Never mind this part
It was also WAY too long. More so than Common People. And Awkwafina is just not a good addition to any show.
I liked Common People, far more than Hotel Reverie, but Black Mirror episodes often bloat.
I finally got to Eulogy and it was as good as everyone is saying. Paul Giamatti is amazing.
<Continuing my catch up, now 7.3: Hotel Reverie>
Well this makes it 3 out of 3 episodes that weren’t really about tech at all. I know some will argue that Black Mirror, and sci-fi in general, is constrained by the human condition so will often be an allegory of familiar themes. But…I dunno, most past episodes of Black Mirror, even the bad ones, had points where you’d think “oh, I hadn’t realized or thought about that consequence of that kind of tech”.
This season is clearly not about that. The tech may as well be a magic genie.
I was going to start scoring episodes, but I think this one has shown me I can’t do it. Because, on the basis of the plot and the (getting worse) contrivances, I’d have to give it 2 or 3 out of 10. It was basically Captain Proton (from Voyager) mixed with that TNG episode where Beverly Crusher gets it on with a ghost. Which would make it the uber-turd Star Trek episode.
But…a bad star trek episode is still watchable and this was pretty much at that level. The characters, dialog and cinematography were intriguing enough, and I didn’t have any eye-roll moments at the end. I mean, there were plenty at the start, but I’d rather it this way, where it’s a stupidly contrived setup but at least doesn’t play fast and loose in the end. Objectively bad but subjectively intriguing. Whatever score that is.
ETA: What_Exit has mastered the skill of speaking succinctly in a way I clearly haven’t 
Great actor. Can’t say I quite assimilated or got on the same page as him - which don’t me wrong is one of the characteristics of how he often plays imperfect people so well. The tech in that one was marvellous. The dude at the camera store was right on.
Just before, following EJ Fudd’s advice white running some long scripts on my computer and thinking my wife was playing some tablet game, I watched “Plaything”. Peter Capaldi was beyond amazing. And though he didn’t skip to flashbacks much, that story is Edgar Allen Poe nightmare fuel. It’s 3:30 AM yet I reckon I’m staying up for a bit.
Generally, TV and movies don’t invade my brain while sleeping. As a IT guy my software has its place. And while the text for many computer languages (except Python for one) can be formatted in many ways, when we saw the code to Throglets I was all “oh my…!”
Agree. Not funny at all. The idea was clever, the delivery MEH. Result: Boring (just MHO of course).
And The Purple Rose of Cairo, which Brooker more or less name-checks by setting the film-within-the-episode in Cairo and having a character call the female lead a “rose.”
Was the early running gag about casting “one of the Ryans” (Gosling or Reynolds) perhaps a nod to their recent roles as fictional characters forced to reassess their existence when they come into contact with the real world? (Ken in Barbie and Guy in Free Guy)
Wife and I have watched all of S.7 except for the new Callister episode. Question: I have only a vague memory of the overall plot of the original S.6 Callister. Is it helpful to rewatch in order to understand what’s going on in the new Callister episode or does it work just fine on its own? Don’t know if I want to spend almost 3 hours rewatching Callister 1 then watching Callister 2.
There’s a 2 minute recap at the start.
Great, thanks.
Oh, and the original was in season 4, not 6. A better excuse for not remembering it.
We rewatched it and it helped a lot. I would recommend it regardless because it’s a very good episode. The new one is good too and does a good job of expanding on the story and character motivations.
Not to mention various quick flashes back when events of the previous show are mentioned.
I think you’re misreading it somewhat. It’s not really a streaming services thing. Or the sort of cutesy self referential meta discussion that of the shots they take it at Netflix sometimes.
So I don’t think it’s a black comedy at all. I think it’s a serious attempt to explore the future of enshittification. Everything pries more and more into our lives. Everything gets worse. We are monetized in every little way possible until we are taken for absolutely everything we have and still they want more. This has become a pretty big problem over the last few years and seeing where that might lead is Black Mirror’s bread and butter.
She literally needs the service to live, metaphorically so many of the services we need to function in society are attempting to become subscriptions services. Perhaps a more realistic version of this than brain surgery would be something like having to subscribe in some way just to use your car. Whereas that’s something that is traditionally been your choice after you bought the product, it’s the sort of thing that can become enshittified. But the metaphor is there that they take things that used to be under our own control and things that we really need to function and they give us less to make us pay more and more making things worse for everyone.
Except perhaps a rich few the people that are buying the Lux package are improving their own lives but it’s only available to a very tiny fraction of the population period. That mixes metaphors a bit and I’m not sure that that helped the story. It may have been better to stick to the central thesis.
Nevertheless I found it metaphorically apt, very uncomfortable, and in the spirit of the best of Black mirror.
