Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Black Mirror Season 5.
When Black Mirror initially aired back in 2011, you couldn’t get me to shut up about it. The first two series each had one episode that wasn’t too hot and two others that were phenomenal. When the programme made the jump from Channel 4 to Netflix, however, it doubled its episode count per series, and the show’s quality began to drift more from narrative to narrative. It was still some of the most gripping and cerebral science fiction in the TV format; it’s just there were a few more duds in each pack and a few more valleys in the episodes where they’d drag or dip. With season five, however, the showrunners whittled their series back down to just three entries: half the stories, twice the focus. Here’s where Black Mirror was in 2019.
Episode One: Striking Vipers
Danny is in a happy partnership with his girlfriend, Theo, until his pal Karl introduces him to a virtual reality edition of the fighting game Striking Vipers. Using total-immersion technology, the two can feel all physical sensations in the software, which leads to them having sex in-world. While they are both male outside of the game, inside it, Karl’s avatar is a woman. These encounters become a habit, and the intimacy in Danny’s and Karl’s offline relationships wither on the vine. The two put a moratorium on their meetings but find that their sexual connection is undeniable, and for Karl, it seems that the sex has a valuable emotional component as well. Theo finds out, and by the epilogue, Danny and Theo have reached an arrangement where she allows him to have sex with Karl in Striking Vipers if she can go to a bar and pick up men in the physical world.
Striking Vipers is more sexually explicit than any Black Mirror before, but not frivolously. Unlike so many other programmes, Black Mirror wants to explore sexuality as a topic rather than an aesthetic, and it takes advantage of its home online to do it. This isn’t something you’re often given the green light to depict on national television, even after the watershed, but on a streaming platform almost anything goes. We all have the task of working out how we relate to our bodies and other peoples’, and Striking Vipers is thinking about how that might become achingly complicated in a VR-saturated world where one person can have more than one body. There’s a visual metaphor for it in the shot where Danny stands at the intersection of two mirrors and sees three more of himself.
As these technologies reveal new sexual configurations between people, existing concepts of sexuality seem insufficient to describe their users. Are Danny and Karl bisexual because in the physical world they’re two men? If so, how do we square that with the scene in which Danny and Karl kiss in the offline world and don’t feel a spark? Are they straight because when they have sexual relations, they occupy a male and a female character? Then there’s Karl who retains the identity of a man while switching between traditionally masculine and feminine bodies. Striking Vipers reveals a new kind of sexual fluidity through technology, although it doesn’t really make sense to me that a fighting game would have full sexual simulation inside it. The episode is also arguably making a boogieman out of non-hererosexual relations. The characters are never repulsed or afraid of homosexuality, only of their disloyalty to their partners. However, as Guy Lodge over at The Guardian writes about the narrative: “queer desire is treated, even exoticised, as a disorienting byproduct of alien technology rather than a matter of the heart”.
The episode is also a rough parable about the availability and discreteness of modern sexual technology and how those aspects of it could obliterate relationships. Karl says of the sex in the game, “it’s like porn”, and when he and his girlfriend do not reach orgasm, she begins watching internet pornography. Technological consumerism makes it easier than ever to mix and match aspects of our lifestyle, so why wouldn’t companies create products that make the person you fuck be different than the person you’re partnered to? Looking at this purely from the perspective of games in media, it’s also incredible that in a sea of poor imitations of computer entertainment on film, Brooker and company have put to screen this dead ringer. Someone made a Street Fighter TV show in 2019.
Episode Two: Smithereens
Rideshare driver Christopher Gillhaney meets a woman at a support group who lost her daughter, Kristin, to suicide. Kristin’s mother doesn’t understand why her child took her own life and believes she might find the answer in her social media account on the Persona service, but the developer of Persona, Smithereen, has locked her out of it. Smithereen is an in-universe stand-in for Facebook, and Chris urgently wants to speak to their Zuckerberg, a silicon valley guru called Billy Bauer. To establish communication, he kidnaps a man who he believes to be a Smithereen employee, but who is, alas, only an intern.
Most of the script lets Chris stew in a police standoff, comically tripping over mundane setbacks like finding that the intern’s phone is in another car and trying to call his way up a convoluted company hierarchy. Through the spy work of the police and Smithereen, we learn that Chris recently experienced the death of his mother and his spouse, and that he’s burdened with debt. His wife died when he was racing down a dark road with her in the passenger seat. He was staring at the Persona app on his phone at the time and collided with a drunk motorist. Chris reveals to Bauer that he wanted to speak to him to obtain access to Kristin’s Persona account for her mother. He manages this, and in a conversation with Bauer, the boss reveals that he started Smithereen with the best of intentions, but control of the company spiralled away from him when investors got their feet in the door. A police sniper takes aim at Chris’s head as he struggles with the intern in the car. The bullet hits someone, but we don’t find out who.
