Nightmare Fuel / Black Mirror: White Christmas

Nightmare FuelSeries One — Series Two — Christmas Special — Series Three — Series Four

• The tone throughout the overarching narrative, with main characters Joe and Matt sitting in a cabin just talking, is constantly unsettling, due to the lack of almost any sound apart from their voices.
• Fridge Horror: the Zed-Eyes (technological contact lenses) are worn by everyone and cannot be removed. But what if somebody hacked into them? They could see everything. And you'd never even know.
  • Also, imagine that someone you know/used to know does something to get "blocked by the system" and the first you find out about it is them getting "fuzzed out" in your old pictures.
• The first segment: a young man tries to romance an attractive outsider, only to discover she's an undiagnosed schizophrenic, and believing she has found a kindred spirit, forces him to drink poison before killing herself with it as well.
• The second segment features a woman getting a 'cookie'. It's an implant that learns how a person thinks, in order to perform tasks exactly as the owner does. However, the problem is that the cookie believes they ARE that person. This results in the cookie refusing to work. Solution? Their perception of time is sped up. They believe they have spent days, weeks, months even, alone with nothing to do. And this is a digital copy, so they can't age or die. By the end, they are left a broken shell of their former self, condemned to an endless 'life' of slavery.
  • Matt's complete nonchalance about the whole ordeal suggests he did this multiple times.
  • It's also pretty scary from the perspective of users who don't know what they're really getting into. If your "cookie" finally snaps, what sort of revenge could they get on you? Could they lock you in your house? Scald you in your shower? Blow out the pilot light and gas you? How much power are they trusted with? And you probably already have devices/applications which learn your habits and preferences. As smarter versions are developed, will we in the real world eventually be condemning intelligent consciousnesses to predicting when we'll want our toilet seats warmed up for us?
  • It's also stated that "Cookies" that go irreparably insane are used as NPCs and enemy characters in video games. Ouch...
  • Another Fridge Horror thought here is that plenty of these cookies have to be made from parents. Heck, aside from schedule freaks like Greta, parents are the number one candidate. Imagine a cookie, who thinks it IS the person, never being able to really talk to their kid or kids again...
    • Word of God is that there was actually a scene written showing this happening to Cookie!Greta — she watched Real Greta reading a story to 'their' son, knowing she'd never be with her child again. It was cut for being too bleak. In Black Mirror.
• The third segment introduces the idea of blocking people in real life using Zed-Eyes where all that either of you see is an inaudible shadow. It can be left on indefinitely, until death. It also covers offspring AND all media of the subject (such as photos). Just imagine never being able to see or hear a loved one till they're dead and gone...
  • It's also legal to "block" someone indefinitely, even when they believe you have a child with them, denying all custody and visitation rights unilaterally.
  • Also, congrats to White Christmas on being the first Christmas special to feature a man accidentally murdering his ex-partner's father in a fit of rage. Good job!
  • Also, keep in mind that blocking obscures a person's body language and their voice. If you blocked someone, you would have very little warning if they tried to physically attack you.
• The ending especially gets dark very quickly...To clarify, Joe's cookie confesses the murder of his ex-girlfriend's father and indirectly causing her daughter's death and is left there, completely alone. To add insult to injury, one of the cops speeds up his perception of time, making one minute in the real world correspond to 1000 years for the cookie! And leaves him like that all of Christmas Day with one annoying song with the volume turned way up! That's right: he has to suffer more than one million years alone, with the full knowledge of what he has done and also knowing he's not real, the frozen corpse of the little girl whose death he accidentally caused in plain sight through the window, and with the most ironic soundtrack in the history of ever. It's safe to say this could be the most accurate depiction of Hell ever portrayed without any supernatural element.
  • To put that into perspective, in the 26 seconds it took for the officers to exchange that information, 433 years and four months have gone by in the cookie, and Roy Wood has wished it would be Christmas every day^note as a point of reference, the song is 4 minutes, 37 seconds long roughly 49,367,073 times.
    • It gets even worse when you do more thinking. They left it on overnight. Assuming they left the station at around 5PM and came in the next day at around 8AM, that means it was left on for 15 hours. In that time, not only would 900,000 years have passed, but the number of times "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday" played? Roughly 102,531,612,996 times.
  • Ordinarily, he would likely be Driven to Suicide, but since he's a digital being, that's probably not even possible. Instead, he's stuck there with no escape. Poor guy can't even stop the music from playing... (He tried. Every time he smashed the radio in the digital room, it respawned, and the music got louder.)
  • Don't forget Matt. He is blocked by all of humanity. Everyone else sees him as a red static blurb, and it's evident that someone might want to make him pay...

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