Sorry if this has been mentioned already but this is a long thread. Just finished the season and I thought every episode was really fun. Love me some Black Mirror. I think my favorite was Black Museum. Is it the first time
a Black MIrror episode has referenced other episodes? I don't remember that happening before. I picked up on three references --- the lollipop from the USS Callister, a reference to old people going to the cloud from San Junipero, and the guy reading a 15m Merits graphic novel. Were there any other references?
To see the former's commentary on violence inflicted on colored bodies to be paired with the latter, which features an entire brown family murdered one by one for a totally unearned narrative conceit is uhh...something I didn't expect.
am i the only one who didnt know black mirror was called black mirror because when you look at your phone or computer screen after it's turned off you see your reflection on the black screen...it's a black mirror..
the existence of black mirror is itself a black mirror episode. a show about the dangers of technology is released on a technology that is designed to force you to keep watching it
Oh no, this guy was as evil as anyone depicted as such in Black Mirror.
He committed straight up child murder because he couldn't get an AI version of a person to do what he wanted.
That's straight up evil. Again, it's hard to feel sympathy for someone who cannot command the respect of others so tortures it out of them.
If Daly had an ounce of self reflection he would have became "a better person" a long time before. Instead he used his modded game to fulfil his power fantasy while in real life losing control of the very thing that he created.
It's why power fantasy and escapism without any bounds are actually dangerous. If your life has problems that you address via escapism alone, you run the risk of having to make the sort of decisions like he made IRT Tommy just to get your own way in something you have control over, yet in reality the issue goes unresolved.
The parallel and warning shot about the alt right is clear. A denigrated and marginalized group whose venting used to go unnoticed is now causing impacts in political and social ways and it isn't positive.
The stereotype of basement dwellers used to be of people who couldn't deal with society but were harmless because they took it out in games and ways that "couldn't hurt".
The far right has used that resentment to make a class of people who have that resentment turned against women and minorities and people like Daly are the target.
I wouldn't be shocked is Palmer Luckey was indeed the inspiring figure for Daly as his personality matches the persona Luckey has made for himself after Oculus went big. I don't think it's a coincidence with the VR theme and the "brilliant but misunderstood" creator tropes on show here.
Thought overall it was the weakest season yet. I only really enjoyed one of the episodes. A couple others were decent. The other three were pretty awful with Crocodile being maybe the worst one of the series.
I'm enjoying them just fine so far. looking forward to the 'better' ones.
edit: after going back and reading some of the earlier thread, I'm at a loss. people thought croc was boring and slow? for a slow paced episode it went by really fast to me.
Does Daly know that these people are complete clones with all their consciousness attached? If he just thinks they are NPCs in a game modeled after real people, are his actions any worse than any kid going around blowing up civilians in a GTA game? I must've missed the show having an answer to this.
It was a really sweet episode and definitely a step up over Crocodile and Arkangel, but not nearly as good as U.S.S. Callister. The ending was a bit silly though, they could have gotten away with it being dystopic in the same sense 15 Million Merits was.
Only seen 4 episodes and seriously, the ending of each one ruins it outside of maybe episode 3, which was just okay TV as a whole (and not at all realistic).
I've been reading a lot of impressions here and it feels like many people are missing too much, so I will try and summarise what I think about the endings particularly:
USS Callister:
I really enjoyed this episode and I like how they played the ending. At least, I saw what would happen to him coming, just didn't know how it was going to happen. I thought that he would have ended up going through the Rift by accident and having the same fate but I'm glad that didn't happen.
However, the closing scene did not at all address how the real woman is definitely fucked. That while the death was otherwise accidental, the real dark twist is that AI woman essentially caused real woman to be responsible for his murder. At least officially.
The police will find him after 10 days then the fact that she was there will be established. Even if not, she will know she had something to do with it and bear the guilt. But it would be very unlikely that they don't have the technology to figure out that she broke and entered and possibly find out that her blackmail (with the images) came from him. It's not at all hard to imagine the many ways she is in trouble.
Whether or not he deserves it, is a philosophical question. Would he have done this in real life with no consequences? Did he view the AI as just being AI, therefore it's ethical as an outlet/personal therapy? I can't say I imagined doing anything he got up to, but even the average child would imagine other kids who wronged them to miss out on dinner or something, or get in trouble. It's the most interesting part of the episode and it's a shame it was all finished off stupid scene about the AI coming across online gamers. It felt detached and was a cheap joke.
