I’m only two episodes in, but I’m enjoying it so far. I enjoyed the 1st episode more than the 2nd.
Anybody else watching?
For those not familiar, it’s an anthology series that parallels BM (at least from what I’ve seen so far).
The first six episodes aired in the UK last Autumn. I thought most of them were quite good.
But!
They’re each based on a story by Philip K. Dick and I was reading each story during the week before the episode was broadcast. Obviously there were changes of all sorts to the stories but almost all of them changed the whole thrust of the original until any message or point was lost, or inverted!
The one that held to the original story the closest, imho, was episode 6 Human Is but, sadly, it also had the most obvious outcome, which was apparent from half way through (or sooner!)
I will watch the final four when they’re broadcast in Spring, though.
I watched two so far. The one about the factory and the one about terrorism. Not bad so far. The twists were guessable but that isn’t always a bad thing. Will keep watching.
We’ve had them on the TiVo box since they were broadcast in the UK. They’re in the ‘watch if we get time’ category.
I’d never heard of the show until this thread. Saw a couple episodes. It is decent, but is more like outer limits than black mirror.
Yeah…Aside from being a SF anthology, there’s not really any connection to Black Mirror.
It’s…fairly uneven, IMO. I haven’t seen The Impossible Planet or The Commuter, yet, due to Space (which is showing it here)'s flaky scheduling, but Crazy Diamond and Human Is were both great. But, while Real Life and The Hood Maker had interesting premises, the actual execution of both really didn’t hold my attention. The Hood Maker was worse in that respect…I can at least remember the key points of Real Life’s ‘which is real’ plot…The Hood Maker, not so much.
I saw the title and thought it was about one of my favorite old time movies, “Electric Dreams” from 1984… Now searching for it will grow much harder…
Love that movie too. I remember searching high and low for the Soundtrack and finally found it online many years ago.
I was a fan when it came out, and searched for years to find a DVD. Finally had to order one from Japan. That was long before anything was available online…
Just finished a 2 day binge. Watched them all.
I am not familiar with any of these stories, so I cannot compare these to the written works.
That said, it’s an uneven bunch. Some VERY sharp concepts in a few of them but uneven overall. Must say, the last 15 seconds of “The Commuter” ruined what was a near-perfect little film, for me.
I’ve quite fond of this kind of series. Was VERY excited when both The Twilight Zone ( 1985 ) and Amazing Stories produced by Steven Spielberg hooked me bigtime- also despite some uneven stories. Also big on short stories, no surprise.
Frankly, let them try and not always succeed wildly. The format is hard, the costs are high and the writing won’t always be stellar. ( No offense to Mr. Dick. ) We ought to have more than just regular t.v. series or features. For no other reason than variety and love of the form, I’m happy to have watched these.
I adored Black Mirror. Also uneven, but the writing and story concepts were SO powerful, that for the most part I enjoyed them and one or two were quite upsetting 
I know I’m not the OP, but I haven’t seen any spoilers yet, so I will box them. But in Real Life:
Was she really for real in her real life? If so, why have such a “vacation” device that can go so wrong?
IIRC, it was a prototype - the wife worked for a company that was creating that tech and brought the prototype home because Anna Paquin’s character was so utterly depressed
Okay, fine, but:
[spoiler]1) Before she went on “vacation” she was pissed that her friend called her french fries “fingers” and insisted that they were “fries” (implying that she knew something was off, especially since “fingers” is a word nobody I know uses for fries).
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She gets zapped back to the other self (the black guy) in the alley without the device on her head.
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What sort of “vacation” device (even if a prototype) mentally tortures you into believing that the good things in your own life are so terrible that you should have your brain shut down and permanently live in the worse one?
I know I overthink these things, but the last 2 or 3 minute scene didn’t really seal it for me that the “real” life was the future one.[/spoiler]
I love that Black Mirror episodes when I had NetFlix. Now I have Amazon Prime and got the Electric Dream BMed. I haven’t started watched it yet. I’m watched Monk. 8 seasons and I’m on season 2. :rolleyes:
By the way I have Electric Dreams 1984 mp4 on my HDD. One of my fav oldies.
Virginia Madsen huh huh! 
I felt kind of the same way about the terrorism episode.
My favourite was “Kill All Others”; I like a good dose of black humour with my heavy-handed satire. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to buy some more cheese.
Good points. Maybe [spoiler]The VR doesn’t actually stop when the user takes off the device, and the black guy was the real person, and the people in the other reality at the end are inside the VR device so to speak, and don’t know it.
Honestly it’s kind of hard to believe it would genuinely be impossible to wake her up from the vacation state–her mind is still in there, in thery, fully functional. Biologically, all her senses are still hooked in etc.
But if, in fact she’s not real, and the black guy is, that makes more sense out of her being unable to wake up![/spoiler]
What about the scene where “he” hops in the car and expected it to come alive? Instead “he” said,“I think you’d better drive!”
This suggest to me the future life is the real life.
I started this last night, based on this thread. I had to turn it off after 20 minutes. The acting…wasn’t good. You all owe me 20 minutes back. 
Is the series being advertised as just Electric Dreams instead of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams? Why isn’t Dick mentioned in the OP at all? I would have thought that being adaptations of Dick’s work would be a major selling point for the series.
I saw two episodes (well, and part of a third) of it while I was in England last year. There it’s showing on regular broadcast TV - on Channel 4 to be exact - while in the U.S. it’s being streamed on Amazon. I saw the second and third episode (“Impossible Planet” and “The Commuter”) and part of the first episode (“The Hood Maker”), although I was tired for extraneous reasons and fell asleep several times during that one. I didn’t think the episodes I watched were very good. They were not very good adaptations of not very good Dick short stories.
You can tell that it was co-produced in the U.S. and the U.K. because the actors and the settings for the show are a mixture of British and American ones.
FWIW, it’s an Anthology so each episode has a different cast. You might have better luck with a different episode.