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Griefor posted:It does that? I never got the feeling that the show was wagging its finger at the audience, in any episode. There were people watching the PM go at it but I didn't interpret that as a blanket statement about every single person viewing the episode. Charlie Brooker used to write bitter satirical things about computer games, so they made him a games reviewer, he then wrote bitter satirical things about TV, so they gave him a TV show, he then made a bitter satirical show about the news so they gave him a live weekly comedy news show, he then made a bitter satirical show about how technology makes us awful, so a big tech company gave him loads of money to make even more! Charlie Brooker is the main character in 15 million merits. He keeps pointing out how laughable and disgusting the system is so they keep giving him more money to point out how disgusting the system is so we can all laugh. Charlie Brooker is disgusted by you, and disgusted by himself and having a whale of a time. Don't doubt that every episode is wagging its finger at the audience, we are the joke.
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Oct 25, 2016 12:57
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HorseRenoir posted:Shut Up and Dance - I don't know what planet you guys are on; this episode was total garbage and tied with White Bear for personal least favorite of the series. white bear was the best episode prior to this season so that may be your problem.
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Oct 25, 2016 13:50
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White Bear (and Shut up and Dance) is an intense piece of television filled with lots of suspense and trauma and a bit of social commentary, but it never really made me think the way that Be Right Back or San Junipero did, or made me as nail-bitingly worried about the impact of technology on our social lives like Fifteen Million Merits or Nosedive or The Entire History of You. There are plenty of other shows and films I can watch for that horrifying suspense and intensity, but only Black Mirror scratches that technological-dystopia-made-real-by-human-nature itch, which is where it really shines in my opinion.
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Oct 25, 2016 16:30
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Griefor posted:
That's the vibe I got too. You feel sorry for him while at the same time feeling betrayed by him, because there's nothing that justifies his treatment by the Phone People, but you just know that his actions are going to make those Phone People feel vindicated.
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Oct 25, 2016 17:07
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White Bear is a decent ripoff of Stephen King's "Cell" that turns into an extremely lovely ripoff of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" halfway through, only "The Lottery" doesn't end with 200 pages of the woman getting graphically stoned in detail and the narrator going "wooooah can you believe how hosed up and disturbing this is woooooah"
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Oct 25, 2016 17:48
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Bicyclops posted:That's the vibe I got too. You feel sorry for him while at the same time feeling betrayed by him, because there's nothing that justifies his treatment by the Phone People, but you just know that his actions are going to make those Phone People feel vindicated. Yeah, nailed it.
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Oct 25, 2016 18:44
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Shut Up and Dance - Charlie Brooker found a rudimentary Black Mirror episode plot generator bot on the internet and got the output sentence "Two Paedophiles fight to the death in the woods while a drone looks on, and then all the bad people get sent troll faces while Radiohead plays", nodded to himself and thought, yes, just the amount of subtlety I'm looking for in a season 3 episode. Print it.
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Oct 25, 2016 19:36
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Daius posted:Shut Up and Dance - Charlie Brooker found a rudimentary Black Mirror episode plot generator bot on the internet and got the output sentence "Two Paedophiles fight to the death in the woods while a drone looks on, and then all the bad people get sent troll faces while Radiohead plays", nodded to himself and thought, yes, just the amount of subtlety I'm looking for in a season 3 episode. Print it. And it worked
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Oct 25, 2016 19:46
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Somebody should use this song as exit music, (you know, like for a film).Total Meatlove posted:And it worked 
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Oct 25, 2016 19:49
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I'm not entirely sure why anyone expects Black Mirror to be subtle. It started with a Prime Minister being pressured into loving a pig. Subtlety has never really been its thing.
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Oct 25, 2016 19:50
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More power to people who liked it, but the lack of subtlety works in the episodes that have a degree of dark humour to them. When you try to play that completely straight up to and including trying to earn closing with Exit Music, it becomes almost a parody of the Black Mirror formula in itself. Which maybe that was intended and is a good thing? Either way I was just left reminded of the end of that Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle episode where he's drinking vomit from a bucket in front of Tory mannequins while No Surprises plays.
