Line #15 Characters/BlackMirrorWhiteChristmas


1	[[foldercontrol]]
2
3	[[folder:Matt]]
4	!!Matthew "Matt" Trent
5	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumb_5772.jpg]]
6	->'''Portrayed By:''' Creator/JonHamm
7
8	* AssholeVictim: His fate is being blocked by everyone (presumably forever). It's a harsh punishment, but given how he used to treat people and clones himself kind of makes it hard to feel sorry for him. Not to mention that the cookie of Joe he created will experience millions of years alone, while he himself will at least be out in the real world and will eventually die, which Joe's cookie won't.
9	* BoxedCrook: He's revealed to be in police custody, bargaining for his freedom by extracting a confession from Joe.
10	* BreakTheHaughty: The smug, manipulative Matt is utterly broken when he realises he's been blocked out from reality.
11	* TheCasanova: A particularly lecherous example. He uses his charm to be a pick up artist.
12	* EvilBrit: {{Inverted\|Trope}}. He is the only character to speak with an American accent in an episode where everyone else speaks British English.
13	* EvilIsPetty:
14	** While it is his job to install the cookie clones and make them accept their new state as slaves for their real selves, there is no need for him to ''bully'' the clones before he makes them suffer from months of isolation.
15	** When he has cookie-Joe tearfully confess to his crimes which caused a little girl to die, Matt jumps up cheering as he succesfully made his deal with the police.
16	* EvilSoundsDeep: Courtesy of Jon Hamm.
17	* EvilWearsBlack: In the scene where he is installing Greta's cookie. Apart from cookie-Greta, in the real world, he wears dark clothes which is in stark contrast to the entire room he is in, where everything is white and bright and the real Greta herself wears a white dress.
18	* FauxAffablyEvil: As only Jon Hamm is capable of. Insightful, quick-witted and good-looking, Matt can come across as a truly charming fellow. In reality he's a ruthless sociopath concerned primarily with himself.
19	* HateSink: Matt is a perverted, manipulative, and amoral sociopath who is perfectly willing to psychologically torture and manipulate people for his own selfish gain. He's a direct contrast to Joe, who is moderately sympathetic and remorseful for his actions.
20	* HeManWomanHater: Matt's a pickup artist, which makes him this trope by default. We don't see the worst of his misogyny, but it's clearly present.
21	* IronicHell: His fate is tailor-made for the type of person he is. Matt was a charming people person who derived pleasure from manipulating and toying with others; now he's become an {{Unperson}} and ''everyone'' will know what he is, and will either shun him or attack him. He also spent a lot of time breaking cookies into compliance by making them GoMadFromTheIsolation; now he's effectively isolated from everyone else.
22	* ItsAllAboutMe: Matt is upset after inadvertently causing Harry's death only because he could be implicated in it. He doesn't mourn the death of another human being, only caring about how he will get out of his mess.
23	* {{Jerkass}}: His callous attitude towards his victims makes him this.
24	* LackOfEmpathy: While he looks on horrified as Harry is murdered, he quickly sets this aside and focuses on destroying the evidence.
25	* LaserGuidedKarma: It finally bites him when he is blocked from society. It's heaven compared to cookie-Joe’s fate though.
26	* ManipulativeBastard: Matt is a charming man in a relatively subtle way, operating on insight.
27	* OhCrap / ThisIsGonnaSuck:
28	** Has one after figuring out that Jennifer is set on [[MercyKill killing Harry to free him of his supposed schizophrenia]], and starts urging him to flee. However, he subdues this when it becomes apparent it's too late to do anything, and commands the dating experts to destroy everything that could criminalise them.
29	** And another when [[WithCatlikeTread the noise he causes while going to destroy his hard drive]] wakes his wife, who catches him in the act.
30	** And another one when he finds out that the cops won't be letting him off easy.
31	** And a final one when he goes outside and sees that he's been blocked by everyone.
32	* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: Matt's side-gig of helping socially awkward people over their nerves when talking to women wouldn't be so bad if it didn't involve the whole "have a VC full of people pay to view the feed so they can watch an unknowing woman strip and have sex with the dater" thing.
33	* {{Slimeball}}: He is an arrogant, manipulative asshole, and that is putting it nicely.
34	* SmugSnake: A manipulative and self-serving sociopath, Matt is also very [[EvilIsPetty arrogant]] and callous to the people he harms and thinks he doesn’t need to take any responsibility for his questionable actions nor suffer any consequences for them. Karma bites him back eventually.
35	* TheSociopath: In some ways, Matt is a straight-up sociopath. Sometimes he appears to show remorse, but in reality it's regret that he's screwed up his own life. He doesn't care about the role he played in the death of Harry or the fact that his job was essentially that of a slave master breaking the wills of sentient beings; he only cares about how his actions affected himself, not others. The only time he appears to empathize with anyone is when Joe brings up not being able to see his own child, and even then it was shown to just be out of self-serving [[PragmaticVillainy pragmatism]]. Contrast Joe, who is a SympatheticMurderer.
