Tao Jones posted:

I hadn't quite thought about it in that way. I think it and Waldo are different from the other five episodes in that they don't involve "magical" technology. There's nothing extraordinary in the premises for them, it's all stuff that could at least in theory happen tomorrow.

That said, though, I don't think National Anthem could have happened without TV, the internet, the ability to follow a developing story with up-to-the-minute information, the lack of institutional control over social media, etc.

Magic Hate Ball posted:

That's just the difference between plot and story - the plot is what happens, the story is what happens.

Vitamin P posted:

How long until we stop doing spoilers? I hate the redacted CIA document look.

Playtest was all about fear as jump scares and monsters, and then adds 'oh yeah and also relationships and adult things can be really scary too', the "lesson" was face your fears. It was just pretty cackhanded in a lot of ways. In Coopers vision it escalates until the company are evil and volunteers die all the time, but then volunteers also die all the time in the real world too, guess they shouldn't have turned their phones on eh, it's just silly.

Honestly I think "we're wiping your mind to turn you into a disposable corporate asset" would have been better. Or even what I was expecting, that Cooper would go to hug his mom and she would plasticate and warp and he'd be stuck never knowing how much he was seeing was real. Neither would be very coherent as an ending but the episode wasn't either honestly.

maskenfreiheit posted:

One thing in Callister no one seems to touch on:

I'm not sure the NPCs were, uh, totally innocent. The front desk woman was definitely hostilely indifferent to a senior staffer. The black lady seemed like many coworkers I've met who sidle up and try to get you to say something they can narc on. The CEO appears to be a serial sexual harasser. Obviously they don't deserve eternal torture, but let's not pretend this is a collection of completely innocent normies being persecuted by the incel gamemaker.

What's really interesting is if the CTO had maybe bonded with engineer fangirl, he could have maybe no longer had a need for the game, become a less broken person. Instead he got weird and retreated deeper into his fantasy world, leading to his possible demise... or at the very least I'll assume being locked up in your apartment for a few days til someone notices you've gone off the grid would leave some serious PTSD

Groovelord Neato posted:

the intern forgot his sandwich.

maskenfreiheit posted:

Callister

I don't think any of them deserved torture, but a couple of them were toxic. The "flirty" CEO and the rude bluetooth later from the coffee machine, along with the front desk woman all deserved an attitude adjustment.

WampaLord posted:

It's literally just to create tension, and it works quite well. The slow build of tension throughout the episode is half the fun.

LesterGroans posted:

Well, sure, whether it was an effective comedy is another thing entirely. I just think an episode that ends with a guinea pig grassing someone up shouldn't be taken 100 percent seriously.

WampaLord posted:

They fit thematically.

Flayer posted:

Crocodile should have had a male lead, it was ridiculous with a female in that role. A physically dominating presence would have been far more intense and sinister rather than pretending a 100lb woman made sense in any of the key scenes after the first one.

Overall it was disappointing series - simple rehashes of previously explored ideas in every episode apart from Metalhead (which in turn wasn't much of a Black Mirror episode).

ZeeBoi posted:

ClumsyThief posted:

And the entire plot hinging on the idea that an insurance adjuster can use police involvement to require access to a video feed of someone's memories because they might have witnessed an accident. And by her own admissions they're aware of how inaccurate they can be, so they have to hit up literally anyone who was around.

Raged posted:

Except for how well it was shot Metalhead was top to bottom bad Hated how the protagonist acted. Have to be quiet? I'll be the noisest mother fucker on the planet throughout the whole episode. Van driver dead? I'll just wait to see if that isn't his brains splattered all over the windshield. It can track blood and I know about it? I'll do nothing to stop the bleeding until it's far too late same goes with the radio. Also, add in that it looks like humanity had been slaughtered, but she is stupidly squeamish when she finds the dead body

With most episodes of BM you get an idea of how humanity has gotten to the position they are in. Nothing at all in this episode.


Hang the DJ was good though. Really liked the and Callister.

Supercar Gautier posted:

Posts like this make me realize how possible Crocodile is.

lelandjs posted:

Yeah, what the gently caress. How the hell does someone watch Black Mirror and find themselves agreeing with the bad guys?

Red Oktober posted:

I liked that it wasn’t. Because it’s back mirror, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. A San Junipero level of happy ending is exactly what I wasn’t expecting.

Desiderata posted:

Sure.

The average middle-aged northern family woman is a tough creature who has no problem running for hours over hill and vale, even with legs full of shrapnel. It should have been realistic and portrayed her with the desicion making skills of a harded special forces vet. Anything less is an insult to my fore-mothers.

cosmically_cosmic posted:

I disagree on some points, like He doesn't trike me as the military nerd type, Trek was kind of anti-military in the sense that it was specifically about diplomacy and working together than conquering an enemy, and I think that the choice kind of does point more to repression in that sense, especially the choice of 60s trek which IIRC was the one still helmed by the guy who thought characters shouldn't have inter-person conflict because the future was beyond that. Considering how confrontation averse he seems in real life, I can see why his character would fetishise that kind of show so much.
He clearly has sexual desire for the main character, but that manifests as turning her into a chaste prop in a skimpy outfit with no actual vagina, like a little boys idea of a woman.
The authority was definitely a factor, but to call him a sadist I think is both right and wrong, his 'fantasy' wasn't one of being an active torturer, it was being the worshipped Trek hero who is all sophistocated, diplomatic, tactical and in control, who everyone loves rather than fears. The fear and obedience were his way to make that fantasy happen, at least that's my idea from just one viewing.

Away all Goats posted:

Metalhead would have been a really neat short film instead of a 40 minute long episode.

