Black Mirror - Dark Sci Fi Anthology Drama

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SkeletonBias420 dijo:
How come everyone living in Iceland is British?
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I just started watching it, fifteen minutes in the first episode and it strongly comes off like a bargain bin Twilight Zone that uses edginess to cover up the mediocre writing. A wimpy guy who bullies sims of his coworkers in a vidya game? This shit has the run time of a feature length film, I hope it's worth the hype.

So I'm to the point where weirdo programmer raids an employee's trash can for DNA and he shoves it inside so sort of DNA scanner box that looks eerily similar to a 3D printer. Somehow, the DNA scanned by this thing somehow, not only calibrated her personality correctly, but it retrieved the employee's memories because she remembers the crew from the real world but the others say they wouldn't have a way to. So I'm not really even thirty minutes in and this show is already breaking science fact over its knee like a florescent bulb.

The only thing this show is good for is riffing on it. Nitpick mode, initiated.

So I'm to the point now where the other NPCs explain that they're stuck in a No Mouth & I Must Scream ripoff and the AM stand-in even erases the protagonist's face, almost like it's a direct reference to Harlan Ellison, almost. The protagonist NPC can't breath and the AM stand-in holds it over her that he can keep her suffocating forever. I have no earthly idea what breathing could actually mean to a computer program but there you have it.

Now it turns out nobody in the game universe has genitals because the AM stand-in programmed them that way. I feel like I should be confused by that but I'm not.

Then the protagonist NPC hacks their way to making the game online, although one has to question how or why the game is running when AM closed it out on his computer, unless he designed it to just play itself in the background while he's not actively running it, which apparently seems to be the case although it's not explicitly said to be. Then there's the question of how an AI inside a vidya could alter its own code when it's not meant to and how it could even access the code from an in-game keyboard. Computer AI isn't like bacteria in a petri dish, you don't leave and come back and it's completely different from how you left it.

Then there's this.
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GET AWAY FROM THAT INTERNET, I'M CUTTING IT DOWN!
Just so you know, there was a Matrix fan theory that Zion was a facet of the Matrix that came about when Neo killed a sentinel with his mind at the end of the second movie. I'm bringing this up because that appears to be the ending this SyFy original is aiming for and I am fully anticipating it, because that's the only way you could feasibly cover up all the impossibilities going on in this show.

So Daly, the name of the AM stand-in, just logged into the game from his work computer, even though it was earlier established that it was isolated on his home computer. I'm guessing he hacked his way into his own PC, but since that's not explicitly made clear, my better judgment says that the writers forgot all about that and just power gamed their own script.

So instead of investigating how the NPC of his homebrewed vidya was able to send a message in a bottle through a closed system to his coworker, he punishes one NPC for coming to the defense of another by transforming it into a tyrannid and having the other NPCs drop it off on a barren planet. He then leaves without patching the major security hole that allowed his NPCs to contact the outside world.

Well as it turns out, the game was never isolated at all, evidenced by a game patch being uploaded to their servers that takes on the shape of a wormhole in-game. Why it wouldn't just apply automatically without making it an in-game event is beyond me, but now the NPCs have deduced that flying into the wormhole would cause their modded ship to get rebuffed by the firewall and them deleted. Firewalls do not delete things, they block them. This also begs the question how nobody in the game has stumbled on either them or the autonomous NPCs that Daly created, or if it hasn't happened for that matter.

At this point, my expectations for a twist ending that accounts for all the stupid shit that's happening are mounting quite high. We'll see.

So there's one NPC who is a holdout on the plan, he describes that Daly 'cloned' his son into the game, only to throw it out of an airlock so the NPC could watch his son die in outer space. The NPC then elaborates that Daly could just reclone them at any time if they were to self-delete and Daly would potentially take it out on NPC's son over and over again. Never mind that the NPCs are aware they're not real and that it doesn't matter if they're cloned again or not since self-deleting would mean their personal continuity of events would cease to exist, making it a waste of Daly's time because the fresh NPCs wouldn't remember their history with him. Not to mention they're also aware that as computer programs that they're not real so nothing that happens to them is of any real world consequence, ergo so what if they're cloned again anyway? Why not do it, just to spit in the face of Daly?

So they somehow make contact with one of Daly's coworkers and blackmail her with her nudes on a cloud server, because of course. The individual complies, breaks into Daly's apartment, swipes his DNA swabs and fucks off while he's off getting pizza. He comes back to find his crew just ditched him on some planet and they're trying to travel to the blagho'. All of this depends on getting a hold of his transponder while he's at his door getting pizza. Apparently he doesn't have the ability to just teleport himself onto the his modded ship even with the transporter and he has to find some stranded ship on the planet that conveniently just works because vidya.

