED being horror's Breaking Bad or anything. It is still basically a live action cartoon, one where our hero gets pulled through a corpse's arsehole or a jock get his cock bitten off. Golden Age of TV it ain't. But it is one of the most ridiculously joyful things on tv at the moment, and I'll take that over the moping dead right now.