I wasn’t even aware that they’d set a release date, but lo and behold I’ve just been notified that the season has just dropped on Netflix.
I’m just now watching the beginning of the first episode, “USS Callister”, which appears to revolve around a VR Star Trek TOS homage.
Let’s assume spoilers are fair game from this point forward.
Damn. I really need to catch up with this show. I was hooked the moment I watched the episode about social media and "likes’. That episode creeped me right the hell out.
So, episode 1: “USS Callister”.This is a double-length episode that, with commercials, would fill a 2-hour time slot on American TV. At its heart, this episode is really about two things which are sort of related. One, the quiet despair of the working-class bloke who’s underappreciated by his bosses and doesn’t know how to deal with his coworkers. Two, the hatred and toxic masculine revenge fantasies that have made themselves manifest in the age of Trump.
Daly created the entire VR game Callister Inc. has made its money on, but he feels like he’s been cast aside by the money man who runs the company. He fantasizes about a world where he’s in charge and all the people who’ve put him down have to answer to him instead. (Haven’t we all?) The difference is, he has the power to put that plan into motion, and so he effectively kidnaps and mind-rapes all the people who’ve committed real or imaginary slights against him and turned them into his servants in a fantasy world where he’s the one in charge. As harmless as he seems in the real world, he’s undeniably a villain in the world he creates. Perhaps that’s a commentary on how anyone can become evil if the social restraints on and consequences of their behavior are removed.
There were points where I thought they were going to go for the darkest possible ending and have him win in the end, but the VR versions of his coworkers managed to win out in the end even if by underhanded means (which opens up a whole side question about the morality of revenge porn and/or suicide.) The ending bit where it seems that the crew of the Callister have wound up on a typical EVE Online server was good for a chuckle.
It bothered me at times to hear some of the British actors attempting to imitate American accents, and with the mix of voices I wasn’t sure whether this episode was supposed to be set in the US or the UK.
Stellar overall, and looking forward to watching the rest of the season over the next few days.
That is one of the least creepy ones, you are in for a treat.
So far I’ve seen 3 episodes, I’m watching a fourth right now.
Binged all of it. Overall great. The last episode was pretty cool in there the museum had little bites from other episodes all throughout.
I just watched episodes 1 and 2. Good stuff.
Someone told me that all season 4 episodes have female protagonists. Is this true?
I missed that one. If a mod wants to combine these or close this go ahead.
I’ve seen four episodes so far. Of them, three have a female protagonist but the fourth I saw had two main characters (male and female).
Oh my fuck.
Ha ha.
Yeah got through ep one and started ep 2.
Also thought they’d go dark along the lines of the Harlan Ellison “I have no mouth and I must scream” short story and happy the good guys won this time but the basic themes seem to be getting rehashed here. Yeah yeah sentient avatars being tortured potentially forever. Again.
Even the first bit I saw of ep two calls back on the blocking out of what is not wanted to be seen by well intended parental control. I do hope they have more than the predictable ways for this to go wrong.
You may not want to watch the rest of the season then.
I think you are reading way too much into it with your last sentence there.
There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where a character called Barclay, who’s a sad-sack incompetent crewman, creates Holodeck scenarios featuring himself as the hero and his colleagues as supporting characters. In his Holodeck, he somehow made it so that Riker was like a foot shorter than he was in reality, and I thought that part was particularly hilarious. This episode of Black Mirror reminded me of it.
In the game created by Todd (I will never be able to think of that actor, or any character he ever plays, as being named anything other than Todd), there isn’t the slightest hint of sexuality, aggressive or otherwise. The characters literally have no genitals. This isn’t “toxic masculinity”, it’s weird, asexual, “wholesomeness” - which makes it all the more bizarre, frankly.
Also, the guy isn’t really a “working-class bloke”, he’s clearly doing pretty well for himself.
The IHNMAIMS / The Jaunt scenario is becoming a bit too much of a staple of Black Mirror. It packs an emotional punch, no doubt, but it is indeed being rehashed and rehashed and I hope the writers maybe lay off of it a little bit, because it’s losing that emotional punch by being used too much as a plot device.
Maybe it’s not explicit, but it definitely felt like it was a paraphilia for him. His interest in the female lead (whose name I don’t recall) definitely seemed to be sexual in nature, and it’s very much a dominance fantasy he’s acting out with these people.
Well, in a figurative sense if not literal. He definitely sees himself as being taken advantage of by people who are profiting off his blood, sweat, and tears.
Episode 2 - “Arkangel”
Jodie Foster directed this episode. Good job, Jodie! It’s not as long as the season opener, but it’s still long enough to fill a 90-minute timeslot on American TV.
I’m not a parent, and God willing, I never will be, so maybe I’m not the target demographic for this episode. The whole story revolves around one question; how far will you go to protect your child? Marie is obviously a very devoted mother who only wants the best for her child, but as Sara gets older, the things meant to protect her serve only to stunt her development instead. Thinking back to when I was young, if my parents had had the power to pixelate my sight and hearing to prevent me from seeing “adult” stuff, or had the power to see what I was seeing at any given moment, it’d have pissed me the hell off. In the end, it’s Marie’s over-protectiveness that drives Sara to madness, so I guess the moral of the story is not to keep your kids on too tight a leash, lest they not know how to handle themselves when they finally have to deal with adult shit on their own.
I liked the way they used makeup to gradually age Marie over the course of the episode, and how her client at the physical therapy clinic eventually becomes her steady as she grows older. The aging of Sara was also handled well, though the actress who plays her in third act definitely doesn’t look the 15 that the script says she is. (Per Wikipedia, she’s 21 in real life.) The mix of accents continued to bother me here. This episode is clearly meant to be set in a small town somewhere in the Midwest, yet we’ve got this range of American actors using their natural accents, British/Aussie actors faking American accents, British actors not bothering to hide it, and American actors seemingly trying to throw a bit of RP into their voice. A little more vocal consistency is all I’m asking for.
Aside; as a male, I’ve obviously never had a C-section, nor have I been in attendance for one. Is it really as painless for the mother as they made it look in the opening scene? I always imagined that having your belly cut open to pull a baby out of it would be an extremely painful and traumatic experience no matter how good the drugs you were on were.
I’m a male, and so it’d maybe be jerkish of me to weigh in as a guy who’s only been in attendance for one — except, hey, all I did here was see the same episode you did, so why not shrug and mention what happened when I saw one in person?
And what I saw, then, was my wife on drugs so good that she could chat with the doctors while noting that what she felt wasn’t pain; she could feel something, she could feel pressure, but she was surprised that it wasn’t pain.
She was, though, more interested in talking about bubblegum, and jogging, and whether the tall and handsome guy standing next to her was the anesthesiologist. Spoiler alert: no, I wasn’t. Dang, those must have been good drugs.
Not particularly original. Neither was the first episode; I can cite stories going back at least 50 years for that trope.
[Moderating]
Merged threads
Thanks for the heads up then. With that guidance it’ll move down my queue. I’ll finish Arkangel and then leave off for a bit.
Really though? They don’t creatively come up with any other ideas than these few for how emerging technologies are going to ef us up? (Or minimally challenge our current ethical frameworks.)