So they all go through the wormhole and instead of just getting blocked or deleted, the mods are shaved off and they're given default skins. Meanwhile, the modded game gets erased by the patch instead of just reskinned, because reasons. Also, how does the patch delete the game off of Daly's computer?

Then the dumbest of all dumb things happens. Up until this point, it's been established that Daly's transponder is the source of his control, it goes when he goes and nothing happens unless it's being used. While his copy of the game is being deleted, he keeps attempting to exit out and nothing happens until he's deleted. Instead of being instantly kicked out, he's locked in, instantly turning him into a perma-vegetable, which makes no fucking sense. The whole episode revolves around describing him as a genius programmer but he didn't develop any redundancies to prevent this scenario from happening? He can't exit the game unless a set of special requirements are fulfilled that allow him to do it? If his copy of the game has been erased, why wouldn't he just be kicked back to the OS? Why wouldn't he be able to use administrative tools to close the program, even if his brain is being projected into the game?

So there was no twist ending, it was dumber than I anticipated. People like this show? Is every episode this elementary?
 
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There's a cold, almost clinically drugged tone underlying every episode of this series. If that tone had a corresponding aesthetic it would be a wall of white paneled plastic in a cold, clean room. I can't really explain it another way. There's this plastic late 90's star trek feel to some of the sets that reminds me of stuff like Outer Limits, but BM takes it a step further with modern editing & effects. The music, the user interfaces, the design of things and what the language of that design says to me about that universe is what gets under my skin.
That dehumanizing cold plastic feeling is what scares me about this show. Watching it is like bathing in that vibe and it irks me more than any of the plot lines do.
 
So I've watched three new episodes, they're all so bare bones that I'm not going to make individual posts describing them because there's barely anything plotwise to cover.

Arkangel
You remember those tracker chips parents got for their kids during the Bush era? Remember parental controls on your computer and cable package? Yeah, those were gay. What if we made it more gay by putting it in your brain? That's essentially Arkangel in a nutshell. Not a bad concept but the pacing is so slow. It's like a fifty minute episode that only really has enough content to make up maybe fifteen minutes.

The way the censorship bit works is that it blurs your vision anytime you see something that increases your cortisol. The kid in the movie episode gets fed up with being denied seeing anything the least bit gritty her whole life and naturally, the whole of the internet. Oddly enough, though, the censorship happens instantly without her having to observe it first even though it's supposed to be reactionary. One thing I've noticed about Black Mirror is that the only internal consistency it has is an absence of internal consistency.

The kid slashes her wrist to see blood because her implant prevents her from seeing 'violent' cartoons she drew as she draws them. She should've filled the blood splatter with green instead of red. Her mom storms in when her tablet alerts her that she's doing the dance of the emo cutter girl. Later the mom is seen interviewing a psychiatrist & she asks him if it's an autism thing, like you do. The psychiatrist just tells her "No, turn off that blurry vision and stop being a helicopter parent." This is where things lose even more internal consistency than before, the psych tells her that Arkangel was shelved years ago anyway so it's obsolete to keep using it anyway. This is where I raise my hand and ask "If the Arkangel company was shut down, how does the implant and tablet still work without a server or satellite to go between and manage it?" They weren't dumb enough to suggest it's a direct connection from A to B were they? How does it work long distance if it's not connected to any satellite? The average wifi connection stops working when you walk five feet away from the modem.

So the mom shuts off the parental controls and of course the sheltered kid dives deep into all things internet with the help of her white trash boyfriend who introduces her to ISIS beheading videos. Eventually the duo grow up into teenagers and captain white trash buys a windowless van to start selling his criminal contraband out of which results in them fucking in his fan & doing coke.

As it turns out, the two teens lied to their parents about where they'd be that night, so mom breaks out the Arkangel tablet and spies on her kid and gets a front row optical view of the scumbag's pizza/OH! hybrid face as his ejaculate spews all over and blocks her view, only to realize that's not cum, it's a very different kind of blow. So naturally the mom feeds her kid some preg-away pills which causes her to vomit in class, leading her to find out that the Arkangel has been recommissioned when she digs through the trash for the box of infanticide.

When the teenager gets her hands on the tablet, mom walks into the room and there's a fight. The blurred vision gets turned back on and whatsherface beats in her mom's face and doesn't stop until the blurred vision turns itself off from the tablet being used as a bludgeon. Upon seeing her mom's caved in skull, the teenager runs away and never says goodbye, hitching a ride from a trucker out of town and presumably into bits and pieces out of a dumpster after the trucker has his fill of her. Mom picks up her grey matter and runs into the street screaming for her kid by name which I forgot mere minutes after watching the episode.