--
Arkangel: I really enjoyed the concept of this one but sadly it didn't have a good idea of where to take it. It felt like it was trying to give an overall picture of what overprotective parenting can be, enabled by this technology, but it only ever amounts to the sort of problems you see on typical "teen revolts" stuff.
Was there a message that this girl ended up having a porn vocabulary, smoking weed and coke because of overprotectiveness in her early childhood? The show keeps playing peekaboo with the audience about whether or not the technology could be beneficial or that it was 100% bad. I mean, as a teen, the girl got pregnant at 15. Was that the Arkangel's fault? Was it going to happen regardless because of the mother not talking about these things? Is it because the girl didn't grow up with a father?
It just throws all of the clichés out there about a teen going bad and ends with her "running away". Unless the fact that she gets into a truck is supposed to mean something, it was a great setup with very poor execution. Such a shame.
--
Hang the DJ: did anyone else REALLY love this episode, then hate the ending? Man, I was even thinking right before how it would be bittersweet if they were just simulations, but the fact that the simulations happened 1000 times made what we just saw so insignificant that we are told to it was insignificant. I personally think it would have been better if it was the only simulation. That way, what ended up happening, the insane amount of sex they went through and all else would be the centre of the discussion and not how they got to the 99.98% number. That didn't even get a smile from me, it was corny. The count to 4 thing, if there is significance there other than things not seeming realistic to them, then I missed it.
But if it was just about how things are unrealistic, and it really bothered the girl, it makes the two AI who fell in love less relatable because for some reason they are happy with being a small part of a larger simulation. In USA Callister, we saw how that freaked the fuck out of the woman and made her feel real to us (leading us to empathise with her). By giving the love bird AIs a fake reaction to it, it made the fact that they fell in love pointless.
Another issue I have with that is that the early parts of what they went through was only convincing for the audience to have no suspicions. Maybe there are hints that it is a simulation prior to the 4 stone skims, but regardless, it sucks that all we have left to discuss is how much it might suck for all of the simulations who don't give a shit that they are simulations...
I left not caring about the versions of the couple we spent an hour watching and not caring about the real versions who have no idea what they went through.
We are just told to except that the system truly works and this simulation covered so much, that these real human beings will definitely be together... Forever?
Does Daly know that these people are complete clones with all their consciousness attached? If he just thinks they are NPCs in a game modeled after real people, are his actions any worse than any kid going around blowing up civilians in a GTA game? I must've missed the show having an answer to this.
Yes, he's fully aware. The crew talk about it when Cole first boards the ship, and Daly gets a personal thrill out of torturing copies of his co-workers.
Yes, he's fully aware. The crew talk about it when Cole first boards the ship, and Daly gets a personal thrill out of torturing copies of his co-workers.
He is aware they are NPCs that fully mirror their counterparts behavior, but I don't think he realizes they can do things while he's on pause until the end.
I don't understand everyone's love for USS Callister.
It has the dumbest tech in the entire series. It really asks no questions about society or the world we live in. It's just a sort of heist episode with crazy tech. It was sort of a fun watch I guess.
I don't understand everyone's love for USS Callister.
It has the dumbest tech in the entire series. It really asks no questions about society or the world we live in. It's just a sort of heist episode with crazy tech. It was sort of a fun watch I guess.
It asks plenty, I'm not sure what you were doing but you certainly wasn't paying enough attention if you didn't see the pretty overt social commentary here.
It asks plenty, I'm not sure what you were doing but you certainly wasn't paying enough attention if you didn't see the pretty overt social commentary here.
I've already posted my thoughts on the episode. Feel free to check my history if you're wanting to see and respond rather than literally saying nothing yourself.
am i the only one who didnt know black mirror was called black mirror because when you look at your phone or computer screen after it's turned off you see your reflection on the black screen...it's a black mirror..
The episodes are standalone so it doesn't really matter at all. However the first episode is pretty weak and not what Black Mirror is really about, so if you do watch in order keep that in mind and don't let it put you off.
no one of the participants had a job, or did anything else but physical exercise, for years. I thought that was already a pretty strong hint
the huge wall around the complex, always a dead giveaway that it's all in some person's mind, or a simulation. I just read a Murakami novel recently that used the very same device. At some point they say they don't even know if there's anything outside of the wall, might have been shortly before they climbed the wall, though
and it being a BM episode, a show which used the cookie tech thing three times by now, the last time just a few episode earlier, let me accurately predict the twist
her noticing that skipping stones only ever resulted in 4 skips like it was a limitation of a simulation. Her "rejecting the system" by telling her coach to count to 4 then skipping the unit in the pool seemed to confirm this and reinforce the point.
