What part? That the government behaved like the Nazis’ dehumanization of the Jews?
Another vote for San Junipero. A beautiful hour of TV.
I voted “Men Against Fire.” I was in the military and the concept of killing others without thinking really resonated with me.
In fact, it gave me flashbacks to the existential crisis I had seven years after my last deployment.
I 98% agree, but I wonder if I’m alone in thinking that “Be Right Back” (S2E1) turned out to be pretty happy/uplifting by the end? Not at the level of “San Junipero” or anything. But by the end, the main character has definitely achieved catharsis.
(And maybe “Nosedive” had a semi-happy ending too, I guess.)
PS: a lot of people seem to rate “The National Anthem” pretty poorly, but it’s still one of my faves - partly because it, again, stands out from other episodes, this time in terms of how it uses the genre conventions of the political thriller with no sci-fi elements at all.)
ETA: also, it plays a batshit-crazy and darkly funny premise completely straight.
Yes. After watching the series, I did my standard look through various discussions, and saw quite a few people who considered the non-soldiers prejudice against the ‘roaches’ to be a plot hole, rather than part of the Nazi allegory.
I’ve only seen the first ep from season 1, which was a solid hour of WTF???(in a good way 
) and the first 3 eps of season 3. I think I liked *Nosedive *the best, if for no other reason than Bryce Dallas Howard’s performance. San Junipero started off great but fizzled out in a pfffft of predictability and twee. Shut up and Dance held my interest the most but apparently not as much as I thought since I had to be told that the lead character really was a pedo - or rather, he was watching kiddie porn :smack: .No doubt the fault in that case is mine but that ending could have been a lot more effective if it had been revealed a bit more clearly.
Black Mirror isn’t always been science fiction. After all “The National Anthem” and “The Waldo Moment” can happen at present as well.
My ranking:
San Junipero
Hated in the Nation
Nosedive
Men Against Fire
Shut up and Dance
Playtest
San Junipero is the first thing to make me cry in a VERY VERY long time. It hit close to home in a lot of aspects of my life at the moment.
I was wondering about that claim, too. If no one was shooting at each other, how did so many millions die?
The ending of “Be Right Back” is not as bleak and hopeless as many (most?) Black Mirror episode endings are, but I don’t find it either happy or uplifting, and I don’t think that Haley Atwell’s character has achieved catharsis.
She’s obviously indulging her daughter, letting her go up in the attic. But while her daughter is up there, Haley is standing below, listening with a pained look. She then composes herself, forces herself to put on a more pleasant face, and reluctantly goes up to join them in the attic.
She’s not as wrecked as she was when she was ordering the duplicate to throw itself off a cliff, but she obviously hasn’t come to terms with the situation yet. Her emotions are just less raw, after the years. I don’t really think “and she lived thereafter in slightly less misery” meets my criteria for an uplifting ending.
I guess it was a happy ending for the daughter: she got extra cake.
In fairness to Marshall,
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You actually can explain that; most soldiers in the World Wars killed in action were killed by bombardment. Movies show small arms fire a lot, but it’s artillery that kills men. Artillery is the red god of war. It makes for bad movies but it’s how modern wars are fought. What killed most German soldiers as the Allies and Soviets ground them down was the incredible superiority of Allied and Soviet artillery. If you read accounts of the Battle of the Falaise Gap, the carnage wrought by artillery and aerial bombardment is stomach-churning.
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It is almost certainly the case that many men did not fire their weapons or, if they did, made little effort to hit anyone. It just wasn’t as high as Marshall claimed.
Marshall’s methods were extraordinarily unscientific and his story and numbers were suspiciously prone to change, and his findings so contrary to common sense that, really, he is making an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, and he doesn’t have it.
Another facctor in the popularity of Marshall’s findings, I suspect, is the eternal frustration generals have always had in their ability to kill the enemy despite using massive volumes of ammunition. In World War I the artillery used was of a volume orders of magnitude greater than any war and it SEEMED like it should have broken any line, but it just didn’t. In World War II they threw even more at each other and the other side kept refusing to die. If you’re the general who knows the Third Army consumed 7.9 billion rounds of ammo, it’s kind of hard to emotionally understand how there are still Germans to kill.
But in practice, your men can be blasting away as best they can, and they’re just going to miss. Men under fire become very good at taking cover, and find it awfully hard to aim carefully while taking cover. It takes a tremendous volume of fire to have any sort of measurable effect.