Crocodil
No, this episode isn't about Desomorphine, that's krokodil. I have no idea why it's called that. What happens here is a couple of Europeans do a hit-&-body dump-&-run on their way home from a rave. The woman wants to call an ambulance and the guy wants to dump the body because they're both high as kites and killed a guy, so that outcome is insta-prison and guy is too in the habit of dropping bass to risk dropping soap. So they wrap the guy up in a sleeping bag and throw him into a lake.

Years later and the woman has become an award winning architect and has her own family. Meanwhile the guy who hit the bicyclist with his car became a loser and pays the woman a visit at a hotel room to tell her that he's thinking of telling the dead bicyclist's wife that they killed her husband. This of course boils over into an emotional argument that results in a new murder, guy getting impaled with a broken wine bottle, shuffled off into the back seat of her car and dumped into a manhole at some construction site.

Turns out, some dude got hit by a self-driving car while crossing the street and the police are going around scanning people's memories with a little pin attached to a square that you stick into a person's temple. I'm sure that's realistic. They first go to the guy who got hit by the car to collect his memories, then eye witnesses, then finally our very own little serial killer. She tries her best to recall the memories of the guy getting hit with the micro machine of god without recalling her own murder. She fails and the lady doing the brain scans sees flashes of the murder happening on her monitor. She gets nervous and tries to leave discreetly and quickly, doing a shitty job of it and giving away that she knows instantly, causing serial killer girl to follow, bash in the investigator's window and abduct the investigator. The investigator swears up and down she'd never rat out the serial killer and serial killer be like "Bitch, that's hostage negotiating 101". The serial killer sticks the brain scan needle into the investigator's head and as it turns out, she told her husband she was gonna be at serial killer's place.

So she kills the investigator, goes to her house and bashes the husband's skull in with a ball point hammer from behind. She then goes to the hallway and spots an infant standing in a crib with the door open. Since the kid can't talk but sees her anyway, serial killer girl's gotta take him out too because his brain can be scanned for what he saw. Turns out, the kid was blind so the murder was pointless, (they can scan your brain for specific memories but they can't fix dysfunctional eyes?) but it also turns out there was a pet hamster just behind the kid who witnessed the whole thing and yes that is how retarded it gets. They scan the hamster's brain with a tool meant for the human hippocampus & presumably pick up the serial killer girl at her son's play at his school. I think.

The whole hamster witness thing is kind of dumb and I refuse to believe it, honestly. It's established early on that the brain scanner only really works at its best when the subject has their memory jogged with stimuli, exhibit A being that the guy who got hit by the pizza truck said he smelled alcohol before getting hit because he was near a bar and the investigator jogs his memory by giving him a beer bottle to sniff from that bar. How exactly did they achieve that with a rodent? This episode is notably more internally consistent and interesting in the way the rules works because it's not nearly as fast and loose with the internal rules as Arkangel was until the very end with the hamster. It also feels like they did a tiny bit of medical research before diving all in with just the bare bones concept since the investigator jogs people's memories with smells. That ending was just dumb though.

A big complaint I have with Black Mirror thus far is that it's extremely slow & boring. Right before the architect serial killer girl kills the baby, there's a long pause where the camera is just fixed on her looking over the kid. This moment would've been powerful if it weren't for the fact that every scene is shot with long, lingering standstills like that. There is so much dead space between each event of every episode that I wish I could watch an abridged version instead. The first episode was a complete joke and tried to frame camp as sinister but spilled its spaghetti all over the place so now each succeeding episode has to be as sterile & clinical in its approach as possible.

Hang the DJ
Yet another episode with a nonsensical title, this one apparently just being a reference to a song from the episode itself. This one is a straight up just the Lobster directed by Yorgos Lanthimos with a black paint job. Thankfully, all the painful awkwardness from that movie was drained out of this movie. It's a dystopian society with a wall built around it and as a citizen of this society you are obligated to date people through a mandatory dating app that uses machine learning to determine your mate for life. This one is much more impressive in my book just because it feels much more structured and thought out.

So two people date each other for 24 hours, break up and they're scheduled to date other people of up to a year, those fall through and then they're reassigned to each other for about five years. One thing established at the beginning is that if you want to know how much time you've got with a partner, you both have to look at it at once using the circular handheld device that schedules all the dates you're going to be on. If you look at it by yourself, it'll reschedule you to an obscenely shorter amount of time. Boyfriend let's girlfriend in on this and she's pissed and they break it off. Another round on the merry go-round of dating again and it's revealed that their ultimate 100% match soul mate is coming up next and as a psychological boon, they both get to say goodbye to a previous significant other, so they choose each other and undermine the system by fleeing for the wall. Turns out, the whole thing was just a simulation for a regular dating phone app anyway.