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Oct 25, 2016 19:57
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https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/59cppq/were_charlie_brooker_and_annabel_jones_the/ go tell brooker you love him or that he's poo poo
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Oct 25, 2016 20:22
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My only problem with What If Bees was that by the end of the episode I was like "Yeah that guy's got a point, gently caress all those idiots that casually wish death on people on the Internet, I won't miss 'em". Also good lord, 20 years later and Kelly MacDonald still looks like the underage girl Renton got picked up by in Trainspotting. e: I'm also not sure what the point of the ending stinger was, other than to add ambiguity for no good reason. e2: I honestly expected the episode to do a twist/reveal that had something to do with the reason Actual Bees have been disappearing.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:31
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precision posted:My only problem with What If Bees was that by the end of the episode I was like "Yeah that guy's got a point, gently caress all those idiots that casually wish death on people on the Internet, I won't miss 'em". The sheer and total hypocrisy of this viewpoint is honestly loving staggering.
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Oct 25, 2016 20:49
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precision posted:My only problem with What If Bees was that by the end of the episode I was like "Yeah that guy's got a point, gently caress all those idiots that casually wish death on people on the Internet, I won't miss 'em". Well, we have the guy who says "Yeah, sure, the White Bear is fine, and good," the people who say "Sure, the Shut Up and Dance Helldumper crew were morally fine," and, finally, the guy who thinks the dude who killed tens of thousands of people for getting riled up on Twitter was okay. If nothing else, Black Mirror lets us note the people who look at philosophy textbook moral dilemmas and say things like "Why don't we just kill everyone?"
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Oct 25, 2016 21:04
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Daius posted:Shut Up and Dance - Charlie Brooker found a rudimentary Black Mirror episode plot generator bot on the internet and got the output sentence "Two Paedophiles fight to the death in the woods while a drone looks on, and then all the bad people get sent troll faces while Radiohead plays", nodded to himself and thought, yes, just the amount of subtlety I'm looking for in a season 3 episode. Print it. You seem to be under the (false) impression that Black Mirror is or ever has been a subtle work. It is not. It is a series where its first episode consists of the prime minister being blackmailed into having sex with a pig on camera. This is not some hidden and texturally rich artistic work. It is and always has been an extremely blatant television show, that impresses themes with a hammer. The quality or lack thereof on an episode-to-episode basis is entirely executional. There's basically no premise for any episode that's more extreme or more outlandish than any other (which is why I find it so absolutely weird people honestly try and pretend that, like, Hated in the Nation fails because it's too "out there". So you're telling me that being able to make an exact duplicate of someone based off their social media postings, a dystopian future where people perform exercise solely to earn completely meaningless faux currency, the ability to block someone in real life, a town where everyone in it is an actor and they wipe criminals' minds daily solely to subject them to horrible trauma for societal amusement/revenge, and a cartoon character getting elected as the leader of a country are all totally believable, but techno bees isn't? Uh huh), it all boils down to how well or how poorly Charlie Brooker et al write the episode. And, given that it's an anthology show directly inspired by The Twilight Zone (a show with a LOT of stinkers in its run), is gonna be naturally hit-or-miss. It's part and parcel with the form. Executionally speaking, Shut Up and Dance is up there with the finest episodes BM has ever done (only outclassed by White Christmas/White Bear), and it's why I consider it an all-time classic. I'm not like, "Man, this episode is so nuanced and subtle! It's like I'm watching Mad Men, but with tech!" I know it's blatant and over the top and broad, but it impresses emotion and carries out its aims so utterly perfectly that it makes me feel things, which is all that I really care about television doing. It has its aims, and it fulfilled those aims. I'm satisfied.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:05
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If you don't believe there are people on this very forum who wouldn't cheerfully force two people to fight to the death and watch them with a drone, I don't know where you've been posting. Subtlety is debatable both in terms of its presence or its merits, but it's hard to argue the episode isn't poignant.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:07
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Bees, But Too Much could have been much better if they'd changed course around the time the public found out - something like "the bees are now autonomous and we are locked out, hashtags that kill is now a thing, how do we as a society handle this" - like with the prime minister wanting to release documents fingering another unlikeable person as a pedophile to save his own skin.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:08
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ymgve posted:Bees, But Too Much could have been much better if they'd changed course around the time the public found out - something like "the bees are now autonomous and we are locked out, hashtags that kill is now a thing, how do we as a society handle this" - like with the prime minister wanting to release documents fingering another unlikeable person as a pedophile to save his own skin. I very much disagree with this, because it would have turned into the most groan-worthy, milquetoast criticism of Outrage Culture instead of encouraging us to look at how things are more complicated than that.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:12
