BLACK MIRROR: Series Three ✭✭✭✭✩

‘NOSEDIVE’ ✭✭✭✭✭

I reviewed the premiere in greater detail over at Frame Rated:

I adored this episode. The idea isn’t completely fresh (Community did something very similar with “App Development and Condiments”), but the execution was sublime. The first half was dedicated to exploring this off-kilter world, and it was a treat to see just how plausible much of it seemed. The production design alone was worth watching this story for, being the kind of future one could imagine existing. The ranking system is, of course, an idea that exists today taken to an extreme, but we all know the feeling of seeing something you post to Facebook or Twitter failing to achieve many ‘Likes’ or ‘Retweets’ and how that can give you a depressed feeling. It’s not entirely ridiculous to imagine this technology of “Nosedive” coming about, to encourage positive behaviour in a population, and the nasty places that might lead.

Read my full review here.

‘PLAYTEST’ ✭✭✭✭✩

Again, I reviewed this one over at Frame Rated:

After the premiere’s intellectual depth and sophisticated storytelling, “Playtest” is far more of a straightforward crowd-pleaser with simpler intentions. It’s a haunted house story for the digital age, given a Black Mirror twist that delivers a twist on The Cabin in the Woods taking place entirely inside the imagination of one player. The idea behind this episode is a great deal of fun, and Russell ensures his character behaves realistically to every freaky encounter, so you can really put yourself in his shoes as the tension rises and the night becomes a living nightmare. The gradual buildup is also expertly handled by Brooker, beginning with an “invisible spider” crawling across the carpet, before escalating to creepy “holograms” of childhood bullies, and tearing the face off a knife-wielding attacker to expose a skull lathered in crimson blood.

Read my full review here.

‘SHUT UP AND DANCE’ ✭✭✭✩✩

This was the first episode that felt apiece with the previous two Black Mirror runs, mainly because it was wholly British in terms of the casting and location. We followed the agonising misadventure of teenager Kenny (the incredible Alex Lawther), who became the victim of a frightening hack when he was secretly recorded masturbating to porn, with the culprits threatening to release the embarrassing video unless he perform various tasks. As the story developed, we came to realise these unseen hackers have numerous people under their thumb, delivering packages around town and ultimately being asked to commit crimes in order to keep their dirty little secrets private.

The great thing about “Shut Up and Dance” is how the threat wasn’t anything too extraordinary, as it would be perfectly feasible for this to happen today. I actually know someone who believed (perhaps wrongly) that they’d been recorded masturbating by a “cam girl”, and sent the people threatening to post the video on Facebook some money. That seemed to be the end of the matter, luckily, and perhaps it was an empty threat from people targeting hundreds of people a day, but it just goes to show how real the leverage behind this episode is.

Unfortunately, the reason for my average rating for this episode (I know it’s a favourite for some), is that I didn’t find Kenny’s exploits to be anywhere near as clever or surprising as I was hoping they’d be. It all got suitably nasty towards the end, but the late twist — where the moral fibre of Kenny himself was upended, transforming him from hero to villain — felt too tacked on. I wasn’t surprised to learn afterwards that “Shut Up and Dance” had numerous different endings planned, before Charlie Brooker chose this particular one, and for me it wasn’t cleverly foreshadowed enough.

‘SAN JUNIPERO’ ✭✭✭✭✩

The danger with some episodes of Black Mirror is you’re ultimately trying to predict what kind of technological nightmare’s being cooked up. “San Junipero” courted that kind of theorising more than most, as there was almost nothing about it that felt like it deserved to be part of this series — beyond some brief early moments playing the ’80s arcade version of Bubble Bobble. Here, we followed the unlikely courtship of virginal geek Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and “bodacious” party girl Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in a nightclub along the beautiful coast of the titular town. It was enjoyable because those actresses are very charismatic and the ’80s vibe was perfectly reproduced (helped enormously by a clever playlist of music tracks), but I couldn’t help wondering what was really going on at all times… and my initial thought of “virtual reality” wasn’t far off the mark.

To spoil things, we eventually learned that Yorkie and Kelly are actually two elderly women in the near-future (the former close to death in a coma, the latter just very sick), who are both easing their suffering with a VR device that lets them experience sun-kissed nostalgia for the years 1980-2002. Going deeper, ‘San Junipero’ has also become a virtual afterlife for society, where dying people upload their consciousness and live out their days in perpetual happiness with youthful complexions. Well, until the huge computer mainframe gets turned off or destroyed.

It’s a good idea, but one that took awhile to be revealed, then I found my interest in the story started to wane once the ‘twist’ had been revealed halfway through, and ultimately the story seemed to overstay its welcome by about 10 minutes. However, Davis and Mbatha-Raw kept my interest alive because they had a fun chemistry and a relationship you could really believe in, and the location shooting was beautiful. It was also that rarest of things: a Black Mirror episode that didn’t leave you wailing into the abyss, as the ending was beautifully ambiguous.

‘MEN AGAINST FIRE’ ✭✭✭✩✩

For awhile, this story about a newly recruited soldier called “Stripe” (Malachi Kirby) patrolling a desolate countryside with cohorts “Ray” (Madeline Brewer) and Medina (Sarah Snook), didn’t feel like a typical Black Mirror — although the presence of a high-tech brain implant called MASS (which overlays graphics to each soldier’s vision, aiding targeting and intelligence gathering) delivered enough of a hook to draw you in.

However, the first half was pretty formulaic and the kind of thing we’ve seen done many times before in dystopian sci-fi, with Stripe and his team cleaning up “roaches” (mutated humans, created by the detonation of a biological weapon). I’ve seen lots of sci-fi war movies in my time, and “Men Against Fire” presented itself as a fairly humdrum one for half its runtime. Fortunately, the reveal of a deeper strangeness managed to pull things back, when it became clear that MASS is creating a false overlay on reality — enabling soldiers to kill “monsters” who are actually normal people the state want exterminated. It then became an interesting take on the idea of conditioning soldiers for warfare, encapsulated by a speech from a pro-eugenics doctor (Michael Kelly) about how WWII soldiers only killed 15–20% of their enemy. A standout scene using knowledge taken from a 1947 book by Brigadier General S.L.A Marshall, which inspired this episode: Men Against Fire — The Problem of Battle Command.

This hour made me think about the philosophy behind warfare, and how the state trains ordinary people to kill, but it was disappointing and heavy-handed in most other respects. It didn’t help that it felt quite low-budget and built around a thin idea, plus it wasted the excellent Sarah Snook with a marginal role.