Black Mirror (Netflix, Season 4)
Mar. 13th, 2018 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWhat if phones, but more so?
"USS Callister" – Upon reflection, the Black Mirror universe is full of the laziest damn programmers. “Oh, I don’t want to code systems to do various tasks. I guess I’ll just clone human minds and torture them into compliance.” (The idea of using DNA to clone someone’s mind into a computer simulation is ludicrous, of course.) This ended much more happily than I would have expected; in fact, pretty much every bit of happy ending you could ask for is crammed into it. And I did enjoy the nods to classic Trek; they were clearly included with love.
As a side note, it’s lovely to see Cristin Milioti still getting work. She went to high school with my wife.
"Arkangel" – This is an episode about the dangers of helicopter parenting, dressed up with some extra technology. All the standard, “if you censor what your kids see they’ll search those things out” which then devolves into “Mom gets addicted to spying but apparently can’t talk to her daughter.“ Because really, if she’d been willing to open her goddamn mouth and say, “I couldn’t find you and panicked, so I went for the old Arkangel tablet. I shouldn’t have, but you also shouldn’t have lied to me. Let’s talk,” the rest of the episode wouldn’t have happened. I had other thoughts about the ending, but then a nurse delivers the line, “The emergency contraception pill for terminating a pregnancy.” AGHVREGH. THOSE. ARE. NOT. THE. SAME. THINGS. (The fact that the woman who directed the episode, and the two women who performed the scene didn’t call the idiot writer on this shit…well, I just hope he got plenty of hate mail for it.)
"Crocodile" – In a world where insurance companies and police have the legal right to search your memories if you’ve witnessed a crime or accident, the best story they could come up with to tell was…a crazy serial killer who was trying to eliminate all of her witnesses? Just blow past all the issues of civil liberties (apparently warrants and subpoenas are a thing of the past in this world) and the vagaries of memory (a guy remembers a coat wrong so it’s wrong on the video, but facial recognition from his memories is enough to compel testimony?), so you can watch somebody murder a lot? Bah; bad storytelling and bad speculative fiction.
"Hang the DJ" – What if OKCupid could completely control your dating life, including telling you exactly how long your relationship would last? (Note, not predicting: Commanding.) The first half-hour raises interesting questions about the necessity and predictability of unpleasant relationships and one-night stands and ends exactly where you'd think, but apparently that wasn't enough material for a full episode. So then they go all Orpheus and Eurydice. But that's still not enough, so they we fall back on this series' old sausage, they're all computer simulations that we're torturing for the benefit of the real world. It's a shame they hadn't ended on the first or second twist; those would have been more poignant.
"Metalhead" – A post-apocalyptic future where a woman and two men are trying to retrieve something from a warehouse, but end up at the mercy of a robotic “dog” that relentlessly hunts and kills people. Why do these dogs exist? Were they weapons, robotic servants gone haywire, alien monsters? We never find out. This is sci-fi survival horror in the vein of Predator or Terminator, without much nuance.
"Black Museum" – In a dusty roadside attraction that attempts to put many stand-alone episodes into the same universe, we have a similar structure to “White Christmas,” in which first a doctor who can feel others' pain gets addicted to it; then a man learns that having his comatose wife put into his head is a terrible idea; then finally we see a man on death row get...you guessed it, turned into a computer simulation that gets tortured! (I have no idea if the racial issues of the third story were intended or not—I can't give them credit for that kind of deep cleverness at this point.) The middle story was the one I found the most interesting, though it was another plot that came down to adults who were unable to speak to each other like adults. Clearly there were no safeguards, no fine print, and no attempt at thinking this through, but I like to think I'd think about, “She'll be in my head 24/7? That might make shitting awkward.” If you're going to be behind someone's eyes, you need to be able to accept that you're just a passenger and can't play “thought police.” And the stuffed monkey thing was just pure cruelty—the kids was, what, five? He was old enough to understand something like, “You know how mommy's ghost was in my head? Now it's in this doll, so take good care of it, okay?”
Overall: I can never quite decide how socially-aware the writer is, but usually settle on “He's trying, but is rather inept and has big honkin' blind spots.” Also, he needs a new schtick besides, “And then we made digital clones of people and tortured them.”
