Black Mirror Season 3 Episodes 1–3
Black Mirror’s journey to the greater public consciousness is an interesting one. It first came out during the awkward years when watching British TV was still somewhat a difficult proposition if you were someone who didn’t live in the UK. Certainly, there wouldn’t have been any reason for anyone to even want to try out Black Mirror without some kind of previous recommendation. For me, I became a fan of Charlie Brooker through Dead Set and his Screenwipe/Newswipe series, so watching a science fiction anthology series about how technology can intervene in our lives written by a man who is obsessed with technology and the consumption of media was a no-brainer at the time.
In the intervening years, the show gained a cult following around the world as the show was talked about online and was discovered by more and more people. Brooker’s obsession with mass media and technology is seen clearly through the episodes that make up the first two seasons of Black Mirror, and the sardonic, almost nihilistic, and prescient stories that he wrote hit a nerve with a group of people who are equally obsessed with the way media and technology has, and continues to, shape our lives.
The first season dealt more broadly with media culture, with technology serving more as a vehicle to facilitate the spread of our obsession with watching a screen than with the technology itself. Given that he wrote Dead Set, it’s not surprising that reality television would still be on his mind at the time and that The National Anthem would still be one of the most memorable episodes of the series all these years later (David Cameron’s porcine fellatio episode thatmade the headlines a couple of years ago was very much an example of “life imitating art”). The second season placed a greater emphasis on thinking about how technology can shape the way that we consume media in our lives, with Be Right Back being the highlight of that season.
It’s a show that is made specifically for those who live at the intersection of being media savvy and also interested in technology, so it’s no surprise then that it would have slowly grown in popularity by people simply talking about the show online and spreading torrent links around. Even today, there isn’t really an easy way to watch the show legally. You might buy a used PAL DVD or Bluray, but more likely you’re finding a way to watch it through less than legal means.
So it’s interesting that in 2016, the series has shifted from being a cult hit that became popular through bootlegs to a splashy launch on Netflix. The first two seasons are probably still trapped in some kind of licensing hell, perhaps in part due to the vindictiveness of some Channel 4 executives who feel slighted that Netflix would poach the series from them (which is ironic given the recent Bake Off controversy), so in a way the third season serves as an introduction to the format to millions of subscribers who probably have never heard of the show or Brooker before. Of course, there’s the Christmas special with Jon Hamm which is on Netflix, but “season 3” is definitely the big push for the show and it will probably be the first experience many people will have with Brooker as a writer.
Before I talk about the new season, I should note that I had the unfortunate experience of watching the series out of order due to some Netflix hiccup that only affected Canadian viewers. This is the episode order that I saw when the show first launched:
And it was only after I watched the first three episodes that I learned that Nosedive was meant to be the first episode of the season. Technically the order doesn’t matter, since Black Mirror is an anthology series like Twilight Zone or Tales From The Crypt and each episode stands on its own, but Brooker has stated that he wanted Nosedive to be first because it served as a primer to the Black Mirror oeuvre. I only mention this because it definitely affected my reception to the critically acclaimed San Junipero, which I’ll explain later. With that in mind, let’s go into the episodes in their intended order.
Nosedive
I can understand why Brooker would want this episode to be first — it stars well-known American actors and relates a cautionary tale that is immediately understandable to anyone who has a social media presence and uses Uber.
We follow Lacie Pound as she lives her life putting on fake smiles in a desperate attempt to get likes from the people she interacts with in her life in order to avoid the dreaded 1-star rating.
That’s really all there is to the episode. Through a series of unfortunate events, Lacie sees her personal rating sink lower and lower, before she is completely ostracized and becomes a social pariah. But once she’s free of trying to maintain a false front in order to try to please everyone in her life, she finds freedom in being able to say exactly what is on her mind.
I’m sure the episode is meant to be a frightening glimpse into a dystopian future where we are all slaves to our social media presences, particularly if we attach our self-worth to follows, likes, and ratings. But in my view the episode doesn’t really work as a piece of science fiction since the world breaks down under any real scrutiny (what’s to stop someone racist from negatively rating you simply because they don’t like that you’re not white?), but also because there was really no reason to build a world around this premise in the first place because these systems already exist in the real world.
For example, here’s a story about people manipulating Google Maps to try to negatively affect a business. Of course, there have been many stories about people leaving fake Yelp reviews for various reasons, Uber drivers complaining about customer ratings, and the practice of stack rankings that pits employees against each other in order to save their jobs. I’m sure there’s an interesting story that could be told from any of these real world examples that doesn’t require trying to construct an flimsy science fiction world in order to support it.