In all of Black Mirror, this is the episode that has the least to do with technology. Hardware and software motivate the characters more than they trap them, and like Metalhead from season four, it’s gunning to be a Hitcockesque whirlwind of tension, and mostly is. The side view and rearview mirrors on the car are used to particular cinematic effect, giving us some intense shots of Chris’s eyes as he pulls pained and exasperated expressions. Although, the narrative does slump around the middle as the various parties involved become mired in mediation and research. Still, there are various riffs on the current state of technology in here that I can’t help nodding along with. Early on, Chris has a breakdown where he complains about people compulsively using their phones. This opinion is omnipresent in our societies, and Black Mirror is often tagged as one of its most visible promoters, but here, the show depicts Chris’s criticism of this phenomena as being overblown to the point of being unhinged. It says getting apoplectic about “kids on their apps these days” is something you could imagine a dangerous gunman doing and the scene may be self-parody on the part of Brooker.
It’s also hard to disagree with Smithereens’s statement that you don’t know who could be lurking in that next rideshare vehicle you get into. The inability of freelance taxi apps to guarantee the safety of their drivers has been a major contributor to entire regions or countries outlawing them. And I think the episode is right when it says that an amalgam of economic insecurity, lack of regulation of various tech giants, and increasing agitation with these companies seems liable to balloon into some people threatening violent action against them. We already had the YouTube shooter in 2018. The story also plays like a long-form joke about what you feel you’d have to do to get these firms to interface with you. But, for me, the most interesting question it asks is “Who is culpable when people die because a driver was looking at their phone?.
Chris takes full responsibility for the death of his wife, but he also understands that social media programs are designed to draw peoples’ attention. While Black Mirror is typically speculative in its horror, the nature of Chris’s wife’s death is not hypothetical. Hundreds of people are dying every year because drivers are transfixed on their mobiles instead of the road. If you were a person who physically distracted someone while they were driving and they crashed their car, we’d see you as having some part in that crash. So, if companies are trying to distract people constantly, whether they’re driving or not, how we can absolve them of the same responsibility for those vehicular injuries and deaths? Of course, despite us seeing a network of psychological, economic, and technological factors that motivate Chris’s stunt, all the problem-solvers dispatched by the UK government can do is act in a limited and all too forceful manner. They kill a symptom and in many ways, a sufferer, instead of attacking the disease. Or worse, in attempting to do that, may have murdered an innocent man.
Episode Three: Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too
Rachel is a fresh face at an American high school, but she is exceptionally lonely. Her mother is recently deceased, her father’s nose is deep in his experimental pest control business, and she’s had no luck making friends at a new school. She retreats into the world of Ashley O, a shamelessly glitzy pop star, to the disapproval of her sister, Jack, who takes to a rock-based diet. Meanwhile, Ashley works as a servant from dawn to dusk for the music industry producers in her life. She longs to make music that comes from the heart instead of the consumer survey, but is denied that pleasure. Meanwhile, Ashley’s brand releases an AI doll, Ashley Too, that acts like a kinder, more personable version of the singer. Rachel’s father buys one for Rachel, and she becomes happily attached to it.
Predicting that Ashley will violate her contract with the record company, Ashley’s manager puts her into a coma and has producers use brain scans to keep harvesting new songs from her head. Using a combination of holograms and motion capture, promoters have an artificial Ashley perform these and prior tracks of her’s. After some sibling rivalry, Jack hacks into Rachel’s Ashley Too, and they discover that the celebrity’s full personality was copied into the doll, but with a limiter so that she could only express marketable emotions. Without the inhibitor, the Ashley Too alerts Rachel and Jack to Ashley’s plight, the three sneak into the mansion where she’s sleeping, and they break her out. They reveal Ashley’s inhumane treatment at the hands of the record firm to the public and Ashley goes on to play alt-rock to her heart’s content.