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I think Hated In the Nation is fine (just like I consider most of the season to be fine-at-worst, Men Against Fire was incredibly personally resonant which is why I overlook some of its larger missteps), it just makes a couple of unforced errors while carried by strong performances and a good script. Playtest I also consider pretty good considering I found its parallelism between the increasing ease with which tech immerses the user in horror (something we're actually seeing, right now, with VR) and what true horror actually is - the main character's fear of becoming like his father and his inability to communicate with his mother eventually causing his demise - a fairly striking point. Really, the only real failure was Nosedive, mostly because Schur and/or Jones wrote an incredibly terrible and totally on-the-nose ending that didn't executionally work at all combined with approaching BM with the same perspective that they wrote and performed in The Office, to the point where there were significant segments of the episode that are genuinely unwatchable. It's still overall "okay", but it needed a lot more cleanup than it got. It's tonally all over the place and it honestly feels like Schur is so unused to writing for a network that doesn't have content restrictions every other word out of everyone's mouth is "gently caress" to the point where it's genuinely distracting.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:17
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:You seem to be under the (false) impression that Black Mirror is or ever has been a subtle work. It is not. It is a series where its first episode consists of the prime minister being blackmailed into having sex with a pig on camera. Counterpoint - I think Shut Up and Dance was executed poorly, because i could see through it's attempts to try to make me feel a particular thing and by the end I felt it had earned none of the respect that it was desperately trying to earn with how the ending was constructed. It'd tried to make me go along with the conceit and, in my eyes, failed laughably in ways that pretty much every other BM episode except the Waldo one didn't. Because media can be intrepreted in different ways.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:24
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And that's fine, I'm just making the point that criticizing a given episode of BM for its lack of subtlety is like criticizing a given episode for having too extreme of or an immersion-breaking premise. It's a fundamentally faulty assertion, what you're really arguing is that it was executionally ineffective. It's not a subtle or realistic show, and never has been.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:28
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:(which is why I find it so absolutely weird people honestly try and pretend that, like, Hated in the Nation fails because it's too "out there". So you're telling me that being able to make an exact duplicate of someone based off their social media postings, a dystopian future where people perform exercise solely to earn completely meaningless faux currency, the ability to block someone in real life, a town where everyone in it is an actor and they wipe criminals' minds daily solely to subject them to horrible trauma for societal amusement/revenge, and a cartoon character getting elected as the leader of a country are all totally believable, but techno bees isn't? Uh huh) the issue with the techno bees isn't that they're too "out there", it's that they're goofy and dumb
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Oct 25, 2016 21:35
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:The sheer and total hypocrisy of this viewpoint is honestly loving staggering. I thought it was obvious I was being flip. I do not literally wish death on people who use Twitter. Just some small, inescapable amount of pain would do. While we're theory crafting I thought when the guy went to change his appearance that he was spoofing the facial recognition so that he looked enough like someone on the list to be killed and martyred. What If Suicide Bombers, etc. Men Against Fire is the only episode I didn't care for, and really only because it was both too long and too abstract. The twisty end was pretty good.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:59
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precision posted:I thought it was obvious I was being flip. I do not literally wish death on people who use Twitter. Just some small, inescapable amount of pain would do. I'm still not sure what they were trying to do with that ending, with the investigator faking her own death so she could go track down the villain in Africa. "Hated in the Nation" felt like the pilot to a completely unrelated series that got turned into a Black Mirror episode at the last minute.
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Oct 25, 2016 22:23
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HorseRenoir posted:I'm still not sure what they were trying to do with that ending, with the investigator faking her own death so she could go track down the villain in Africa. "Hated in the Nation" felt like the pilot to a completely unrelated series that got turned into a Black Mirror episode at the last minute. Yeah, actually, it does. And to take it a step further, why did they make sure we knew that Kelly knew that the girl faked her death? Like I said, it adds ambiguity to no purpose, unless maybe it was meant to be "See, it was a lone nut with bees, but also, the government is lying".
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Oct 25, 2016 22:36
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Escobarbarian posted:the issue with the techno bees isn't that they're too "out there", it's that they're goofy and dumb yup. the premise of the episode is an interesting one but they completely hosed it up. there's like a 10 minute infodump about how the bees work it's silly.
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Oct 25, 2016 22:58
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I thought they were purposefully poking fun at the ultra grimdark scandinavian crime shows.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:16
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Mu Zeta posted:I thought they were purposefully poking fun at the ultra grimdark scandinavian crime shows. I think it was an homage to that rather than poking fun at it.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:17
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An homage with bees? Beeees?
