Imagine your geeky coworker moonlighting as an asshole Mad God in his own twisted little reality, in which you're an NPC. A lowly NPC with little more role than a glorified actor on a stage, forced to play along or suffer the wrath of the aforementioned master.
In his modified game, Daly has Reality Warper powers. If you don't play along with his fantasies, he'll do such lovely things such as stealing your face, turning you into an Eldritch Abomination complete with Body Horror, or shoot your six-year-old son out of the airlock while forcing you to watch.
The torture of having your face removed is as horrific to suffer about as it is to witness. Suddenly your face is wiped off your head and immediately you have no oxygen and no sight. Your brain screams for your lungs to breathe but they cannot because there is nowhere you can pull air into your lungs from. Even worse is that you don't get the sweet relief of being rendered unconscious from it. You get to remain conscious and struggle throughout the entire experience in a state of perpetual suffocation because only Daly himself can decide if and when you die. If he is feeling especially cruel he can simply choose to leave you writhing in agony forever.
Daly describing how Walton’s son Tommy died as his father watched is incredibly chilling: a six-year-old didn't just die when tossed out into space, his body froze and then cracked like a porcelain doll. And because Daly has Tommy's DNA in real life, he could torture a copy of Tommy over and over until Walton complied to his twisted fantasy. By this point, any shred of sympathy Daly might have from the audience will have vanished. And remember that Daly also has a power (but thankfully not uses it here) to make Tommy undying: if you thought killing the boy over and over was bad, now imagine him being thrown out the airlock and not dying.
As awesome as Walton's heroic sacrifice was, being burned beyond recognition in the ship's thruster once it restarts is not a friendly way to go even if he was a digital clone. And this is even considering that he cannot truly die, and after the crew escapes into the main game and Daly's mod is removed, he returns to the bridge.
Hell, Daly's possible brain death near the end of the episode is unsettling. The implication that his entire mind was erased causing said brain death as well as showing his body going limp while an eerie version of Silent Night plays makes you feel a small amount of pity on him.
Him having a brain death is actually merciful in this context. With how much emphasis has been put on Daly being a hermit and Callister being shut down for ten days, some people speculate that Daly's actually just in a comatose state, left to die slowly of dehydration. To add salt to the wound, Daly locked up his apartment earlier to get out of paying a tip, making it absolutely certain that he won't be found.
The real Nanette idolized Daly and is probably going to be a wreck if he is found dead after she stole from his apartment. Also, as far as she knows, there are blackmailers out there who have her naked photos to re-use later. She knew nothing of the digital crew's plans. Finally, she left prints at Daly's apartment and presumably ordered a pizza to his address from her phone. If Daly dies and police investigate, she is in for a world of trouble.
Marie spying on her daughter Sara throughout key points in her life takes My Beloved Smother to obscene levels, using a chip injected into Sara's brain that works in tandem with a tablet. She can see everything through Sara's eyes and tell exactly where she is through the tablet's tracking feature. Paranoia Fuel incarnate for anyone who's ever had an overprotective parent.
When Sara is young, her grandfather has a stroke, but seeing him in pain causes her stress levels to rise. The chip blurs him out, so she can't see him or hear him telling her to get the phone. He only gets medical attention in time because the ArkAngel tablet notifies Marie that Sara's stress levels are abnormally high.
The implant blurs out things that elicit a fear response from the implantee. Through Sara's eyes, every depiction of blood is blurred out, even including a simple red-colored-pencil-on-paper drawing. She pricks her finger with a sharp pencil to find even her own blood pixellated by the implant, and begins wildly stabbing her fingers with the pencil in frustration.
When Sara has finally hit her teen years, she has a full-on mental breakdown courtesy of discovering her mother had watched Sara and her boyfriend have sex, then secretly slipped her a morning-after pill in her smoothie. Sara takes the tablet and beats her mother bloody with it, only further twisted by the implant pixellating her mother's entire face.
Mia ends up killing her old boyfriend, an innocent couple and their infant son. Shazia is clearly terrified when she realizes her memories are cause enough for Mia to kill her; Shazia's husband was killed because he knew his wife was going to meet Mia, and the baby died simply because he appeared to see Mia in the house.
All this is caused because of the memory scanning tech, which has the potential to create a domino effect of utter catastrophe. For criminals (or really anyone in this future) it means that ANY LIVING THING can be used against you as a witness; Mia gets caught because of a pet guinea pig. For the innocent, it means that you can be a perfect witness — so desperate people will do whatever they can to take you out of the picture before you can incriminate them. This has to be happening a lot, since the law has seemingly made compliance with any civil worker that uses these chips mandatory; even without the possibility of getting murdered in the course of an investigation, it's very sinister that it's totally legal for the government to get inside someone's head. Finally, there's nothing to stop less scrupulous people from using the tech for their own purposes, such as Mia forcibly reading Shazia's mind to see who else knew of her visit, before taking steps to cover her tracks.
Those robotic dogs actually manage to be quite terrifying. Their barrages of bullets make Your Head Asplode. No wonder this thing had to be shot in black and white. Yeesh.
The way the robot dogs move is a bit silly at times, looking almost like stop motion. Other times, its jilted mechanical movements look unnatural and just plain unsettling.
The Pain Junkie. In order to get his fix, he eventually turns to graphic self-mutilation, starting with a sickening display of Fin Gore with a shard of glass, and ending with him with lots of bloody tissues and gouged flesh in the bathroom. There is the exact opposite of a Gory Discretion Shot. The highlight of this is his lips, marred with freshly healed scars that appear to be either a result of him cutting into his lips or suturing them shut. And before that, we can see that he's Not to mention the first shot we get of him is his feet, revealing that he's CUT TWO OF HIS TOES OFF. And going back to the lips, the first shot we see of them is one where he is pulling out one of his teeth with pliers.
The Pain Junkie eventually takes a cordless drill to a homeless man's head to sate his needs. Luckily we're given a Gory Discretion Shot, but we still hear the poor man's screams.
The next story features a coma patient who agreed to have her consciousness transferred to her partner's. However, the arrangement proves to be stressful for the both of them so after failed compromises, the patient ends up with her consciousness put inside a stuffed monkey who can see, hear, and feel everything around it but can only communicate through the phrases "Monkey loves you" and "Monkey needs a hug." Eventually, the monkey becomes neglected and forgotten, and is donated to the Black Museum where it now resides in a glass case. And I Must Scream at its most horrific.
Having your consciousness trapped as an attraction and being electrocuted by a bunch of greedy or vindictive tourists for years. Thousands of souvenier copies exist in perpetual agony. Nish has no way to find and free them all, only the revenge of putting one copy of Rolo through the same torture.
Speaking of which, Nish Leigh, Clayton Leigh's daughter, can be this in spades if you happen to be on the receiving end of her wrath. Just ask Rolo Haynes. Think about it: an ordinary young woman on a road trip from Britain shows up at your museum. She seems friendly and curious with a charming accent. Then, just as you show off your prized exhibit, you're coughing and having trouble breathing. Her accent disappears and as she tells her side of the story—not able to decide whether to break down in tears or lash out in anger—you realize just how screwed you are. And that's before your physical body dies, as Nish attaches a familiar piece of technology to your forehead that you had a hand in developing.