It also ignores the reality of trolling, where people derive pleasure from actively antagonising people with antisocial behaviour in order to illicit any kind of reaction. When you see people using their real names on Twitter call Colin Kaepernick the “n word” because of his anthem protest, you begin to understand that there are people for whom the potential social stigma of releasing vomit into the world isn’t really much of a problem.
Nosedive also fails as satire because it’s so on-the-nose and makes Swift’s call for eating Irish babies seem subtle by comparison. I’m sure everyone has personal preferences when it comes to satire, so this criticism is probably more subjective than most, but when someone tries too hard to be satirical, it typically ends up falling flat for me. South Park’s strange adventure into “PC culture” last year is another example of just watching a writer try too hard to try to satirically attack a target and failing in the process. Certainly it’s hard to enjoy the episode when you’re spending most of the time rolling your eyes at the moral it is trying to convey.
This episode is credited to Rashida Jones and Michael Shur, with Brooker only receiving a “story by” credit, so I don’t know if my dislike of the episode comes from the fact that it’s not a Brooker script. The best that I can muster is that Nosedive is a competent episode of Black Mirror — Bryce Dallas Howard is fine as a woman whose life is slowly crumbling away around her, and at least on the surface, you understand that this is a story about how technology might interfere with our lives. It’s an acceptable introduction to the themes that the show is trying to raise, but for me it’s the weakest episode of the season.
Playtest
The second episode of the series is a more assured take on technology and the pervasiveness it has in our lives. Rather than just condemn social media and try to frighten us with a nightmarish view of a world govern by likes, we see a contemporary man use social media apps in the way that most people do today.
The story itself is fairly simple. Cooper finds himself unable to talk with his mom after his dad dies, so he decides to go on a journey of self-discovery around the world in order to put off having a meaningful conversation with her. In this episode, technology is treated apolitically, serving only as a tool to connect people together.
For example, the first time technology appears in the episode, we see Cooper reject a call from his mother:
The phone itself, and the various services that keep the phone running, facilitate the possibility for Cooper to reconnect with his mother. However, he’s the one who chooses to reject his mother’s call and put off a conversation with her.
We later see that he is capable of using technology to put himself out into the world if he so chooses:
We get a montage of all the photos he presumably posted on Instagram or some other photo sharing service, depicting all the places he travelled to on his walkabout.
When he spots a couple on a date, he feels lonely and pulls out an off-brand Tinder app to begin looking for a date of his own. The irony of Cooper being able to meet and have an intimate moment with a complete stranger using his phone while being unable to communicate with his own mother is definitely not lost on the viewer, and in fact, is motivates the science fiction aspect of the latter half of the episode.
As he prepares to wrap up his trip and head home, Cooper finds that his bank account has been hacked and he isn’t able to buy a ticket home. Rather than call his mother and ask her for help, he uses a fictional version of Task Rabbit to find a job that would allow him to make the money he needs to go home. He ends up connecting with a game developer that is looking for testers for a new technology — a brain implant that we believe is a form of Augmented Reality.
The episode becomes a horror story soon after, with Cooper being led to an old mansion where he is meant to test the technology’s ability to frighten him (an homage to the first Resident Evil, I’m sure).
There’s not much to say about this part of the episode — Dan Trachtenberg, who has shown he can do horror well with 10 Cloverfield Lane, delivers a fine horror episode here. And given that Cooper is played by Kurt Russell’s son, Wyatt Russell, Trachtenberg even manages to fit in a reference to The Thing:
Beyond the obvious jump scares, the initial bit of horror comes from Cooper questioning the nature of his reality, as the Augmented Reality technology slowly takes over his rational mind and the line between the real world and the game world blurs. This part of the episode is fine, but doesn’t quite connect to the themes introduced in the beginning of the episode. We get an ending where it appears that Cooper is scared straight by his frightening experience and chooses to immediately fly home and reconcile with his mother.
But when his mother doesn’t recognize him, the episode takes a final unexpected turn and reveals itself to the audience. We are jolted back to the “present” and watch as Cooper has a seizure, yelling “mom” with his dying breath.
The entire mansion episode was just in his head, and we learn that there never was an Augmented Reality implant. The technology that was put into his head actually creates experiences in the user’s brain, essentially allowing users to experience vivid waking dreams.
To bring it back to the opening of the episode, we find out that the reason why Cooper is taken out of the experience is because his mother called and the cellular signals interfered with his brain implant.
Although technology is immediately responsible for his death, we understand that all of this could have been avoided if he has just spoken to his mom earlier. Even if he didn’t ask her for money, if he just took one of her numerous calls, she may not have called him while he was under the influence of the implant.
