Ok, just watched episode 2, Arkangel, with the child-monitoring implant. I enjoyed this a lot. What I thought was best about it was that the mom was obviously a decent person, and society obviously HAD recognized the dangers of the device, which is why she put it away in the attic for so many years. And only brought it back out again for reasons which, while obviously not good ENOUGH, were certainly at least understandable. (I also like that they managed to casually imply that the company no longer existed, which then answers a lot of “hey, why didn’t they just…” type questions that would otherwise be potential plot holes.)
The acting, of course, was terrific.
I ding it a few points for not being super-original… I feel like most of the ideas are ones that Black Mirror has covered before. So, overall, good but not quite great. Final grade: A-
Great to see Aldis Hodge. Naming the son Parker made me sad. (And it couldn’t have been an accident.) Watching Hardison say Parker’s name again literally made me gulp.
Not a ton to say about this one, actually. It’s a story we’ve seen frequently in the past, fairly well told, with only the minor wrinkle of the recaller device.
Some really nice small details (the scent and music cues to help people remember), excellent acting as always, but… nothing super-memorable or super-innovative.
Also, they make a big deal about how tricky it is to get at the memories, and how they can be inaccurate, etc, but that never goes anywhere (which is a shame). But then they’re able to get a precise enough memory from a GUINEA PIG? That seems to kind of contradict everything we had heard about how tricky and delicate it is to bring up just the right memory with the right detail. What did they tell the Guinea Pig to get it to focus on the event they cared about?
Overall: C+
I think “Crocodile” (not “Alligator”) will turn out to seem a better episode upon revisiting. It is extremely well-told – every little detail that seems to be a random throwaway has importance later as a callback. Guinea pig, pizza truck, car not starting; all relevant to the story. And it’s maybe-technology conceit isn’t as jarring as, for example, memories from DNA swabs.
It is just a horror that’s more familiar to us: we’ve seen someone who has to keep killing to prevent a past sin from being rediscovered, before. Much like “Metalhead” is a story that’s much more familiar than most Black Mirror stories.
Regarding Callister: We’re told when Walton goes to sacrifice himself, that he won’t die from the fire, he will instead be burning in perpetuity. So when the ship crosses through the wormhole, I see two options.
A) During the entire happy ending, Walton is still down in the jets burning in agony and totally forgotten, while everyone else celebrates.
B) He dies and is either brought back to life somewhere in the simulation, or he dies and is dead for good. The second option which implies that any death in this game is fatal for our heroes as well.
This seems like something the episode should have addressed.
Like I said earlier, if there’s enough interest, I think each episode could use a thread. But I won’t be offended if people want to keep talking about episodes here :).
Jessie Plemons was also terrific in Season 2 of Fargo alongside Kirsten Dunst. I thought his take on Bill Shatner was hilarious, as was the rest of the episode. Ep 2 was predictable, but still respectable.
I hope I didn’t miss someone else posting it, but Kirsten Dunst had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in episode Callister, walking past a group of people in the gaming company Callister (Plemon’s her RL fiance??!!)
*snip. I don’t see how this can be true. Our heros inside the simulation are simply copies of themselves from the “real world” whereas the main character did not copy himself, but implanted his mind into the simulation.
Questions about other episodes (spoilers for Hang the DJ, Metalhead, and Black Museum below)
Hang the DJ: What actually happened? Did the couple meet in a bar and a cell phone app simply ran the simulations? Was it all instantaneous for the two parties or do they have a recollection of their time inside the walls? A cute twist in that the computer looked at who would rebel against the system to decide that they were a match. However, how do we know that the computer did not pick those two anyways?
Metalhead: It seemed silly that the three individuals risked life and limb for a stupid teddy bear. However, did the teddy bear contain the consciousness of other people as depicted in Black Museum?
I’m pretty sure almost every previous episode had a callback in Black Museum - in the museum there’s the DNA and lollipop thing from Caliister, the broken Arkangle tablet, the bathtub from Crocodile, a robot bee under a magnifying glass from Hated in the Nation, the ski mask from White Bear as well as her photo next to “Child Killer,” and you can see the mugshot of the woman from Crocodile.
Plus they talk about “cookies” from White Christmas, uploading old people to the cloud from San Junipero, the 15 Million Merits comic book, there’s a tankstation like the one from Nosedive…more I’m sure that I missed even after watching it twice.
A fun thing about this series for me is trying to play “guess the actor” - my favorite this season was when I figured out the hit-and-run boyfriend from Crocodile played Charles Stuart in Outlander.
Did you notice who supplied the voice of the on-line gamer in the final few moments? Hint: it’s someone that Robert Daly (“Meth” Damon) has appeared with before in a popular TV series. King of Space!
Personally, I think “Hang the DJ” falls apart if you take it too literally, and assume that someone’s smartphone app ran a thousand strong AI personality simulations in the time it took for them to meetup in a bar. But we really don’t know the setup – i.e., if the pair got matched and then went to a meetup, or met up and then ran the simulation app to see if they were a match. Either way, I don’t think the experiences of the simulated couple were passed along to the real world couple.
It was just a box of standard teddies in “Metalhead”. They were trying to replace one lost by what was probably the only kid around, presumably somewhat traumatized by the loss of the one he had. I suspect it’s some sort of Children of Men scenario, where everyone is willing to do extreme actions for what they probably think is the last child that will ever be born (and who is likely to have a rather miserable life).
Michaela Cole was also in an earlier season 3 episode of Black Mirror as the lady at the airport terminal when Bryce Dallas Howard’s flight is cancelled.
He would be burning, but he expected to die when the ship got to the wormhole. He also knew whatever torture he faced in the engine couldn’t be worse than what the Captain had in plan for him and everyone else.
I think everyone forgot about him during the happy ending because they weren’t expecting to survive.
What everyone did forget is all the other people who were turned into monsters. All the conscious entities that the Captain got mad at and stranded on random planets. I guess they had a happy ending because they died.