Jesse Plemons, God love him, will go to his grave as “Meth Damon.”
USS Callister: Probably the best episode this season; maybe of Black Mirror. The commentary was biting, but in my opinion had essentially nothing to do with DNA or abusing AI. It’s 100% about the entitlement and aggression white male nerds tend to hold, the exact same sort of thing that caused GamerGate and to some degree the modern alt-right.
It’s about someone who feels unappreciated, but is also a genius, so he uses that genius to act out revenge fantasies on those he perceives as wronging him. It starts off by his hating the pretty, outgoing face of his company (the classic “nerds vs jocks” bit rebranded). But soon moves onto antagonizing people for doing nothing wrong other than being snippy or calling them out for being creepy. It’s no accident almost every person he abducted other is a POC or woman, it’s a direct parallel to how angry white straight cis male nerds with a victim complex take out that victim complex by becoming, say, MRAs or white supremacists or at least being sympathetic to those groups. All while forging an identity over some commercial property.
It’s not just Toxic Masculinity, but a complete microcosm of how your average pepe on Twitter, or that guy ranting about SJWs on Facebook, views the world.
It’s possibly some of the deepest most accurate social commentary Black Mirror has ever done. I think the thing tripping people up is that Black Mirror is usually about the tech and the horror of the tech itself, whereas this merely used the tech as a framing device to explore a social ill through analogy.
Arkangel: It was fine, I guess. Pretty standard.
Crocodile: This episode was fine, and I like having the technology be positive for once. But most of all it was pretty boring.
Hang the DJ: This was really, really cute. I actually loved this episode, but it lacks the spark San Junipero had.
Metalhead: alksjdfhoiusdnbisfnmb kjln sf adsfopibhsfiuvbhp sdmd oh my god this was boring and the worst slasher film I’ve ever seen
Black Museum: The vignettes were pretty well executed, with the second being the best, but as a whole it was just kind of “that’s a Black Mirror episode, yup.”
Og help me, up until Tish started to remind Rolo of the parts of her dad’s story he had left out, I was utterly charmed by him. Penn Jillette would have made an excellent Rolo (as would Robert Preston).
I finished watching the season yesterday. I was a bit disappointed, having thoroughly enjoyed the previous seasons. I liked the first and last episodes best, though neither of them were as good as the best of earlier seasons. The tribute to the original Star Trek in the first episode really tickled me. The lead actor’s impression of Captain Kirk was great fun and the retro details were super. I also liked the nerd-turns-evil plot. The far fetched science didn’t bother me at all.
The final episode was also pretty good IMO. I liked the way it was a museum of previous episodes, a clever conceit within the storyline. The conclusion was quite satisfying too.
The other episodes seemed like less successful rehashings of earlier themes. Entertaining in the moment but not really memorable.
A general nitpick: too many fake American accents and Britishisms spoken by characters who were meant to be American. That isn’t an issue confined to this series, of course.
The names of the planets in USS Callister were Rannoch and Skillane, the last names of the killers in White Bear. Speaking of that episode, I loved how in the end they really had to act like a space crew in order to get away. Ad hoc repairs, going through the asteroid field, mad rush into a black hole. Straight out of an Star Trek episode.
Opinions: in Arkangel when the grandpa casually mentions being two thousand years old was he being sarcastic or not?
Agreed. I was going to say that this was the worst slasher film I’ve seen. For all their high tech, future cars still fail to start when someone is being chased by a killer?
Another “murder” episode where some future tech solves the case in a society where every is integrated with intrusive technology that probably tracks and logs all their movements anyway.
I thought Andrea Riseborough looked terrible, apparently deciding to lose a bunch of weight since Oblivion and Birdman.
I disagree. I actually liked how I found it creepy, unsettling and bleak. Probably because the robot “dog” was intentionally made to look like a robot from one of Boston Dynamics’ YouTube videos. Unlike, say, The Matrix or Battlestar Galactica with their advanced, but still relatable machine civilizations, you could actually envision a world where thousands of these dog things exist as some sort of ubiquitous appliance. Then one day a bad patch sets them to “kill all humans”.
I finally got to see Season four. I think it was overall the best season yet. Brooker seems to have noticed that “San Junipero” got all the raves last year, so he wrote some without the bleak endings. Four of the six episodes had positive endings, something very rare in the series.
The only one I didn’t care for was “Metalhead,” mostly because the final revelation was so stupid. It made no sense they’d risk their lives for that. But it was otherwise tight and tense.
It’s hard to pick a favorite. I keep going back and forth between “USS Calister,” “Crocodile,” and “Black Museum,” but could make a case for “Hang the DJ.”
There’s no way you are considering Metalhead or Crocodile as positive endings. So I guess that means Arkangel? The one where the girl gets pregnant, is forced to break up with her boyfriend, beats her mother unconscious, then runs away from home? The one that ends with her homeless, no money, no family, and hitching a ride with a trucker?
Frighteningly enough, that is a pretty positive ending in the Black Mirror universe.
She’s escaping from her controlling mother and living her life without her interference for the first time.