There’s a way to connect the whole middle of the episode to the ending as well. The fear that he experiences while he is trapped in the haunted house is a manifestation of the enveloping fear that he feels when he even thinks about speaking to his mother, which is why the final moments of his implant experience is an attempt to speak to his mother. For Cooper, that fear is simple scarier than any kind of giant spider or losing one’s mind in an AR experience. It’s why the implant created that reality for him, because it knew that the most frightening thing that could happen is his mother not responding to his attempts to connect with her. Here the technology is allowing him to experience his greatest fear, and perhaps the hope is that by experiencing it in his head in a “safe” environment, he’ll be able to overcome that fear and actually speak to his mom in the real world. Since Cooper dies after the cellular signal disrupts the implant, we’ll never know how he would have resolved that conflict, but the technology was at least offering a path to communication.
Playtest is a stronger episode than Nosedive, but its muddled message at the end drags it down — particularly since the episode tries to fake-out the audience twice at the end. There’s definitely an interesting message about technology bringing people together while also paradoxically keeping people apart, but that seems to take a backseat to the horror aspect that takes up a large chunk of the episode. But at least there’s more meat on the bone with Playtest, since it offers you the chance to think about the themes it is trying to convey. That’s more than can be said about Nosedive.
Shut Up and Dance
While I may sound lukewarm about the first two episodes, Shut Up and Dance more than makes up for it by being one of the strongest episodes of Black Mirror produced. It’s a taut script that continually ramps up the tension, creating a feeling of terror that is more genuine than the one found in Playtest. It also has an easy to understand parable about technology — that there is no real sense of privacy on the internet and that anyone can be watching you or trolling you. But what makes this episode so strong is that it is set in a world that is so close to our own that we can imagine ourselves in a similar situation, a prospect that no one wants to find themselves in.
The fact that the episode can be summed up in a sentence is what makes the episode so strong: a boy named Kenny does something bad on his computer and an anonymous hacker blackmails him and orders him to follow their instructions or risk his secret being revealed to the world. That’s all there is to the episode, but it’s simplicity is what allows the episode to not only be engaging as a thriller, but also deeply thought-provoking as well. There isn’t some high-concept science fiction gobbledygook to get in the way of the story.
The biggest thing I admire about the episode is that it doesn’t actively try to trick you like Playtest. On the surface, Kenny seems like an innocent kid whose only crime is being a sexually awkward teenager. So we get a scene where Kenny’s coworkers leer at a naked picture that one of their girlfriends sent them:
And Kenny tries to bond with them by just smiling at their boorish behaviour:
But that immediately puts them off and he is forced to slink away in shame:
He just wants to be “one of the guys”, as the cliche goes, and he fails spectacularly because he’s the sexually inexperienced virgin who doesn’t quite fit in with the older guys. The fact that the two guys are cooks and he’s on the wait staff is also a nice way to show a divide between them, since it only adds to the fact that they exist in two different groups.
Later in the episode, we see Kenny “experiment” with his sexuality in a manner that millions of teenage boys with access to the internet have done before. We see this from the point of view of his computer’s webcam, showing us what the hackers will use to blackmail him later on in the episode.
Is what he did something to be ashamed of? Of course I’m sure it’d cause some embarrassment at work or at school, but in the grand scheme of things a boy using the internet to amuse himself isn’t exactly shocking news. So why does he freak out when the hacker tells him that he’s been caught?
We get small clues that tell us that Kenny might have crossed a line that simply shouldn’t be crossed and that it’s simply not a case of a teenager watching something on Pornhub. First, we get this seemingly innocuous interaction between Kenny and a little girl at his workplace:
The girl forgot her happy meal toy and he calls out to her to give it back to her. It’s not exactly a strange scene to include in the episode — perhaps it’s meant to show us that Kenny is a sweet kid who is good with children.
But later on, we see this:
It’s a shot that is, to put it simply, pretty creepy. We see him linger on this activity sheet that a kid drew on, and although this shot doesn’t actually confirm anything, I think it does enough to plant some suggestions into our heads about Kenny’s intentions.
His boss comes up to him and teases him about the picture, and perhaps it puts our minds at ease that this scene is there to show that he might have a crush on his boss. But by the time we get to the end of the episode, we know exactly what Kenny’s crimes are and why these two scenes are more revealing than they appear to be at first glance. Certainly it gives you enough clues to figure out his crime before you get to the end of the episode, so you don’t feel like the ending just “happens” like it does in Playtest.
