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Black Mirror Season 5 is up

Kain-Nosgoth

Kain-Nosgoth

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,561
Switzerland
FInished the season, i really liked smithereen and striking viper!

Viper's concept and idea was great, i would have liked a different ending but it was still pretty satisfying!

Smithereen was worth it just thanks to Andrew Scott's performance, damn that was good! That in-credit scene at the end felt too real too (when people check their phones)

... the Ashley one though, holy shit it was bad... that was like children hollywood movie, with the comically evil vilain and the funny side character and so on... This episode really wasn't fit at all for the black mirror serie IMO! So dumb
 
ry-dog

ry-dog

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
2,180
Barry Sandwich said:
I don't know your orientation or gender, but let's use a hetero example. Your friends brains are implanted into virtual avatars of Megan Fox or Tom Hardy (depending on your preference).

Assuming they're up for it, you would have sex with your friends based on how they look?

Also your first point is kinda similar to the question: would you stay with a partner who changed gender/sex? If the change resulted in sexual incompatibility then you likely wouldn't stay together despite the initial attraction, even if you're still attracted to their personality.
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Like another person in the thread said, I think sexuality can be split into two parts. Emotional and "sexual". The emotional part is genderless (ie: personality), the sexual part is biological. This episode poses the question that what if that sexual part (ie: physical attraction) could also be genderless. Would that person's gender matter at that point? And I think the answer is no.

I don't think either of those two guys were gay, they were just emotionally attracted to each other. That emotional attraction wasn't enough for them to fuck in the real world (for some it might be, this is subjective), but once they changed their physical appearances, they were able to.

I'm gay, and there's plenty of woman who I'm emotionally compatible with. It's really just their body that would stop me from dating them.
 
Acorn

Acorn

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,972
Scotland
I'm surprised there hasn't been a "Anyone Who Knows What Love Is" reference or it playing in the background of scene so far.

Think it's been in every season since it appeared in 15 million merits.

Edit nevermind

spoiled myself
 
Dwebble

Dwebble

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
9,626
I thought Vipers was superb, and the highlight of the season by a large distance.

No, the tech doesn't make any sense, but that's true of many of the best Black Mirror episodes (Be Right Back, USS Callister, etc.). It was just a method of conveying a fascinating, rich story about love, sexuality and masculinity. I thought it was a bit of a triumph, to be honest.
 
skipgo

skipgo

Member
Dec 28, 2018
2,568
To me this season was lame. There is literally a "people just stare at their phones now!!!!!" episode.
 
Winstano

Winstano

Editor-in-chief at nextgenbase.com
Verified
Oct 28, 2017
1,828
The hate for Metalhead in this thread is outrageous. One of my favourite episodes!

Only caught eps 1&2 so far, Striking Vipers was a bit meh - I think the concept ran away with itself and it just got a bit silly by the end. Just a bit... Weird.

Loved Smithereens though, a really good take on grief and loss, with a suitably ambiguous finish. Really really liked it.
 

Deleted member 1656

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
4,474
So-Cal
skipgo said:
Hahhaa, it's the same level of insight I get from my mom.
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It ain't untrue insight though.
My biggest gripe with the episode is that Billy is portrayed a little too sympathetically for my liking. It's true tech guys are often depicted villainously so humanizing him as such was a bit subversive I suppose... but like they've been depicted that way for good reason. And I suppose the implication is that in the grander scheme Billy's still complacent and not a good guy and that his genuine connection with Chris is a bottled moment, but I feel as if it might be read the wrong way too easily.
 
Winstano

Winstano

Editor-in-chief at nextgenbase.com
Verified
Oct 28, 2017
1,828
Disgraced said:
My biggest gripe with Smithereens is Billy is portrayed a little too sympathetically for my liking. It's true tech guys are often depicted villainously so humanizing him as such was a bit subversive I suppose... but like they've been depicted that way for good reason. And I suppose the implication is that in the grander scheme Billy's still complacent and not a good guy and that his genuine connection with Chris is a bottled moment, but I feel as if it might be read the wrong way too easily.
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I think that's what the ending shot summed up though. The way I interpreted the ending is that the sniper missed and killed the hostage. Billy, after hearing this, just went back to his silent retreat and continued to meditate. Hell, even if the sniper shot Chris, the fact he can just go back to his life again after talking to the guy only to find out moments later that he got shot shows that his humanity has disappeared to a degree and he's leaving the PR nightmare to his staff, while he gets richer and meditates.
 