That’s one aspect of the episode I thought about at the time, but haven’t seen mentioned. The higher levels of service didn’t just replace your missing brain parts, they actually let you enhance how your brain works, specifically including pleasure levels.
That’s an awful lot like Larry Niven’s “Wireheads”, who use implants to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brains, producing the best and most addictive high ever created.
So this brain company is literally getting their customers addicted to the higher service levels, and then jacking up the prices. Pay, or be miserable.
Watched the new Callister last night. Fun episode overall. Except…it reminded me of one thing that bugged me about the first Callister-- I’m pretty good at suspending disbelief for the most part, but I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the ‘sci’ part of the ‘sci-fi’ there:
Collecting DNA in order to create digital simulations of people-- how the heck is that supposed to work? First of all, DNA isn’t going to contain one’s collected memories and skills. Second, how does DNA help to create a digital simulation at all? DNA is code for creating flesh and blood organisms. Making a real-world clone from DNA, sure, fine. But a digital simulation is just code, and any visual representation is mere pixels. How does DNA contribute to that? Maybe by helping the computer simulation software figure out what the simulated person should look like, but that seems like a very roundabout way to do so-- it’d be much easier to just scan in pictures of the person.
This is a common failing, IMHO, and not just with Black Mirror. Common People made the same mistake.
That was a big miss from the first Callister episode too, specially when something as simple as the headset device they use to login doing a brain scan would have been a simple and easy explanation.
I’m not sure why this post shows as a reply to Horatius, I meant it to just be a reply to the thread.
So I am very slowly making my way through the season because I’ve hardly had any time to watch TV. I just watched Hotel Reverie and I have really ambivalent feelings on this one. It could’ve been one of the great ones, but it was kind of confused and tried to cram in too many ideas and didn’t do so elegantly.
I will say that Emma Corrin’s performance was incredible. One of the best performances I’ve ever seen on a screen. The role was very challenging but she nailed every part of it. She was completely believable as an actress from the mid 20th century, even nailing the mid atlantic accent. There were times early on in the episode where I forgot I wasn’t actually watching an AI recreation of an actress of that era she blended in so perfectly.
She also had to portray an AI that thought it was real and has to deal with the realization that it wasn’t, an AI recreation of a character that gradually has elements of the real actress blending in, scenes where she plays the role of the real actress during flashbacks/memories, someone dealing with a bizarre situation, someone falling in love. I was captivated by every part of her performance.
In comparison, Issa Ray… I don’t quite know what she was going for. I can’t tell if it’s a failure of the writing or the acting but she just didn’t work. She was too awkward at all times. This is supposed to be one of the biggest movie stars in the world, someone who was in love with old movies and particularly hotel reverie, and yet… it would’ve made a lot more sense if she was a technician or someone with no acting experience that accidentally got thrown into the simulation because she was awkward and broke character and seemed way too modern and unable to act the entire time. A real accomplished actor could improvize, respond to instruction, make the characters in the film believe that they belonged there. But she was just a bull in a china shop making snarky comments, saying things that made no sense to the AI entities, and just being completely wrong for the situation the entire time.
The actual ideas behind the story were a mixed bag. The whole time pressure being forced was absurd – someone needed the studio to do a commercial, so you’re going to use this incredible new technology to make a movie in 3 hours flat? FFS, you don’t even need a studio or a sound stage, you just need some computers. It was an incredibly weak way to try to force time pressure.
The main emotional impact of the story should’ve been the (subjective) months that the two main characters spent together. Their developing relationship was the emotional heart of the episode and an interesting what if to explore, and yet it felt very rushed. The technical/directorial staff made basically nothing of the fact that months had passed for the two main characters. When they reset the AI’s memory back a few months, they erased months of quality time the two characters spent together falling in love. That’s an incredible emotional gut punch. And to Issa Ray’s credit, she absolutely acts that out. When her character considers whether she’d rather stay stuck in the simulation with the AI rather than getting out – that’s a huge topic to explore and a big character moment and it was just sort of brushed aside. But instead the producer is basically just like “wtf bro? you crazy?” and doesn’t even acknowledge the (subjective) time that they spent in there together. I suppose that could be part of the point of the inconsiderate asshole characters, but I feel like we should’ve spent more time exploring that moment.
The episode should’ve spent less time on the “omg, will they get the plot back on track or is this whole thing going to fall apart?” aspect of the story and focused more on the implications of the AI developing self awareness and a relationship with the other character it would’ve been a lot more cohesive. And replace Issa Ray or rewrite the character since that didn’t work at all.
The ideas were there for a great story, and one of the greatest performances ever on TV, but it was just all over the place otherwise.