YMMV / Black Mirror: Striking Vipers

Black Mirror YMMVSeries FiveStriking Vipers — Smithereens — Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too

• Alternative Character Interpretation: There is a lot to unpack regarding Danny and Karl's dynamic and whether they're really bisexual or at least heteroflexible in an If It's You, It's Okay kind of way.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The table conversation between Danny and Karl. Karl desperately tries to convince Danny to continue having virtual sex with him because he can't feel anything close to what he has with Danny from any of the other players he hooked up with. He admits he went as far as to have a go at it with an avatar of the polar bear character but still couldn't feel anything.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A lot of viewers only showed up because this is one of Nicole Beharie's first major roles after being pushed out of Sleepy Hollow and being subsequently blacklisted for her auto-immune disease.
• Memetic Mutation: More than a few have come out here.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
  • "I fucked a polar bear and I still couldn't get you out of my mind!"
  • "No homo."
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • There are a lot of genuinely interesting philosophical questions about the nature of sexuality, sexual attraction, romance, and gender performance here that get teased and touched upon without getting fully explored, to the detriment of the episode. This is mostly because the episode is filmed to focus on the salaciousness and drama of the situation itself, therefore the audience is focused on how these characters act and react to the behavior of each other. However, in doing so, it fails in providing a deeper exploration of Karl and Danny's mental and emotional reaction to their own behavior, and thus keeps the audience from fully understanding if anything other than "the sex feels good" is motivating either character. This general frustration is discussed in this critique of the entire fifth series.
  • The above discussion also gets mildly undermined by the subplot involving Theo, Danny's wife, who is increasingly sexually and emotionally unfulfilled in their marriage, which culminates in her being allowed to have random hookups once a year the same time Danny is with Karl. The arrangement seemingly equates Danny and Theo's situation and thus reduces Danny's attraction to Karl (and vice versa) to them just needing something new and different.
  • The concept of people being able to live as 'cooler', heavily-idealized versions of themselves in video games and becoming more fixated on a fantasy world than the real world is briefly touched on and has all the framework set up (in the game world, Danny is super strong and fit, no longer has a damaged knee and can heal quickly, doesn't have the responsibilities of his job and family, and gets to screw around with a hot warrior chick; indeed he starts to be more interested in having simulated sex with Karl-as-Roxette than he is in having real sex with his wife), but ultimately it never really gets explored further, with the focus instead being on Danny's infidelity.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Danny can come off as a self-centered jerk in a lot of ways. He cheats on his loving and loyal wife, the mother of his children, mostly because he finds his life boring, as opposed to communicating this to her and trying to find a solution with her. With said cheating, he also strings his best friend Karl along, who, unlike him, doesn't have a family or a steady relationship and lives alone in his apartment. In Karl's case, it could be argued that having sex with Danny in the video game is the closest thing he can get to a meaningful connection to another person, while for Danny, it's more of a distraction from his mundane everyday life that is only hurting everyone else around him, including his family.
  • Theo kind skips between this and Unintentionally Sympathetic. While her suffering through a fractured marriage is pretty hard to watch, you're on board (or just neutral with it), hearing her confront Karl while saying what most scummy cheating housewives justify their cheating (not that she was wrong in this case, but still) can be pretty irritating and throw people off.

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