Deleted member 1656

User requested account closure
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Oct 25, 2017
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So-Cal
Winstano said:
I think that's what the ending shot summed up though. The way I interpreted the ending is that the sniper missed and killed the hostage. Billy, after hearing this, just went back to his silent retreat and continued to meditate. Hell, even if the sniper shot Chris, the fact he can just go back to his life again after talking to the guy only to find out moments later that he got shot shows that his humanity has disappeared to a degree and he's leaving the PR nightmare to his staff, while he gets richer and meditates.
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I interpreted it that the sniper landed her shot, but I can see the latter happening. I also think it could go the other way with him inspired by the experience to try making a difference. I don't mind the ambiguity there but what I do mind is that he seems a little too nice a guy for the bulk of his screen time. I think so that we can have this discussion the episode tries to show two sides of Billy—empathetic and apathetic—but we didn't get enough of the latter. You might say Billy's apathy is largely represented by his absence until the ending sequence, but the delay in contacting him felt like it was so much more caused by the crappy gateway via intern, and the COO's and FBI's bullshit. His haste in calling Chris when he learns of the situation indicates his "silent retreat" wasn't actually that sacred.
 
subcutaneousphat

subcutaneousphat

Member
Dec 4, 2017
1,801
London
Winstano said:
The hate for Metalhead in this thread is outrageous. One of my favourite episodes!

Only caught eps 1&2 so far, Striking Vipers was a bit meh - I think the concept ran away with itself and it just got a bit silly by the end. Just a bit... Weird.

Loved Smithereens though, a really good take on grief and loss, with a suitably ambiguous finish. Really really liked it.
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Yep Metalhead is way up there IMO. Best episode last season alongside Hang The DJ.
 
Nose Master

Nose Master

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,717
Fitts said:
Smithereens was ok. Had us hooked well enough.

Striking Vipers is hilarious. When I wasn't laughing about bootleg SFIV, I was calling shots and we were laughing about the absurdity of it. The second those characters loaded into the VR game I was like
"they're gonna fuck."
Watching the characters inch toward each other in fighting stances just to... so fucking funny. If David Cage made a VR fighting game it would be the downfall of civilization as we know it.

Thing is, they sort of turn it around at the end. The scene on the streets and the stuff after was actually pretty good. And thank goodness they didn't
have the friend transition to get the dude's attention irl
because I was kind of nervous they may go down that road and it would send a super fucked up message.



Lol no shit. Nerd played himself.
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That game is bootleg sfxt. The char select screen is identical, and the polar bear etc.

Season was solid. Favorite was prolly e2 just cause scott is amazing, even though it didnt really go anywhere. Laughed pretty hard at the pop nin songs.
 
Perfect Chaos

Perfect Chaos

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,335
Charlottesville, VA, USA
skipgo said:
To me this season was lame. There is literally a "people just stare at their phones now!!!!!" episode.
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Honestly, I've felt that Black Mirror is a little too on the nose with its "Hey, technology can be bad, you ever think about that??" angle since the beginning, so I actually really enjoyed this season because they at least seemed to just have fun with it in Striking Vipers and the Ashley Too episode. Smithereens being an hour long Don't Text and Drive PSA with some other crap in there about how social media companies have so much information on you (wow no kidding), was pretty lame, though.
 
Fitts

Fitts

You know what that means
Member
Oct 25, 2017
21,197
Nose Master said:
That game is bootleg sfxt. The char select screen is identical, and the polar bear etc.
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Lol holy shit you're right. That makes it even funnier. Didn't play a whole lot of xt because IV is my least favorite SF in the series and xt was somehow even worse.

Edit: at least we can all agree that not basing it on Fighting Vipers is a missed opportunity.
 
F2BBm3ga

F2BBm3ga

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
4,083
"You know I even fucked Tundra, the polar bear character..... I fucked a polar bear..."

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Kitana

Kitana

Banned
Dec 12, 2017
12
This show has really gone down the drain. Could not finish Vipers. Doubt I'll watch the rest of the other episodes too.
 
Emrober5

Emrober5

Member
Oct 27, 2017
743
I watched them all. they were all okay but no standouts. I guess the Ashley episode was my favorite but even that one had really dumb moments.

Bandersnatch was better than all of them.
 

Deleted member 2809

User requested account closure
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Oct 25, 2017
25,478
How is smithereen's message only "phone = bad", do y'all pay attention to anything ?
Said a lot too about how the corp had more info on the guy faster than the cops, or how the chain of command took forever to reach the guy in an emergency for bullshit reasons, or how the corporate heads were complete fucks who couldn't think straight for a second while the CEO was the more humane one. That corp was filled with mindless robots.
 
Opium

Opium

Member
Oct 30, 2017
220
2 was okayish-mediocre but 1 & 3 were straight up thrash. Another show down the drain.
 
CloudWolf

CloudWolf

Member
Oct 26, 2017
15,617
Chitown B said:
I mean none of them fit in seasons. They're all stand alone like Twilight Zone.
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True, but what I meant was thay White Christmas was never part of a season until Netflix just lumped it into season 2. It was more like a Holiday Special.

Its original release was as far away removed from S2 as it was from S3.
 
