Are there really that many VR episodes? Many of the ones I enjoyed the most weren’t VR at all. Maybe I just don’t really notice them, hmm.
Also couldn’t really get into Severance. I felt like that entire show could’ve been condensed into a single Black Mirror episode without needing several seasons… different tastes, I guess!
What about Love, Death, Robots? Similar sci fi anthology series. Any love?
There is a lot more variety to the stories at least. It’s a fun show.
Also very hit or miss. But worth the watch overall.
Honestly, I can’t stand Severance and gave up on it almost immediately. I mentioned this in the original thread when I mentioned it was filmed locally at the old Bell Lab (now Bell Works) in Holmdel, NJ.
I may be mistaken but I think White Christmas is the only one for which that’s a twist/end reveal. Whilst I do think the use of the “cookies” is overdone, I don’t believe they were ever used as a twist again.
S7E1 was rough. Rough in a good way for TV but ooof…that one hurt (which made it great TV).
S7E2 was a bit weird. A little Deus Ex but I liked it. The concept is interesting. Gaslighting taken to the extreme.
That’s as far as I have gotten so far.
Love the series though. Great TV.
It’s right in the title “Black Mirror” using the zeitgeist around digitization and interconnectedness as the hook to make stories about human nature. Rod Serling did the same with his era’s obsession with nuclear war and space travel.
If too many episodes rely on “they’ve downloaded me!” that it becomes tiresome, it’s the fault of something Serling faced sixty years ago and that’s only gotten more intense in the age of streamers and podcasts: the need of a content creator to churn up more butter even when the milk is running dry. Thousands of writers out there, tens of thousands of scripts, but known properties like Taylor Sheridan or Aaron Sorkin or whoever’s currently hot get green lights for entire convoys of shows, despite the paltry freight they carry.
Serling infamously met the challenge by stealing other writers’ ideas, pouring them drinks at parties and asking “so what are you working on these days?”
In a long-gone, better literary world, E. M. Forster could putter about in academia and publish on five novels. J. B. Priestly could use use the scientific phenomenon of time as the hook to make stories about human nature. But nobody besides those yeomen crankers-out of pulp magazine stories were expected to drive a theme until the wheels fell off.
Off the top of my head, the following episodes had some variation of “artificial/constructed reality” as twist or major component of the plot:
White Bear
The Waldo Moment
Be Right Back
White Christmas
San Junipero
Men Against Fire
Hang the DJ
USS Callister
Black Museum
Fighting Vipers
Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too
Joan is Awful
I’m using the terms loosely, but for a heck of a lot of episodes the main conceit seems to be that in the near future the technology will exist to directly record and/or manipulate your mind/memories/perception or make a digital copy of your consciousness, such that you might wake up one day as the “copy” in some virtual prison, videogame, or whatever where someone might do God knows what to you.
I see what you mean there. That does seem to be a frequent conceit in the show, something that it just mostly takes for granted and is perhaps over-used. The “cookie” head-integration thing that someone mentioned above.
It’s not the main “twist” of many of those episodes, but it’s certainly what enables their plots. I suppose common, everyday VR is just part of their setting?
But, I guess that’s just of the suspension of disbelief in a fantasy series. It’s like watching a superhero movie and wondering why so many of them have magic powers and can defy all the laws of physics… but that in itself isn’t really the “plot”.
It is one of the things I liked better about Love, Death, Robots, though… not all of them are about virtual worlds, though there are a few there too.
Episode 1 and 2 of season 7 were not good. The second one was heavy handed and dumbish ending.
So
Agreed on the Callisters. And I’m definitely not a good judge/critic of this stuff, lol, since I enjoyed pretty much every episode of every season. I sit down and binge them as soon as they come out and then wait years for the next season 
But San Junipero (one of the VR ones, yes, but focused on relationship-building) is one of the few episodes that I’ll show to non-sci-fi lovers, and most of them really love that episode even if they don’t otherwise care for Black Mirror or sci-fi in general. Many are surprised it came from the same series as the pig-fucking episode (sorry, no spoiler since it’s so old and famous by now).
Mostly I just wish we had more anthologies like this, especially near-future sci-fi. Apple TV’s offerings seem to be more long-form and heavy (like Foundation and Severance) and end up not really focusing on the sci-fi aspects but becoming either space opera & mysticism or office politics. Black Mirror and Love, Death, Robots stay more centered on the sci-fi parts, IMHO.
MHO is that the best sci fi, including dystopian sci fi, is not centered on the sci fi parts.
Clarify please?
What is an example of one centered on the science fiction?
Even some of the other episodes like “Metalhead” where those people were being chased by killer Boston Robotics dogs, I assumed the characters were more likely than not digital clones in some sort of survival videogame.
I’m a huge fan of film and shows like Severance, The Matrix, Westworld, Free Guy, Ready Player One, Inception, Ghost in the Shell, Vanilla Sky and examples of the genre that explores concepts like AI and virtual reality where they are seamlessly blended such that events in the virtual world impact the “real” world and vice versus.
That said, I feel like I too would like to maybe get away from dystopian tales of a not-too-distant future of technology run amok, given that we seem to be living in one.
I do like Love, Death, Robots, but that anthology series also has a much more diverse range of stories and styles.
You do realise that something being endemic to the plot of the episode is vastly different from being “twist/punchline is usually IT WAS VR ALL ALONG!”?
Although from that list I would also see Men Against Fire as an episode where the VR itself is a twist.
We just finished Season 7, and I have to agree, there was an overuse of the VR cookie this season. The stories were still interesting (and very sad) but not as varied as in the past. It’s a tonal shift towards a more relatable everyday capitalist dystopia, as opposed to killer robots and such.
So what?
The point is that a disproportionate number of Black Mirror episodes revolves around virtual reality. A bunch more deal with social media. A few more address drones running amok.
Correction above: The company that makes the creepy robot dogs is Boston Dynamics, not Boston Robotics
I just realized season 1 of Black Mirror was released 14 years ago in 2011!
That’s a long time these days in “speculative fiction about the not too distant future”!
I hear a disproportionate number of Breaking Bad episodes revolve around illegal drugs.
twist/punchline was YOUR phrasing, but this is it, I’m not going to sidetrack it further.