One really constructive thing about all these episodes is that they have a lesson in them that all viewers can glean, but then plenty more messages hidden below the firmament for anyone who cares to dig. Watch Striking Vipers casually, and you’ll get the idea that VR video games could steal you away from your partner, but meditate on it, and you’ll hear a lot more on the topic of bodies and sexuality. Smithereens tells us that a man could be frustrated enough with social media to risk hurting someone, but sit with it and you’ll find reflections on reasonable responses to modern inconveniences, our reaction to potentially violent individualists, and the worst-case consequences of phones being so compulsive to interact with. Sometimes, Black Mirror can be crass or heavy-handed in its didactics, but sometimes it’s critics not immersing themselves fully in these episodes that leaves them with the idea that the show’s viewpoint is just “phones are bad”. So, yes, Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too says that the pop industry is phoney and controlling; like Rachel’s dad, they’re about making traps and knocking out a lab rat. But the script is also replete with other observations, not all of them coming back to meet under a singular theme.
Ashley O is played by Miley Cyrus, who was a child star under Disney, and then graduated right into the hands of the industry’s wealthiest. With that in mind, this episode comes across as a partial exploration of Cyrus’s serfdom in the entertainment business. The episode also does something with its music that I’ve never seen any other piece of media do. Ashley has a signature track that’s pretty catchy but repeats throughout the show until you’re blue in the face. It’s called On A Roll, and it’s a slight reworking of Nine Inch Nails’s 1989 industrial anthem Head Like a Hole. Head Like a Hole’s lyrics have the speaker alternating between hypnotic subservience to money and throwing off the chains of authority, both themes appearing in the episode. The Black Mirror version retains the notions of subservience but tweaks the chorus to make Ashley the picture of confidence and achievement. Later, sitting at a piano, Ashley plays a variation of Right Where It Belongs, the solipsistic closing track from NIN’s With Teeth album. Her manager also has this mangled into a positive radio-friend bop.
If you know these songs, you know how wrong Ashley O’s renditions sound. It’s a unique method of giving the viewer the feeling that the record company is twisting music to be something other than what it should be and redacting any emotional nuance. They do the same thing with Ashley Too: an objectification of Ashley’s public image, the doll is a conscious Ashley without any self-assertion or negative emotion. The story also has some strong opinions about the difference between pop and rock, or at least, the underground brand of rock. Ashley’s handlers are monsters, and her music is a cage, while rock is the key to her freedom. The pop tracks are all a perversion of something more raw and genuine: the NIN tracks. However, the episode is not saying that a connection to pop music is necessarily invalid.
It’s easy to think as a teenager, and even as an adult, that pop is for the popular and vapid, and rock is for the authentic and the outcasts. Ignorantly, I thought like this at one point. However, Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too acknowledges the evils of the industry and that its music is often candyfloss while also showing it as a vital comfort for Rachel. She’s not a preppy kid trying to turn off her brain; she’s someone who feels alone that finds confidence and a friend when she listens to Ashley O. It’s the same experience that many outsider kids go through with rock, and by the time Rachel shows up at Ashley’s guitar gig at the end, the mainstream music has become a bridge to something a little off the map. Again, I think a lot of young people take that journey.
The inclusion of the Ashley hologram also gave me one of those “Oh, of course” moments. I’m not so sure the future is farming songs through an MRI, but we have vocaloids, we’ve seen hologram Tupac, and the public is familiar with motion capture. It makes sense that the future would be virtual performers who are easier to pilot and perfect than real ones. They never tire, they don’t need to spend an hour in hair and makeup, and you can change their clothing with the touch of a button. Unfortunately, this episode also has one of the least believable twists in Black Mirror’s history. I don’t buy that copying an entire human mind into a toy and then augmenting that mind was easier than creating a slightly more responsive Alexa or that this will be possible in the near future. Ashley Too also serves as the episode’s heaviest sandbag.
She’s not quite a Claptrap, but this cutesy yet foul-mouthed doll feels a little low-brow for Black Mirror, and the episode tugs on its seams trying to swing between two teenagers and an angry action figure driving around in a dog-themed car, and Ashley being preyed on in her coma. It also seems just a little too effortless for a couple of people in their teens and a single singer to bring down a whole entertainment operation. There are Black Mirror fans who have panned this episode for not being grimdark for the sake of it, and others who are subtly signalling that the inclusion of powerful girls or Miley Cyrus got their hackles up, and we can safely dismiss this way of thinking about the episode. However, tonal consistency and realism are its blind spots, and that’s highly out of character for Black Mirror.
Overall, I enjoyed this season immensely. It didn’t feel like it had to clasp onto the most gruesome thing it could think of at any one time to maintain its reputation, and so, rather than going the darkest direction with any given scene, it often went to the most engrossing. With old plot structures for the series exhausted, it’s experimenting with new ones, and like any experiment, it sometimes goes awry. However, season five constitutes some of Charlie Brooker’s most thoughtful and least predictable work. Thanks for reading.