Chitown B

Chitown B

Member
Nov 15, 2017
9,602
CloudWolf said:
True, but what I meant was thay White Christmas was never part of a season until Netflix just lumped it into season 2. It was more like a Holiday Special.

Its original release was as far away removed from S2 as it was from S3.
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True. Even so, I wouldn't call two seasons "in a row" a trend of 3 episode seasons. But I'm ok with short ones as long as they're good.
 
Meg Cherry

Meg Cherry

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,276
Seattle, WA
I mostly enjoyed the season, but I feel like going back to a 3 episode structure pressured them to make each episode about 10 min longer than it needed to be. Vipers is probably the strongest of the bunch, mainly because it's one of the best concepts the series has tackled when it comes to relationships. It's slow, but the build was effective for me.

Smithereen is solid, but feels like it intentionally builds to a non-ending. Strangely, it feels like it could've been stronger on a smaller budget. Having a big ensemble cast for such a small-scale story was a bit distracting.

Ashely Too has some great stuff - the music is smart, Cyrus' performance is outstanding - yet it probably drags worse than any other ep in the season. You get the sense Brooker wanted to show he could write something lighter/youthful that still fit the Black Mirror mold - but the sisters aren't compelling enough protagonists to round out the episode.

Overall, it's three middle-of-the-road Black Mirror episodes, which means it's still better than most anthologies on TV right now. (I'd also confidently say all three are better than any episode of the rebooted Twilight Zone, if we want to play that game).

Then again, I also loved Bandersnatch - so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
 
ExtremelyBitter

ExtremelyBitter

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,944
I actually liked all three episodes; I'll need time to see how they fit into my overall Black Mirror rankings, but I did feel like the show was in a weird way trying to grow. Not necessarily grow up but maybe grow out? Striking Vipers was a solid starter episode for me because as soon as they introduced the VR concept we started trying to guess how it would go wrong--Are they going to get stuck in VR? Get so addicted they ruin their lives? What will happen? And instead we get an episode that goes in a completely different way and tries to engage, in part, with how the tech can change things in a not necessarily awful way. It wasn't perfect and watching it you could tell it was going to bomb out with a huge part of the audience, but I enjoyed it.

I also don't really have the plausibility problem with the VR that most do, but I think it's because I've more or less bought in hard to the shared tech of Black Mirror in general. They don't explicitly state it like in Ashley Too, but when we saw the same VR access device from USS Callister pop up, I just sort of wrote the game off as built on a much bigger, much more complicated comprehensive VR base. So when
it had code to handle the fighters having sex, I read it as less 'they put that in a fighting game?!?' and more 'the engine they slapped their assets onto probably supported it by default'.
. Which isn't something I expect to work for everyone, but for me it did.

I missed the chilling twists the show used to deliver regularly, but I enjoyed all of these episodes (although on two thirds of them my reaction at the end was "I liked it but man are people going to hate that") and kind of acknowledge that there's probably a limit to how many dangers of tech stories they can really tell. In a perfect world, these could have been sprinkled in with season 4 episodes to provide a little more tonal breadth.
 

Deleted member 43084

Banned
May 9, 2018
3,600
About Ashley Too: it is very deliberately a parody of Disney-style movies, and also a bit of a meta reference to Miley Cyrus's career.

There's a reason Jamie's father is a mouse exterminator.

The subreddit has a lot of memes, mostly about polar bears.
 
Dice

Dice

Member
Oct 25, 2017
22,304
Canada
Heh, won't lie, I really liked
sapien85 said:
For a singer, Miley Cyrus has a really grating speaking voice.
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I don't find it grating but totally surprising how her sorta-raspy sorta-deep voice translates super well into singing.

ReAxion said:
they could do a whole season on the implications of vipers.
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Would honestly be down for a few 'Part II's of certain episodes. x)

minimaxir said:
About Ashley Too: it is very deliberately a parody of Disney-style movies, and also a bit of a meta reference to Miley Cyrus's career.

There's a reason Jamie's father is a mouse exterminator.

The subreddit has a lot of memes, mostly about polar bears.
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Forreal, I read it that way too. Not the Mickey part (that's just funny) but it certainly felt a little-on the nose in some of the "right" ways. It was the cheesiest (sorry) of the bunch but it appropriately works some of that "Disney charm" into its plot and style.
 
OP
OP
Conciliator

Conciliator

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,129
As someone who's been involved with these threads and seeing live responses to BM episodes over the years, it's always been a show where reactions vary wildly. "Well, at least it's better than the terrible Metalhead." "What, Metalhead is my favorite episode!" That kind of thing. That's just the nature of the show to me, different people get different things out of it. DEFINITELY not surprising that Striking Vipers would be an extremely polarizing episode. But even if you look to "original" Black Mirror, well the tech concept in Be Right Back is completely preposterous. The dystopia in 15 Million Merits is extremely on the nose. That's also always been a part of the show.