So a hacker catches Kenny masturbating and uses that to blackmail him into performing a series of seemingly random tasks. He’s told to pick up a cake, and then deliver that cake to another man named Hector who is also being blackmailed. Then with Hector’s help, he is ordered to rob a bank and the manner that the robbery is depicted helps convince us that he’s still a victim:
Kenny is nervous wreck throughout the robbery, and you could almost say that he’s scared shitless (although wetting his pants is obviously easier to show). This sequence of tasks builds tension as Kenny gets embroiled in a plot that drives him to dig himself into a hole that he won’t be able to climb out of. It all happens so quickly that we almost feel sorry for Kenny, because we can at least empathize with a victim being blackmailed with a picture of them in a compromising position. Surely everyone has at least one skeleton in their closet that they would be embarrassed by if it were ever made public. If Kenny is just a normal kid discovering his sexuality, maybe he’s just caught up in the hacker’s demands and isn’t fully thinking about the consequences of his actions. He’s gone this far, so what’s robbing a bank if it means his secret is safe?
The final task the hacker gives him is to take the money he just robbed from the bank to a mysterious location in the woods. There he finds a man waiting for him, and we finally learn the truth about Kenny. The hacker orders the two to fight to the death, and Kenny’s opponent reveals that he’s looked at some pictures that would end his life if people ever found out about them. Kenny tells the man that all he did was look at a couple of pictures, at which point the man asks Kenny, “How young were they?”. It’s at that point everything should come together for the viewer. It’s not just a case of a teenager being caught with his pants down. Why else would Kenny go along with all of these increasingly insane demands?
Kenny tries to escape his shame the only way he can at this moment. Rather than fight the man to the death, he tries to kill himself, freeing him from the hacker’s blackmail on his terms. But the gun is not loaded, and the fight proceeds as the hacker planned, and the final shot of the scene is an image of a drone capturing their fight for everyone to see.
This is the moment that the episode turns, because we are suddenly put into the point of view of the hacker — or at least someone who might be watching the hacker’s live stream. Yes, we don’t get to watch two paedophiles fight each other to the death, but we’re still complicit in watching Kenny jump through the hoops that the hacker set up for him. Even if we might have sympathized with Kenny during his torment, we were still deriving some “enjoyment” out of watching him if only because we’re engaged by the “thriller” aspect of the episode. Once you understand what Kenny did, suddenly the entire episode turns on its head and you see that you’ve been watching a guy who downloaded child porn be tortured for your amusement.
The fact that we get the infamous “troll face” at the end shows us that the events of the entire episode was for “our” amusement.
Everyone in the episode who was blackmailed was being trolled for some crime they committed, and the tasks they were forced to do were in accordance to their perceived crimes. So Hector, the man who drove Kenny to the bank and became his getaway driver after the robbery, was blackmailed for trying to set up an encounter with a prostitute. Which in the hacker’s mind, is a greater crime that using racist language in an email (the first “victim” we see in the opening of the episode) but not as bad as looking at child porn.
The episode becomes multilayered, because after we are caught up in the terror of what it might feel like to be blackmailed, we get to feel safe knowing that we never would do anything as bad as Kenny did and get to be voyeurs in his misery. It’s a comment on how technology makes us both vulnerable and powerful, as the episode expertly allows us to experience both sides of the story.
In fact, to give us the ultimate experience as voyeurs, we are allowed to witness Kenny’s fate:
He survived the fight to the death with the other paedophile, but did he really escape? Maybe he was right to try to kill himself before the fight, and maybe “winning” the fight is actually losing it, because now he has to deal with all the crimes he has committed — murder, armed robbery, and downloading child pornography. We’re not on his side anymore, we’re the ones sending him the troll face right as he is arrested. It’s a brilliant turn that doesn’t feel like a cheap twist because the clues were always there for you to find, and if you watch the episode again after the fact, the two scenes mentioned above can only be viewed as foreshadowing.
What’s doubly interesting about this episode is that it implicitly condemns vigilante justice — at least, it assumes that even if you found out that someone was downloading child pornography, blackmailing them into killing another paedophile might not be the best course of action. Yes, the “victims” of the hacker in the episode committed various crimes, but does it give the hacker the right to blackmail and torture them in this manner? The fact that we just go along with this convoluted plan as passive observers makes it feel like we are complicit with the hacker, and that perhaps we should condemn the hacker as much as the blackmail victims.
Hopefully you can see why I just love this episode. It’s complex and makes you think, it raises ethical questions about technology, it has a dark and unforgiving tone, and it is exactly what I expect when I watch an episode of Black Mirror.
My thoughts on the second half of the season will come in a subsequent post, but I think it’s fair to say that Shut Up and Dance is my favourite episode this season. That said, the next three episodes are fairly strong in their own right and at least have some kind of hook that elevates them above Nosedive and Playtest.
