Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker's new TV series debuts tonight on Channel 4 with first episode "The National Anthem".

Trailer

I'm definitely looking foward to this, because Charlie Brooker is usually really good. I love Screenwipe and Newswipe, and I thought Dead Set was brilliant. Knowing a little about the plot of tonight's episode though, I can't help but be a bit squicked. But then, that's the idea, I suppose. Plus I doubt they'll actually show it going in or anything. To paraphrase Brooker himself.

Well, that was... good. Incredibly uncomfortable to watch in places, but good.

Agreed. The last portion was excruciating to watch.

Next episode on tonight - "15 Million Merits".

I refuse to believe only two people watched this. :/

No, I watched it too. Though, I'm in America and had to watch it on You Tube. My goodness, this was like everything I learned about in sociology, especially the second episode, very Baudrillard.

I enjoyed "15 Million Merits" better, probably because of how unsettled I felt watching "The National Anthem" and it's science fiction nature.

edited 15th Dec '11 6:29:31 PM by hybridelement

Yeah, me too. As I said to one of my friends, I'm a sucker for sci-fi dystopian miseryfests.

I think "15 Million Merits" did a good job of giving an impression of how this dystopia worked and its properties without bogging you down in the bad science and logical infeasability that some dystopia based works drop you in when they want to hammer you with their metaphor.

I've finally got around to watching both episodes of this, and am definitely not regretting it.

"15 Million Merits" was truly soul-crushingly depressing, but also probably the best and most thought-provoking drama I've seen on TV all year. Daniel Kaluuya and Jessica Brown-Findlay were both outstanding — a large part of the story's power came from their creation of two characters that you could really care about and who you wanted to see escape their monotonous lives, which made their inevitable failure all the more difficult to watch. The depiction of the dystopia was also very well done and far, far too close to modern life for comfort. Yet another reminder of what a brilliant writer Charlie Brooker is.

I liked "The National Anthem" too, but it really didn't compare to this. The central idea and the fallout from it were both very interesting, but generally it felt more distant and less heartfelt than this one did and the characters were much harder to care about. It was still good, but ultimately that's what's stopping it reaching the same level.

I think you've really got to give props to the designers on 15 Million Merits. The look of the programs and interfaces managed to reflect reality really well without coming off as obvious and blunt Bland-Name Product examples. The parody came mostly in how they behaved. "People who liked [apple] also liked [banana]".

Yes, exactly.

Among some of the touches I loved were there being an actual monetary penalty for just "skipping" ads and how sirens blared when one closed their eyes.

edited 17th Dec '11 9:26:05 PM by hybridelement

Well, at the moment, the main character of The Entire History Of You is such an arse that I'm hoping that he'll fall off and cliff and we'll get a different protagonist in.

Maybe, they'll make it work but at the moment I am rooting for his life to be ruined and am feeling that the technology really isn't the source of this guy's problem.

Edit: OK. No. If I'm being favourable then I guess they were dropping us into near the end after the guy's obsessive relationship behaviour has been exacerbated by years of using the Grain but I can only do so with some trope awareness. The real impression that the work gives me with the way his wife feels she needs to lie to him and the history of freaking out before is that he has always been like this. Also, it's not just being obsessive. A really insecure guy who feels the need to pick over detail of human interact it and analyse it...is not the guy who bursts into another man's home drunk and threatens him with a broken bottle. You need something else there. Plus "Look at what you're making me do" is a very "wife-beatery" line.

Outside of the impression that I got of the guy, I am otherwise positive. As a narrative structure, I think it would have been ok to try, it just wasn't pulled off right due to some dodgy characterisation. As science fiction it did the genre's job of making me think about all the ways the technology could impact on one's life. It had a failing because the other two episodes were about technology we currently have. Because of this, I did think about what we currently have that relates but it didn't come from the episode itself. I think that's a perfectly valid way to go. It just depends on what you want the show to do and with only three episodes, I wouldn't have expected that.

But to put it into one sentence: It got me thinking about how such a memory recording device would screw me over, 100 times worse than my facebook photos could, and how I would also turn to trying to analyse all the ways people talk about me and live in the past too much. Mission success.

edited 18th Dec '11 2:10:59 PM by SomeSortOfTroper

I really liked the first two, but "Entire History of You" fell a bit flat with me. I guess the other two left me thinking about people's connection to society and media, but this just left me thinking what an asshole Liam was.