All that said though, I do mostly agree with the sentiment that there's diminishing returns to the limitations of the show and its best days are probably behind it. I still completely find the show compelling enough to be watching any new episodes ASAP, but nothing lasts forever.
 
StayMe7o

StayMe7o

Member
May 11, 2018
1,016
Kamurocho
As someone who's only seen about 2 or 3 episodes of Black Mirror, Smithereens hit home hard. Andrew Scott and Damson Idris were excellent and their portrayals were just too real. I guess I haven't really seen a lot of movies or shows that talk about mental health in that way, but they knocked it out of the park.
 
Mg.

Mg.

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,977
Man the end of Smithereens is some buuullshit.

The folks of that Persona platform giving away a password? That means they don't hash the user passwords. That's a fucking stupid security flaw of a social media platform developer.
 
Adree

Adree

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
4,072
I thought Striking Vipers missed a good opportunity to explore sexuality and attraction and threw it away to focus on it being about porn addiction. A real shame.
 
bye

bye

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
8,422
Phoenix, AZ
Adree said:
I thought Striking Vipers missed a good opportunity to explore sexuality and attraction and threw it away to focus on it being about porn addiction. A real shame.
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This also annoyed me, because exploring the idea that closeted men can find solace in VR gaming is much more interesting than just being addicted to VR porn.
 

Deleted member 20630

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Oct 28, 2017
1,406
Best to worst:

Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too: Superb episode about parasocial relationships with some pretty clear metatext about Miley Cyrus' life and career trajectory. Veers a bit silly towards the end, but Black Mirror is inherently silly. Nice to get the occasional happy ending to give an antidote to all of the bleakness so many episodes offer. Also, Cyrus is a surprisingly good actor.

Smithereens: This is the most old man yells at clouds episode thematically. Some of the story beats and the sense of tension reminded me a bit of a lesser Shut Up and Dance (my favorite episode) so that brings it up a bit. The performances and the intimacy of the main char's emotional turmoil make this a plenty entertaining watch.

Striking Vipers: Oh shit, Tetris Effect! And poverty fighting games. I don't really know how to feel about it. A lot of it is kind of unintentionally laughable, but I feel like under the surface it has something interesting to say about sex, intimacy, and monogamy and the way evolving technology has the capacity to reshape our understanding of those things. I just don't know if it ever quite goes from "There's the spark of an interesting idea," to actually having a fully-formed statement.

Bandersnatch: Novelty aside, a trash episode. It's so self-congratulatory with all the metatext. It's novel...for Black Mirror, but CYOA and non-linear narratives aren't exactly new, and they are just so willing to act like this is something groundbreaking. There isn't anything to the episode beyond the metatext either, which just makes it tedious.

So lots of ups and downs, but with at least one episode that is exactly my jam. This makes it a pretty standard Black Mirror season, imo, and not at all a "decline," because every season is polarizing. That's sort of the best thing about Black Mirror is people will love and hate such completely different things, and very few episodes are universally loved or hated. Most seasons are mixed bags, but what you love from that bag varies by individual so much.
 
Chris McQueen

Chris McQueen

Self-requested ban
The Fallen
Oct 27, 2017
5,378
London
Finished the second episode. I've said this many times before, but maybe Mr Brooker needs to step back and allow new writers with different ideas to come aboard. It seems as though with each passing season, the concept strays further and further.

Anyway, I'll watch the last one tonight.
 
John Rabbit

John Rabbit

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,099
Striking Vipers (only one I've seen so far) raises a lot of really good ideas and questions but it's attempts to (not) answer or even address them was pretty infuriating. Might be one of the most disappointing episodes of the show.
 

Deleted member 46948

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Aug 22, 2018
8,852
I only saw Vipers and Smithereens so far, but I liked both. Pretty consistent with the previous 4 seasons quality-wise IMO.
Not every episode has to have a super powerful mind-shattering message, but Vipers had something interesting to say about relationships, and Smithereens (though not especially innovative) had Andrew Scott, so there's that.

I mean I routinely see big fuck off budget blockbusters that are creatively arid, and even Smithereens had more new things to say than the entire run of MCU (yes I know that's not why people go to those movies).
 
Elderly Parrot

Elderly Parrot

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Banned
Aug 13, 2018
3,146
Smithereens was a little long but that's prob the point that a huge long event like this was reduced to smiithereens aka small text notifications where it really doesn't even matter what happened because we just look go on with our life until the next one. Also goes with the fact that we can't even read or long stories anymore And just want a quick summary tops

Loved corporation knowing more than the cops, the comparison of suit intern to Sandles CEO, the middle management robots, the disappointment when no fake gun. Texting in cars is bad is def a theme of lower importance but well done.

Great acting performances all around as well
 
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