YMMV / Black Mirror: Men Against Fire

Black Mirror YMMVSeries ThreeNosedive — Playtest — Shut Up and Dance — San Junipero — Men Against Fire — Hated in the Nation

• Anvilicious: Even by Black Mirror standards, this is definitely one of the least subtle episodes of the show.
• Broken Base: Some viewers like the episode for its interesting premise and social commentary on the dehumanizing effects of war while others criticize it for having a plot twist that could be seen a mile away and for its social commentary being too heavy-handed.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Charlie Brooker uses the idea of advanced augmented reality so often in the series that roaches actually being people becomes obvious very early on. Also, the show has not been known to actually use straight-up monsters before this, even further making it obvious.
• Cliché Storm: The Fantastic Racism twist and Aesop makes this the least original plot of any Black Mirror episode. Hasn't this been done a million times before?
• Complete Monster: Arquette is an ardent supporter of the MASS system and its goal of exterminating the Roaches—including innocent children—by changing their appearance into grotesque mutants so soldiers would not hesitate to pull the trigger, despite acknowledging that they are civilians. A military psychologist who uses his position to direct genocidal attacks against the Roaches, Arquette is xenophobic enough to claim that the eugenics program is completely justified since the Roaches have "shit in their DNA". When Stripe begins to discover the truth behind the MASS system, Arquette imprisons him and gives him the Sadistic Choice to either have his memories erased and continue massacring Roaches or stay locked up and have his MASS system configured to replay the footage of him killing Roaches with their appearances intact in an eternal loop.
• Harsher in Hindsight: As mentioned above, the episode's mixed reception revolves mostly around its Captain Obvious Reveal that the Roaches are actually humans modified to resemble monsters via Augmented Reality due to the fact that the show has never played supernatural elements completely straight. This seems incredibly kind in comparison to the reception of the Season 6 episode "Mazey Day", which became the first episode of Black Mirror to feature explicitly supernatural elements, specifically the existence of werewolf curses, and consequently became a top contender for one of the worst episodes in the whole show as a result.
• Retroactive Recognition: Medina is played by Sarah Snook, who would later achieve worldwide recognition for playing Shiv Roy in Succession.
• Spiritual Adaptation: It is basically a retread of the storytelling involving implementation of the brainwashing techniques that was shown in Haze, and the The Outer Limits episode "Hearts and Minds". The Twilight Zone (2002) also has an episode with a similar setup.
• Spiritual Antithesis: In a way, both this episode and the Outer Limits episode mentioned above are an inversion of They Live!. In They Live, the aliens used cloaking technology to masquerade and infiltrate human society; in this one, humans use cloaking technology to cause other humans to appear to be mutants.
• The Woobie: Poor Stripe.