It felt like missed potential, because there were so many stories about the effects of the technology as it showed up (the inequality of differing levels, how rosey memories turn out to be hollow nostalgia, people being able to scan your every little action and being overcautious in how they act, overreliance on technology etc.) and getting a basic relationship story didn't quite work for me.

I have to say I don't have such a harsh opinion of Liam in 'The Complete History of You'.

I mean he is clearly an insecure person and he does lose it (threatening the guy and pushing his wife) but the grain is pretty much the trigger and catalyst. (Not that I'm condoning his actions.)

Also not to mention I can understand him being quite annoyed at finding out about his (or not child) and his wife having cheated lied etc.

Edit:
I didn't find any character properly sympathetic in that episode.

edited 19th Dec '11 7:37:19 AM by IanExMachina

If I were to fix it, I would just change the introductory piece of his work and how the grain is involved. He was a lawyer so maybe show him actually doing his job, performing one of those cases where children sue their parents for not being good enough, then going back over the faces of everyone, trying to see what reaction each thing he said, all as part of his job. It helps put us in the future, puts his negative qualities in the context of a world gone barmy, and by showing him as a working guy just making him more of an emblem for everybody in the world. It should blame the tehnology more "See, this is what this guy has to do at work and obviously that bleeds over to everything else so it's not just him, really".

Edit: I sympathised with the woman who had been gouged. I liked her. Felt slightly guilty because I know that in the future I'm the person telling you about how human memories are so crap and implying you are nuts for going against "the grain".*

edited 27th Dec '11 2:22:19 PM by SomeSortOfTroper

So, the first episode of the new series, "Be Right Back", aired earlier this week.

I found it difficult to watch and emotionally draining, but in a good way.

"Be Right Back" is the first episode I've seen. Good stuff, if a little bit predictable thanks to all the foreshadowing. Actually the foreshadowing was so heavy it made me think it would be more predictable than it ended up being.

The show looked nice and Hayley Atwell was great.

Honestly, I think that level of foreshadowing is perhaps necessary when each episode is so self-contained. I thought it was quite elegantly structured, in a soul-sucking, bleak sort of way.

I loved the first series, except for "The Entire History of You", which was a bit meh. Second series has not dissapointed. "White bear" got a bit away from the whole "social-media-based-dystopia" vibe the series has generally gone for, being much more about the mass-hysteria and fanatical hatred of the victims that has resulted from many child-murders in Britain in the past few decades. Granted, social media was still a theme, what with the whole "bystanders just record on phones" thing, but this kind of "hangings to good for em" type reaction has been happening in the UK since at least the 1990's.

The main ethical qaundry I had was with if you mind-wipe them daily, is it really the same person who committed the (albeit, horrific) crime in the first place?

edited 19th Feb '13 2:34:28 PM by Nemo

White Bear broke my suspension of disbelief. People forming a lynch-mob, yes, that's believable... but there simply aren't enough people willing to throw enough money to create something so elaborate as what was there. It was just a bit... too much.

edited 20th Feb '13 6:31:48 AM by imadinosaur

I don't know Consider how certain groups have reacted to child murders like James Bulger, or the extra-legal persecution of people like Maxine Carr- particularly that led by the red-top newspapers. Clearly, there's a large market for people getting off on tormenting child-murderers- they're kind of the ultimate guilt-free target for boundless hatred. Think of those video's of people literally throwing themselves against the police vsn Maxine Carr was transported in. Again, it's primarily something the British red-tops and other right-wing media do rather than the general population, but considering their numbers and the fact they're one of Brooker's favourite targets (such as the old "Daily Mail Island" sketch), the idea that he would satirise their attitude by taking it to such a ridiculous extreme works for me

Shit, I'd vote for waldo.

The system may be absurd, but it built the roads.

That line stuck out the most for me. Especially as it came from the Strawman Political.

The rest... It never quite worked for me.

edited 26th Feb '13 8:43:23 AM by korpse_man

I think Black Mirror in general has good ideas, but never quite manages to pull them off.

I liked this up until the guy voicing Waldo lost his shit. It fit with his character, but I think the piece as a whole would have been better if he'd got sucked into it the campaign or something. The LAST MINUTE TWIST ENDING OMFG WALDO TAKES OVER THE WORLD was stupid, but then twist endings tend to be stupid.

His rant at the 'question time' was fucking spot-on though.

edited 26th Feb '13 9:35:15 AM by imadinosaur