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Oct 25, 2016 23:21
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Mu Zeta posted:I thought they were purposefully poking fun at the ultra grimdark scandinavian crime shows. It reminded me of The Fall
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Oct 25, 2016 23:39
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Hated in the Nation worked for me, but I also have a bee phobia. I didn't mind the info dump on how they worked because it didn't bore me. I agree it was unnecessary, but I don't care. I didn't mind the ending because I interpret it as showing the two policewomen having built a friendship and the hacker dude getting his comeuppance.
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Oct 26, 2016 01:18
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Bicyclops posted:Well, we have the guy who says "Yeah, sure, the White Bear is fine, and good," the people who say "Sure, the Shut Up and Dance Helldumper crew were morally fine," and, finally, the guy who thinks the dude who killed tens of thousands of people for getting riled up on Twitter was okay. If nothing else, Black Mirror lets us note the people who look at philosophy textbook moral dilemmas and say things like "Why don't we just kill everyone?" After episodes like Man on Fire and Fifteen Million Merits, I can sympathize with that view. If our future is really that bleak and dismal, we might as well just call it quits and let some other species have a go. 
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Oct 26, 2016 02:53
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Hated in the Nation was a 7/10 script with some 10/10 performances, particularly the two main detectives and Benedict Wong's character. But even a mediocre Black Mirror is better than 95% of everything else.
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Oct 26, 2016 04:42
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I don't know if it's been said yet, but I was really let down by Hated in the Nation because that is not the way MRI scanners work. The magnet is is always the same strength and rarely even turned off. When the scan begins it is only altering the polarity of the field to produce the image. Furthermore, most all implanted devices will not be wrenched out of a person but simply heat up and cause thermic damage to surrounding tissues. So my immersion was totally ruined at that point.
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Oct 26, 2016 05:44
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Blind Rasputin posted:I don't know if it's been said yet, but I was really let down by Hated in the Nation because that is not the way MRI scanners work. The magnet is is always the same strength and rarely even turned off. When the scan begins it is only altering the polarity of the field to produce the image. Furthermore, most all implanted devices will not be wrenched out of a person but simply heat up and cause thermic damage to surrounding tissues. So my immersion was totally ruined at that point. Exactly. When will they learn what's really important! There were issues with the neural network system in Playtest as well, it's almost like they didn't consult a Machine Learning researcher for that one. And the CEO wasn't played by Kojima, immersion ruined.
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Oct 26, 2016 05:53
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Blind Rasputin posted:I don't know if it's been said yet, but I was really let down by Hated in the Nation because that is not the way MRI scanners work. The magnet is is always the same strength and rarely even turned off. When the scan begins it is only altering the polarity of the field to produce the image. Furthermore, most all implanted devices will not be wrenched out of a person but simply heat up and cause thermic damage to surrounding tissues. So my immersion was totally ruined at that point. Some of the chatter about hacking the bees was also jabberwocky. For example, the guy saying the system is impervious to any and all hacking*. Most of security breaches in software are exploits of human error, not cracking a security algorithm. I don't think any real world security expert would dare claim a business sized project they wrote could never be breached ever. Also, "You can only get in with a super-secret key" raises the obvious concern that someone might have gotten a hold of the key, through one such exploit or by social engineering or a combination. But you know, computer stuff in tv/movies is complete balderdash used as a substitute for magical realism so often that it doesn't even affect my immersion anymore. Hated in the Nation wasn't half as bad as some other shows are. You better get used to this kind of stuff because I'm pretty sure that having a good amount of knowledge about almost any subject means you will start seeing these kinds of errors in writing. *Of course he was proven wrong anyway, because the system was breached, but they're still weird things to be said by the top IT guy at the richest company of the country.
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Oct 26, 2016 06:17
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sout posted:https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/59cppq/were_charlie_brooker_and_annabel_jones_the/ Thanks for this! FYI if anyone wants the upvote/downvote sounds from Nosedive for your own phone, Brooker posted them here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/59cppq/were_charlie_brooker_and_annabel_jones_the/d97fgvv/
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Oct 26, 2016 13:56
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San Junipero is the best, and I won't be able to hear that song again without thinking of that ending.
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Oct 26, 2016 17:40
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Halfway through Hated by the Nation, and this is like a bad episode of CSI: Cyber
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Oct 26, 2016 18:27
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