"USS Callister" – Upon reflection, the Black Mirror universe is full of the laziest damn programmers. “Oh, I don’t want to code systems to do various tasks. I guess I’ll just clone human minds and torture them into compliance.” (The idea of using DNA to clone someone’s mind into a computer simulation is ludicrous, of course.) This ended much more happily than I would have expected; in fact, pretty much every bit of happy ending you could ask for is crammed into it. And I did enjoy the nods to classic Trek; they were clearly included with love.
As a side note, it’s lovely to see Cristin Milioti still getting work. She went to high school with my wife.
"Arkangel" – This is an episode about the dangers of helicopter parenting, dressed up with some extra technology. All the standard, “if you censor what your kids see they’ll search those things out” which then devolves into “Mom gets addicted to spying but apparently can’t talk to her daughter.“ Because really, if she’d been willing to open her goddamn mouth and say, “I couldn’t find you and panicked, so I went for the old Arkangel tablet. I shouldn’t have, but you also shouldn’t have lied to me. Let’s talk,” the rest of the episode wouldn’t have happened. I had other thoughts about the ending, but then a nurse delivers the line, “The emergency contraception pill for terminating a pregnancy.” AGHVREGH. THOSE. ARE. NOT. THE. SAME. THINGS. (The fact that the woman who directed the episode, and the two women who performed the scene didn’t call the idiot writer on this shit…well, I just hope he got plenty of hate mail for it.)
"Crocodile" – In a world where insurance companies and police have the legal right to search your memories if you’ve witnessed a crime or accident, the best story they could come up with to tell was…a crazy serial killer who was trying to eliminate all of her witnesses? Just blow past all the issues of civil liberties (apparently warrants and subpoenas are a thing of the past in this world) and the vagaries of memory (a guy remembers a coat wrong so it’s wrong on the video, but facial recognition from his memories is enough to compel testimony?), so you can watch somebody murder a lot? Bah; bad storytelling and bad speculative fiction.
"Hang the DJ" – What if OKCupid could completely control your dating life, including telling you exactly how long your relationship would last? (Note, not predicting: Commanding.) The first half-hour raises interesting questions about the necessity and predictability of unpleasant relationships and one-night stands and ends exactly where you'd think, but apparently that wasn't enough material for a full episode. So then they go all Orpheus and Eurydice. But that's still not enough, so they we fall back on this series' old sausage, they're all computer simulations that we're torturing for the benefit of the real world. It's a shame they hadn't ended on the first or second twist; those would have been more poignant.
"Metalhead" – A post-apocalyptic future where a woman and two men are trying to retrieve something from a warehouse, but end up at the mercy of a robotic “dog” that relentlessly hunts and kills people. Why do these dogs exist? Were they weapons, robotic servants gone haywire, alien monsters? We never find out. This is sci-fi survival horror in the vein of Predator or Terminator, without much nuance.
"Black Museum" – In a dusty roadside attraction that attempts to put many stand-alone episodes into the same universe, we have a similar structure to “White Christmas,” in which first a doctor who can feel others' pain gets addicted to it; then a man learns that having his comatose wife put into his head is a terrible idea; then finally we see a man on death row get...you guessed it, turned into a computer simulation that gets tortured! (I have no idea if the racial issues of the third story were intended or not—I can't give them credit for that kind of deep cleverness at this point.) The middle story was the one I found the most interesting, though it was another plot that came down to adults who were unable to speak to each other like adults. Clearly there were no safeguards, no fine print, and no attempt at thinking this through, but I like to think I'd think about, “She'll be in my head 24/7? That might make shitting awkward.” If you're going to be behind someone's eyes, you need to be able to accept that you're just a passenger and can't play “thought police.” And the stuffed monkey thing was just pure cruelty—the kids was, what, five? He was old enough to understand something like, “You know how mommy's ghost was in my head? Now it's in this doll, so take good care of it, okay?”
Overall: I can never quite decide how socially-aware the writer is, but usually settle on “He's trying, but is rather inept and has big honkin' blind spots.” Also, he needs a new schtick besides, “And then we made digital clones of people and tortured them.”