I don't understand everyone's love for USS Callister.
It has the dumbest tech in the entire series. It really asks no questions about society or the world we live in. It's just a sort of heist episode with crazy tech. It was sort of a fun watch I guess.
I think it's about the dangers that the tech can introduce for people who could become or are mentally unstable. Like such powerful technology could be insanely bad news for anyone who has a mental illness
(i.e. Daly). They use a 'disturbed genius' angle to explore it and also tell a heisty/punchy plot from within the simulation -
but they could have looked at the same idea from a different angle; a person who experiences schizophrenia, a person who experiences psychotic episodes, a person with depression who uses it as a complete escape, etc.
That weird Channel 4 knock-off, the Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams show, did the same thing with a hamfisted story about a guy who doesn't know which of two lives is real or the simulation (and both feature people trying to convince him the other is fake).
The tech is definitely dumb though. All they needed was a throwaway line about how
he can gather people's memories up the present moment. But they never did it, instead they just waffled on about DNA like numbskulls.
The first part of that episode with the doctor's device was also pitched by Pilkington on the podcast, but as an actual invention, the same one as the watch that counts down your life.
Makes me terrified of the future that some people here wouldn't consider
torturing a virtual copy of a human consciousness to be a problem. If something has thoughts, memories, opinions, fears, and believes it's real, then it's fucking real. If these feelings are copied from a human and it has all the same thoughts as a human then it's a human. Being organic or physically human couldn't be less relevant. It's our consciousness that makes us who we are, and suffering of others that makes torture bad, regardless who those others are.
Sorry if this has been mentioned already but this is a long thread. Just finished the season and I thought every episode was really fun. Love me some Black Mirror. I think my favorite was Black Museum. Is it the first time
a Black MIrror episode has referenced other episodes? I don't remember that happening before. I picked up on three references --- the lollipop from the USS Callister, a reference to old people going to the cloud from San Junipero, and the guy reading a 15m Merits graphic novel. Were there any other references?
There are tons of references to other episodes in several episodes. Like, a lot. But they are often very subtle, and some you won't find unless you literally pause and zoom in.
He is aware they are NPCs that fully mirror their counterparts behavior, but I don't think he realizes they can do things while he's on pause until the end.
Interesting, I never considered that and assumed he knew they were conscious when he wasn't around. I really liked the episode and the idea behind it. The part that got me thinking was when Walton finally talked to Daly as a human and apologised for his behaviour in the real world. My questions is: why didn't you try that sooner? All the shit you went through and you never once tried to reason with him in that way? Daly was clearly very affected by that speech.
I don't understand everyone's love for USS Callister.
It has the dumbest tech in the entire series. It really asks no questions about society or the world we live in. It's just a sort of heist episode with crazy tech. It was sort of a fun watch I guess.
Well that's why people love it, because it is fun. It's a thriller set, that quickly turns everything you learn in the beginning on its head.
It does ask some questions, which is the what is the morality and ethics revolving simulations? And it does have something to say which is basically an anti gamergate credo. Certainly a pro women manifesto for the rest of the season and probably series. Felt like almost every episode was about a women defeating a man or a creation of man.
But I do agree the tech is a bit stupid, and the problem with that is, that's just one of the things that Black Mirror doesn't do, it tends to always be something the audience believes is pretty damned believable, which is what makes it unsettling.
I think its a strong enough and enjoyable episode on its own, with strong characters and good plot. But there's all sorts of holes and " why didn't he just do that?" that you could pick it apart a little, and the tech doesn't make any sense, which really give the episode an un Black Mirror like feeling.
And the only thing stupider than the tech was how
fucking badly the main character is treated. The episode clearly doesn't want to make anyone treat him too badly, its more like they just ignore him rather than actually bully him. Its in service to the themes and the point of the episode, so perhaps its a bit nit picky, but its a bit ridiculous how even the fucking secretary and interns treat the genius CTO like he's a janitor.
And a few of the episodes feel like this, like the internal logic and plot become a bit stupid and uncharacteristic of Black Mirror to get to a certain end point or prove a thematic point. Which one would have to say is bad writing.
Thinking over the season a little bit more and it felt like the first time each episode here actually could be fleshed out into a movie as well with a little more plot/time. At the same, this season felt the most removed from earlier black mirror. Part of it is a good thing because some of the early ones were hit and miss but it feels off. Might be the fact it's more Americanized since moving to netflix idk.
