Fridge / Black Mirror: Crocodile

Black Mirror FridgeSeries FourUSS Callister — ArkAngel — Crocodile — Hang the DJ — Metalhead — Black Museum

• Fridge Brilliance: Shazia decides to go interview Mia as soon as she finds out who she is, working overtime. This means she'd get paid more, which would be very attractive since the family needs money to help with raising a visually-impaired child.
• Fridge Horror: the memory recall tech in this episode means NO ONE who saw or knows something about a major crime like murder is safe if someone desperately wants to cover it up. This is made crushingly clear by what transpires in the episode. Since the law says people have to comply with any agent or worker sanctioned to use the memory control gadget, domino-effect murder must be taking place all the time if those agents aren't protected.
  • Actually, the law only says that the insurance investigators have to inform the police if a witness to an incident doesn't cooperate with the investigation. There's nothing in the episode that says people have to allow themselves to be probed by Corroborators.
  • In a similar vein, the Corroborators mean that NO ONE who wants to keep a secret can truly do so. If Alice really wants to find where Bob's treasure chest is buried, she could tie him to a chair, stick a probe in his temple, then use a Corroborator to see where it is. The fact that the Corroborators don't use any sort of security key or password means a street thug could steal one from a sanctioned worker and then start probing for secrets.
• Fridge Logic: Why did Shazia not have any kind of protection? As in, pepper spray or a gun? What happened with Mia has to be happening on a smaller scale more often.
  • In the U.K. (where this is set), carrying knives or guns is illegal and pepper spray is very uncommon.
    • How about a baton then? Or maybe go in pairs?
    • Shazia wasn't with the police (the hotel receptionist points that out), she appeared to just be from some kind of insurance/compensation claims company sent to investigate accidents. The only reason she even went to Mia was because none of the people she approached first actually saw the van hit the musician whose claim she was in charge of processing. The chances of her actually being at risk from a secret murderer were probably extremely low (also note how the Recall team at the end with the police are in a pair). In a sense, it was simply her bad luck that Mia was the only one who had seen the accident.
• More Fridge Logic: there's no way Mia would've gotten away with her murder spree for very long even without the presence of the memory recall technology or the intercession of Chekhov's Guinea Pig at the end. Shazia's husband wasn't the only person who knew she was looking for Mia when she disappeared (Shazia had also spoken to the clerk at the hotel about her and he knew her real name), the last person Shazia looked up on her computer before disappearing was Mia, the last address she looked up directions to was that of Mia's house, and it's extremely likely that somebody in Shazia's line of work would keep detailed case notes on people she was speaking to in her investigation, including when and why she was planning to meet them; since she was anticipating getting paid extra for overtime, she likely even told her employers that she was going to Mia's house while on the way there. Real-world murderers are frequently caught for reasons like this, so it's pretty implausible that someone could even hope to tie up all loose ends and get away with murder in a world with Black Mirror technology.

---