Note: The following article contains major spoilers for all of season four and minor spoilers for other seasons. It also assumes that you’ve already watched all episodes; recounting the six plots is outside of the scope of this piece.
Episode One: USS Callister
USS Callister is a disturbing cinematic recreation of the idea that Harlan Ellison set out in his unforgettable short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. This episode is at its best when it’s channelling that Ellisonesque sense of inescapable torture to critique toxic work environments and nerd culture spaces. Black Mirror is often misunderstood as simply showing the horror of modern or near-future technology, but it becomes clear in episodes like this one that Brooker’s preoccupation is more to do with the nightmares we create when we allow certain technologies to line up with certain social dynamics. In USS Callister, there is no threat from the technology outside of the way it is applied by the villain, and that makes him, rather than the computer simulation itself, the enemy.
This season of Black Mirror makes a point of starting with an episode that ends on a high note, or as much as a high note as you’ll find in these sardonic anthologies. Along with season three’s game-changing San Junipero, USS Callister establishes that Black Mirror once again has stakes. We can reinvest in the idea of heroes succeeding in this show, urging us to celebrate more in their triumphs and feel more of a gut-punch from their failures. Still, USS Callister blags its way to an ending; it pulls off a deus-ex-machina to get the upbeat closing it craves, and so many of its other MacGuffins along the way are hard to believe in.
Robert Daley has a private server for an MMO on which he appears to have trapped sentient human beings but why is a video game running the code to simulate a human mind? Why would patching a video game cause a black hole to appear in the in-game world? How does flying the spaceship into the firewall free the crew of their virtual curse and transfer them to a different server? Callister is trying to establish stakes in this season of Black Mirror by showing us that happy endings are possible but then disillusioning us to the sense of stakes because it suggests that Brooker is now willing to have technology possess any power at any time, condemning or liberating the characters through unpredictable, unexplained means. Fortunately, this trend does not continue through the series, but when Black Mirror is famed primarily for its realistic portrayal of near-future tragedy, the failure to create a believable world and plot makes it hard to believe in USS Callister as a journey for its characters.
Episode Two: Arkangel
I can’t remember a Black Mirror as gentle and understated as Arkangel; it’s a risk. There is no surprise that people might remain hooked on a show that presents a conga line of revolting misfortunes for its protagonists, but Arkangel especially is about letting the cold, sterility of a world slowly wash over you; the viewer has to make an active effort to remain invested. There is, however, a fine line between giving your viewer a minimalist experience and giving them too few meaningful handholds to cling onto. Arkangel and the similarly-directed Crocodile often end up on the wrong side of that line.
None the less, there is a moral heart to Arkangel that stays with you. It can be difficult to broach the subject of over-protecting children without ignorant boomers thundering into the conversation whining about “participation trophies” and how it was in their day, but those people have no interest in good-faith debate or empathy for their subjects. Arkangel shows a reality where a mother wraps a daughter in cotton wool but doesn’t suggest that that daughter is some snowflake archetype incapable of acting out, nor does it feel bull-headed or inconsiderate in its argument. Arkangel is a tragedy in that when this person is ruined it empathises with all involved.
Episode Three: Crocodile
Crocodile is a passable TV thriller but a wholly unnecessary Black Mirror episode. Unlike its brothers and sisters, it bears a plot where technology is so non-essential, it could easily be rearranged to be a non-sci-fi. At most, Crocodile says that more coercive interrogation methods may push criminals to more extreme means of evasion, but that goes without saying. In the course of its runtime, this episode has few new ideas, and it feels somewhat derivative of the Scandinavian murder mysteries which are all the rage among those deep into TV drama right now. The pacing at least keeps up an acceptable jog until the script rounds the corner into its third act and the investigation begins to feel like a functional exercise as insurance company agent Shatia is just going from A to B to fill in the blanks. I’m not sure if it says more about me or the episode that the single concept from it that I’ve thought about most is that robot pizza truck.
Episode Four: Hang the DJ
If Black Mirror feels unusually susceptible to pacing issues, it’s because it gives itself such a tight window to tell a story in. If a serialised TV show is a little ahead of itself or a little behind, it doesn’t matter too much because it can always course correct the next week. However, Black Mirror gets no more than sixty minutes to establish characters and a premise, get the ball rolling, play out a drama, and wrap things up neatly. Or in the case of Hang the DJ, it drags around the middle as the character slogs through his failed relationships and then skips the third act entirely. Good script-writing lets us see characters striving towards a well-defined goal, but there’s virtually no time between us understanding the goal of Amy and Frank and them achieving it. As soon as they work out that the dating app is a test to discover if they’ll leave the dating app, the story has concluded itself. It’s also a little harder to care about the Amy and Frank when we learn that they’re likely pages of unfeeling code but Hang the DJ still has a lot going for it.