Professor Shark posted:

Re Metalhead:

Apparently they filmed but didn’t include/ planned to show a man operating the dog from his home. When the dog “goes to sleep” they planned on cutting to him doing domestic stuff, like reading to his kids. It’s obviously connected to drone warfare and the disconnect between violence and the drone operators, which is why they didn’t include it, but I think that sheds more light on the world the episode takes place in.

Bicyclops posted:

So far, no one has defended the proprieter from from Black Museum, even if there are a bunch re: Callister that were "Wow, is it so bad that that a guy made a bunch of sentient copies of people and tortured them? Are they actually real? Makes you think, glad this episode engendered so much discussion, this so is so complex."

Let's see how long we can keep that up.

Waltzing Along posted:

The system worked. They were both using an app and it worked. Did you watch the episode?

Bicyclops posted:

That's true of John Hamm and the CTO of the USS Callister too, but it doesn't stop goons from doing it!

Bicyclops posted:

It's not really Black Mirror that makes you lose faith in humanity so much as reading people's interpretations of it.


Well yeah (his moral crimes are considerably worse than non-consensual voyeurism, and even that is a generous descriptor of his lesser crime), but "punishment we shouldn't be on board with" is true of almost all of the Black Mirror villains, including in this season. It almost doesn't matter if it's wildly disproportionate to the crime - in a world in which people can inflict real, eternal horror on people, we shouldn't let anyone do it, even in retaliation for those who do it first. Part of what separates my thinking from other people's vastly is any time somebody says "Well, sure, I'm okay with this," when it comes to any of the And I Must Scream level torture-thons.

Bicyclops posted:

lol wtf does this even mean?

Cojawfee posted:

Hang the DJ: The two people matching up because the computer told them to isn't the success. the success is the two people breaking away from the system, deciding they are good for each other on their own and attempting to run away. It demonstrates that even when told who to date, these two people will still find each other and run away. That proves they are truly compatible.

Groovelord Neato posted:

i think it's hosed up to torture video game characters and they aren't even sentient. i've played through new vegas four or five times and every time i side against caesar because even in a fictional game i can't go with the misogynistic slavers.

Bicyclops posted:

This guy's defense of "it's okay to abuse sentient digital copies, it's totally fine" was "Looks like someone doesn't understand a little thing called nuance!." Hanging out in your programmed torture world where you inflict And I Must Scream level punishments on your co-workers is fine, just normal, and if you disagree with that, my friend, then you must see everything in black and white and/or not understand that some villains are written sympathetically.

When you condone torture, it's not the other person who missed the point

Thursday Next posted:

Arkangel
This one wasn't very powerful for me. I felt like Mom escalated way too quickly. She turned off the monitor for, what, like ten years? So she clearly wasn't totally overprotective the whole time. To go from that to grinding up a morning-after pill in a smoothie in under a day just felt weird. I get that she was screwed up by seeing her kid fuckin' (I think anyone would be on tilt after that, to say the least). But the escalation felt too fast, for little payoff. The tech was obvious from the get-go here, too.

Supercar Gautier posted:

The divide I'm seeing in the reaction to Metalhead is:

If you assume the dogs are the ubiquitous cause of the apocalyptic setting, then you will naturally think the protagonist and her companions are idiots for ever venturing anywhere.

If you assume the dogs are just one, relatively uncommon aspect of this world that went to poo poo in some tangential/unrelated way, then doing some scavenging is still risky but not brain-dead unreasonable.

21 Muns posted:

IMO it would be kind of interesting if there were an episode that inverted it, so the uploaded people are just being complete dicks and getting away with it because they're in a computer. Like, yay, we just got Grandpa into a computer, we've saved him from mortality! Wait, poo poo, now he's making copies of himself. Guess we need to respect all of them now, because they are all intelligent beings. gently caress, GRANDPA, STOP MAKING COPIES OF YOURSELF, WE DON'T HAVE THAT MUCH STORAGE SPACE, WHAT ARE THEY EVEN FOR. Like, the emulated intelligences were natalists in life and now they're taking it to its logical conclusion in a post-Cookie environment.

unlawfulsoup posted:

A running theme in Black Mirror is that people, even the awful ones don't always deserve the tortures/fate they endure. It has sort of morphed from 'hazards of tech' to being more abstract at times now. Like even if you hate pedophiles, greedy corporate types, etc. cheering on their deaths is sort of lovely irregardless. It was one of the main things that Hated in the Nation was hamfistedly making a statement on.

21 Muns posted:

Is it weird that I really liked Frank's second date? Yeah, she's absolutely awful to Frank, but she doesn't strike me as a fundamentally antisocial person, just someone deeply incompatible with Frank. Assuming she's based on a real user of the app somewhere out there, I hope things turn out well for her!

HorseRenoir posted:

White Bear sucks rear end, it's like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" but if the twist was revealed halfway through the story and then the entire second half was just a sadistically detailed depiction of the woman crying and being bludgeoned to death as the narrator goes "whooooah isn't this so hosed up you guys???"

It wastes a great setup on a pointlessly edgy and mean-spirited ending. Maybe I would give a poo poo if I lived in England and things like the Moors Murders resonated with me, but I live in a country where you can spray dozens of people in a crowd with an automatic rifle and people will forget it happened less than a week later so the entire thing reads as hollow to me.

Cojawfee posted:

People in the United States would most definitely go to a theme park to see a criminal run around all scared. Go find any reddit, something awful, twitter, or facebook post about someone committing some terrible crime and look at all the people coming up with all the sick poo poo they want to do to that person as punishment.