Again this episode is significantly better than the previous three in my opinion & does a significantly better job of keeping me awake at the wheel. I can't find too much to complain about, honestly. The internal consistency doesn't break itself nor is it really scientifically illiterate either. For once the concept was actually supported with some strength by the story telling.
 
AKA The Outer Limits Special Edition
 
I haven't seen Smithereens yet but holy shit the other 2 are pretty bad imo

Edit: After watching Smithereens it was the best of the bunch which isn't saying too much sadly. But I'd say it's at least worth a viewing or two
 
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Dirt McGirt dijo:
I haven't seen Smithereens yet but holy shit the other 2 are pretty bad imo

Edit: After watching Smithereens it was the best of the bunch which isn't saying too much sadly. But I'd say it's at least worth a viewing or two
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The only one that was kinda ok was the Britney Spears one. The rest kinda bored me to tears.
 
I am afraid to ask, but I need to know before I waste several hours in the new season, especially since the last season was really disappointing, in parts.

How much "fuck Drumpf!" is there?
 
The first episode of the first season was the best episode of the series. Its amazing how popular this show got and maintained that, when it completely started shitting the bed when Netflix became involved. Less than half the episodes in S3 match the quality from S1/2. San Junipero being the highlight of the show in terms of recognition really speaks to how embarrassing the audience they're after is at this point. S4 I think Metalhead was the only one that I liked, the ending with the bear was dumb but compared to everything else at least the rest of the episode was really focused. The trailer for S5 made it look like they've completely run out of ideas and aren't even attempting to try something new.
 
ProfDongs dijo:
The first episode of the first season was the best episode of the series. Its amazing how popular this show got and maintained that, when it completely started shitting the bed when Netflix became involved. Less than half the episodes in S3 match the quality from S1/2. San Junipero being the highlight of the show in terms of recognition really speaks to how embarrassing the audience they're after is at this point. S4 I think Metalhead was the only one that I liked, the ending with the bear was dumb but compared to everything else at least the rest of the episode was really focused. The trailer for S5 made it look like they've completely run out of ideas and aren't even attempting to try something new.
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They're going back to 3-episode seasons which should speak volumes.
 
This show has had some undeniably thought-provoking and excellent episodes. I do agree that its cold, clinical tone usually works to its advantage, but that also just seems to be a trend in British cinema right now (Death of Stalin was good but that gray filter over the whole thing was nasty and distracting).

Its also had some of the stupidest fucking shit I have ever seen in my entire life. To the point where I have to wonder if some of the crap episodes are Charlie Brooker's sense of humor as an edgy comedian coming through. Either way, I appreciate that the Britfag version of The Twilight Zone was made by this gentleman:

 
Dreamland dijo:
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Is it gay to fuck another man in VR even if he's your homie?

If you would, would you be the guy or the girl?
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That shit is really unrealistic. Like, two straight guys who are friends wouldn't do that at all. Maybe if they'd both been girls in game and did kinky lesbian sex I could maybe see it? Cuz there's plenty of weirdos who RP lesbians with other men (Maybe when they don't know each other are men) but knowingly banging a dude online when you're an actual dude? I don't buy it. IIRC from stats I read once from Mass Effect 2 and 3 gamer dudes rarely do the female romances while playing women characters unless they can romance another woman.

Also the episode basically said nothing? It didn't really question anything in an interesting way even if it was attempting to and it's clear they wanted to pander to the gender sexual fluid crowd too and it left a gross taste in my mouth.

It's like they didn't really understand games either...And looking at original Black Mirror versus this shit? Is painful.

'Wot if we kissed in a vidya gaem?'
 
Black Mirror really went downhill following season 3. While the show lacked the simplicity, imagination, and brevity of the twilight zone it was still an interesting anthology and it’s always nice to see anthologies on TV. Following (and arguably starting with season 3) the show began to get really obvious with its themes to point where you could guess an episodes plot by just reading what tech was in it which may have worked in a nice snappy 20 minutes but dragged out to 40 minutes to an hour and it jus becomes a chore. “Woah helicopter parenting bad. Woah being fake on social media bad. Woah online dating fake and not real love.”. The last really good black Mirror episode was Metalhead as that was just a simple old school horror story that didn’t bonk you over the head with its themes.
 
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