There are many ways that Black Mirror could have phoned in a predictable, cringe-worthy commentary on dating sites but it’s one step ahead of us. Beyond just describing the malaise that people feel when subjected to the strings of failed dates, Hang the DJ also explores the frustration that we feel in being told to put our unquestioning trust in patented algorithms that we will never be allowed to see the workings of. The episode discusses our investment in hidden algorithms as akin to a faith in God as the dating app runs the community that Amy and Frank live in. With this electronic faith, as with all faiths before, the correct response is to abandon it for more tangible truths. In this case, that truth is the love which these two feel between them. At the same time, Hang the DJ isn’t asking for a complete abandonment of internet dating or use of software algorithms in our lives. Instead, it’s proposing what values we might have those algorithms weigh most highly. For Brooker, the ultimate test of love is whether two people will come together no matter the views of companies, technologies, or authorities. Maths is to be used to analyse relationships but never govern them. Hang the DJ is like a much more optimistic version of The Lobster.
Episode Five: Metalhead
Possibly my favourite of the bunch. Metalhead is no more complicated than it needs to be and while you could accuse it of lacking grounding in technological issues, the same way Crocodile did, I think you’d be wrong. Sure, Bella could be running from an animal or a guard instead of a robot, but neither of those things would have the gruesome arsenal or near-unlimited stamina of Metalhead’s “dog”. The dog also forces us to think about what we want the security systems of the future to look like. Machines built to protect privates assets already exist, and at some point, we’re going to have a discussion about what the acceptable amount of force is for a machine to use against a person. In another sense, the dog is about a future we have arrived at where so often the preservation of products is prioritised over human well-being. For as much as the other episodes of this series may hitch and stall, Metalhead is a tense, harrowing chase from beginning to end. It’s a Hitchcock for the electromechanical age.
Episode Six: The Black Museum
A nice touch in this episode is how it finds a format which feels like wandering through a museum. Being an anthology within itself, it has you drifting from curiosity to curiosity without any direct line between each of its exhibits, but with a theme tying them all together. The more overt theme is the transfer of consciousness, but each of the stories also plays with the concept of objectification: Doctor Dawson sexually objectifies his patients, Emily turns Carrie into a child’s plaything, and curator Rolo Haynes turns Clayton Leigh into souvenirs for the museum-goers. This leads on to an excellent third-act twist in which the framing device of Black Museum becomes the staging ground for a final horror.
I found the unscrupulous Haynes the most entertaining Black Mirror villain to date and yet I can’t help but feel this episode lacked the satirical edge that the programme is known for. As Zack Handlen noted over at The AV Club, Haynes is a symbol for Brooker. The two bear a physical resemblance, and while Brooker spends his time spinning dark yarns through the Black Mirror, Haynes spends his time telling chilling stories in the Black Museum. The episode plays like a goodbye from Brooker and co. perhaps motivated by the fear that there will be no more Black Mirror after this. The ending is Nish destroying the Black Museum, the stand-in for the show, and effectively killing off Haynes, the stand-in for Brooker.
I appreciate the devilish playfulness of this meta-narrative but notice that all other Black Mirror episodes either don’t have an explicit antagonist (e.g. Nosedive or Arkangel), play the general public or a crowd as the antagonist (e.g. The National Anthem or White Bear), or otherwise have their antagonist represent a kind of person in society (e.g. Men Against Fire or USS Callister). This is generally what lets the show comment on broad social trends as opposed to criticising purely fictional characters, but Haynes is perhaps the only example of the programme referencing a single real person with one of its antagonists. This would be okay if it felt like the programme had a criticism of Brooker to deliver, but we all know that unlike Haynes Brooker isn’t torturing real people. The episode is serving up food for thought over consciousness transfer technology which we may have to consider the downsides of in the relatively near future, but it’s more of a carnival attraction than a satirical essay. I also wonder if the eternal torture of Leigh and Haynes isn’t a bit much; less is usually more, but maybe that excess is part of the joke. As carnival attractions go, this one was quite dazzling.
Thanks for reading.