I do consider black museum to be like an "end" to the universe. It probably isn't the end of the show however.
I think it's about the dangers that the tech can introduce for people who could become or are mentally unstable. Like such powerful technology could be insanely bad news for anyone who has a mental illness
(i.e. Daly). They use a 'disturbed genius' angle to explore it and also tell a heisty/punchy plot from within the simulation -
but they could have looked at the same idea from a different angle; a person who experiences schizophrenia, a person who experiences psychotic episodes, a person with depression who uses it as a complete escape, etc.
That weird Channel 4 knock-off, the Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams show, did the same thing with a hamfisted story about a guy who doesn't know which of two lives is real or the simulation (and both feature people trying to convince him the other is fake).
The tech is definitely dumb though. All they needed was a throwaway line about how
he can gather people's memories up the present moment. But they never did it, instead they just waffled on about DNA like numbskulls.
I really enjoyed the first fifteen or so minutes of the episode, because I thought they were going to go with 'what happens when you can create a reality exactly how you want it, when the real world isn't quite how you'd like it to be?' People already make something like Wow or Everquest their entire lives, when these games are poor representations of the real world. What happens when nerds get their real life holodeck?
But they didn't really do this, they went with "what happens when a big bully becomes a God in a world with perfectly sentient AI", which really isn't that interesting to me.
The company just started their Christmas break, and he has no friends, so he won't be missed before he starves to death. That's if his brain wasn't damaged when the game nuked itself.
Welp, until two days ago I'd never heard of Black Mirror, but my girlfriend saw it pop up on Netflix (due to the new S4 being out) and we sat down to check it out. This is starting with S4, we were unaware that there were previous seasons, lol. So now two days later we've seen all six eps of S4 and fuck if we didn't enjoy the hell out of this show! We loved all six eps, some more than others naturally but they all were thought provoking, well acted and directed, and sometimes just downright surprising and dark. My favorite was The Callister as I'm a huge Star Trek fan, her favorite was Hang the DJ as the finale reveal in that one threw us both for a loop and brought a smile to our faces.
And now after reading this thread, many of you are saying that the previous seasons have some eps which are better?
Yep, guess we're watching the rest of the seasons then too!!!
Be aware many people are saying "better" as in "darker".
It's pretty interesting how
Black Museum address this, the black museum is Black Mirror itself, (they even share initials :P) attracting people to this gallery of horrors, but how at the end only attracts sadists and all kinds of messed up people. It's obvious Brooker was not too pleased with how the fanbase was skewing, and it started in season 3 with some complaining about how episodes now had "happy" endings. As you mentioned in this season only *some* episodes go really dark, in the first two seasons all of them are.
The company just started their Christmas break, and he has no friends, so he won't be missed before he starves to death. That's if his brain wasn't damaged when the game nuked itself.
It's pretty fucked up how the game can do that at all. Like, his particular use case shouldn't be doable, but what happens to regular users if their game locks up or botches a patch install or whatever?
I also don't get how his copy was online in the first place. Shouldn't it be in a completely separate, dev environment?
I have to say overall I'm pretty disappointed with this season of Black Mirror it's my least favorite of the four. The only one I really liked was Hang the DJ, Black Museum is really, really awful. Like I thought people were just ragging on it for no reason but having watched it, RTS.
It's pretty fucked up how the game can do that at all. Like, his particular use case shouldn't be doable, but what happens to regular users if their game locks up or botches a patch install or whatever?
I also don't get how his copy was online in the first place. Shouldn't it be in a completely separate, dev environment?
Yes and no. On the one hand, it's the Christmas holiday and he's got his door set to Do Not Disturb, so he might not be found until he dies of thirst, which takes about three days.
On the other hand, the game he works on just had what sounds like a pretty major content patch that same day, and those things never go right. I have a suspicion that his real-world boss might be breaking down his door looking for him to fix something RIGHT NOW. Of course, whether he's actually able to be pulled out and not brain-dead now is an open question...
Episode 1 might just be the creepiest bit of television that I have ever seen and is probably my favourite Black Mirror yet. So glad that Charlie Brooker is allowed to make this stuff.
I'm not in the business, so my view may be clichéd and unnecessarily cynical, but I can't help but think that a TV series like this is incredibly difficult to get commissioned. So thanks to channel 4 for getting it started.
