I watched it again tonight because this thread made me want to, and I believe that I missed something from previous viewings. The British dude had really nothing to talk about with his wife. He noted that she treated him well, was faithful to him, that they had a good sexual relationship, that she was a good mother, but at the end of the day, he just “wanted to fuck a twenty-something year old.”
I guess he still could have confessed to his wife that he had this personal weakness and that they should talk about it. He’s my favorite minor character on any show I have watched in a few years.
For a month, like the show implied? Absolutely. As I recall she lived out something relevant to her crime. Those three bastards having thier minds erased everyday and having them suffer some measure of pain they caused others almost approaches justice.
Muammar Qadafi getting a broomstick shoved up his ass before the lynch is exactly what tyrants deserve, not the kangaroo court Hussein got to grandstand in.
San Junipero is probably in the top 10 greatest television episodes I’ve ever seen. Honestly, I don’t think there’s been a single episode that was dreadfully terrible. But I would agree a lot of it (most of it) is pretty dark.
For me, knowing my body was dead and I was an artificial construct in a simulation would be a nightmare I could never wake up from. Also no matter how fun and nice the simulation is, after 10 years, or 100 years or a 1000 years it would be like a prison.
I saw the calendar but if they said or showed anything that implied that it was only a month, I missed it. OK a month, definitely cruel and unusual but not beyond the pale. Indefinitely would be another matter.
The episode The Entire History of You really hooked me. It’s Black Mirror at its best, extrapolated technology mixed with human foibles, with results that ring disturbingly true.
The series is often hit-or-miss, to varying degrees, but its best is at the top of anything out there, and it hit it often enough to be more than worthwhile.
At least for me some of the discomfort with it is the whole overarching question in these “making a copy of ‘you’” episodes, of which there are many: which one is “you”? Is there such a thing as you, or a soul?
As we saw in the one episode where the lady made a copy of herself to be a slave and run all of her errands for her, there was clearly two different “souls”: the lady living in luxury, and her copy living a life of hell and being tortured by being left in a white room for six straight months for compliance purposes.
So if you were uploaded into San Junipero, is that really you experiencing the joy and happiness (or possibly the hell that the people at the dive bar outside of town are experiencing) or is that just a copy of you? Is it just a copy of your wife?
Of course, that involves deep philosophical questions of spirituality and religion, but most people have a sense as to what it means to be “you.” For example, I doubt that even for significant amount of money you would replace your spouse with an exact cloned duplicate, containing all of her memories, and looking exactly the same.
That’s what I like about this show. It explores these concepts without (for the most part) hitting you over the head with them.
“The Entire History of You” is what science fiction should aspire to be. It is the best kind of sci fi, positing a technological advancement and then spending its time examining how real people would act as a result.
I agree. I mentioned upthread that far too many episodes use this concept, but there are several very top notch ones (such as Shut Up and Dance, White Bear, Nosedive, and National Anthem) do not.
I wish they would make more than 6 episodes a season. Are they on a French work week?
Yeah, that’s probably my favorite episode, along with San Junipero and White Bear. I’m pretty sure I read about it getting optioned. (Sure enough, but it looks like there’s some kind of mess with the movie version.)
I do find the series a bit heavy-handed sometimes. I know a lot of people love Nosedive, but to me it was just okay, and a bit ham-fisted. That said, the Twilight Zone episodes could get a bit that way, too. But to me it just seemed like take an obvious idea and script it to an obvious, exaggerated conclusion. Mind you, it was still an enjoyable episode, but if it had any subtlety, I guess it was too subtle to me.
I have only watched 3-4 episodes (and I don’t know the names of the episodes). I don’t mind dark but I found these downright disturbing–the endings were such depressing downers. So I quit.
I hope Charlie Brooker resists that temptation. Less episodes is better. I can’t think of a single TV show that I wish was extended. Even the very best like “the wire” or “the Sopranos” all outstay their welcome and spread the plot so thinly until they work out how to end them. If you can’t tell a story in 12 episodes max then what you are making is a soap opera.
The non-narrative nature of Black Mirror means that you don’t have to worry about a story arc but even so, the more you do the more you risk repetition or running out of ideas. Less is more. I’d rather he makes a few as and when the ideas come to him rather than commit to coming up with episodes just to meet a contractual obligation.
I don’t think this is too unusual for British series. Fawlty Towers ran a total of two seasons, with six episodes each season. Black Adder was six episodes a season. The Office (UK) ran six episodes a season. Coupling ran 6-9 episodes a season, for an average of 7 episodes a season. Etc. It’s pretty common in the UK.
With Black Mirror, I think you need a sampling of a couple of episodes to really figure out if you’d like it. I started with the first episode of the first season (“The National Anthem”) and was just so WTFed about it, that I almost gave up. I’m glad I didn’t. And, now, in retrospect, I actually do enjoy that first episode, but it feels a bit out-of-place to me compared with the other episodes that season. For me, there really isn’t a ton of much better stuff out there, so I’m glad I stuck with it. There’s like a total of six to eight series that I’ve found compelling enough to follow in the past decade, so it takes a lot to hold my interest. It may very well not be for you, but I don’t think a single episode gives enough information, especially given the independent nature of each episode.
It’s an anthology series, so each episode may vary dramatically from one to the next, and there’s no reason at all to watch any of them in order, other than for a few easter eggs sprinkled here or there. Personally, I thought S1:E1 was just an uncomfortable way to start a show due to subject matter, S1:E2 was dumb and almost had me abandoning the show, but S1:E3 (the entire history of you) was fantastic.