36	* {{Unperson}}: His ultimate fate is to be blocked by the rest of humanity, becoming entirely alone in the world.
37	* UnreliableNarrator: Matt is a manipulative liar at the best of times, so it isn't a surprise that he lies to Joe about the exact extent of his own sins. For example, he tells Joe that, once it got to Harry seemingly having sex with Jennifer, he stopped watching, when in reality the dating experts that were helping him coach were paying in order to watch the scene and experience some very personal porn. To explain why he has knowledge of Harry's murder by her, he claims to have seen it on a newscast when, surprise, surprise, he was watching the whole thing.
38	* VillainProtagonist: Matt is manipulative and callous to the point of being a sociopath in the vein of [[Film/InTheCompanyOfMen Chad]].
39	* VirtualRealityWarper: As an employee of the company that makes these Cookies, Matt is empowered to interact with them in virtual environments -- but only so he can break their willpower and render them down into willing servants. To that end, he can mute them, accelerate their perceptions of time, and even alter the environment. [[spoiler:The twist is Matt's been using the same powers to pull a VirtualRealityInterrogation on Joe for the entire episode: Joe is just a Cookie, the outpost is Matt's virtual creation, and the five years that Joe has spent there was just seventy minutes.]]
40	[[/folder]]
41
42	[[folder:Joe]]
43	!!Joseph "Joe" Potter
44	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/black_mirror_joe1.jpg]]
45	->'''Portrayed By:''' Creator/RafeSpall
46
47	* TheAlcoholic: He gets absolutely slammed at the karaoke night to the point that Beth and her co-worker Tim have to drag him out of the bar.
48	** There's a bit of FridgeBrilliance in this. Joe only starts talking about himself when he starts drinking. This also may justify Beth keeping the fact the baby wasn't his from him. Him exploding at her when she said she wasn't going to keep it on top of his alcohol induced belligerence suggests that he wasn't going to take the news of the affair well.
49	** It should be noted, however, that he ''only'' started yelling when he realized she was drunk and pregnant. Before then, he was upset but not yelling.
50	* DespairEventHorizon: Discovering that his [[spoiler:ex-girlfriend cheated on him and had the other guy's child, leading him to believe the kid was his for years because she never admitted it]] pushes him over the edge.
51	* GoMadFromTheRevelation: [[spoiler:Discovering the daughter he'd been pining for for five years wasn't actually his child destroyed what little was left of his dignity and self-control.]]
52	* JerkassHasAPoint: Joe was wrong to flip out at Bethany about having an abortion but considering she was planning on aborting the child without listening to his say on the matter (since he genuinely wanted to be a dad) it's understandable as to why he was so angry.
53	* LoopholeAbuse: [[spoiler:The confession of his cookie is enough to get him convicted of murder and the death of a child.]]
54	* MadnessMantra: [[spoiler:"Where's my daughter? I want to see my daughter."]]
55	* MindPrison: [[spoiler:The fate of his Cookie self, condemned to spend the next few million years in a deserted cabin surrounded by reminders of his crime, all with "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday" blaring in the background.]]
56	* SympatheticMurderer: [[spoiler:Accidentally killing your ex's father in reflexive anger and inadvertently leading to her daughter's death]] are terrible, but his psychological torture throughout the past few years and his ultimate fate (for both him and his cookie) is so awful in its own way that it's easier for the audience to feel sorry for him.
57	* VillainousBSOD: After [[spoiler:murdering Beth's father in a moment of rage and abandoning her daughter to die alone in the woods, he became a drunken, mute hobo living on the streets until the police picked him up.]]
58	* WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds: After undergoing what amounts to a years-long mental breakdown over the [[UnPerson estrangement]] of Bethany and his daughter, he cracks completely and accidentally kills Bethany's father once he finds out it's not his daughter. Bethany's daughter dies frozen while trying to get some help for her grandpa, adding more salt to the wound.
59	* YouMonster: Gives several to [[spoiler:Matt]] throughout the episode.
60	[[/folder]]
61
62	!!!Part I
63
64	[[folder:Harry]]
65	!!Harry
66	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/latest_93.jpg]]
67	->'''Portrayed By:''' Creator/RasmusHardiker
68	* BloodFromTheMouth: His IncurableCoughOfDeath after being poisoned has him coughing up blood after a while.
69	* CannotTalkToWomen: The reason he enlists Matt and company for help at picking up women at a Christmas party is because of his social awkwardness.
70	* EveryoneLovesBlondes: Subverted. When he approaches Jennifer and Amy at the fateful party, who have brown and blonde hair respectively, the other members of his club think he's interested in Amy, but he signals Jennifer.
71	* HiddenDepths: He actually makes up some good romantic banter with Jennifer, with minimal prompting from Matt. This implies that he's actually pretty good around women, he just needs prompting to get over his nerves.
72	* IncurableCoughOfDeath: The poison Jennifer has him drink causes him to cough uncontrollably, which continues all the way until Matt shuts off the Z-eye feed.
73	* {{Mondegreen}}: Thanks to Matt eating while giving him lines, he ends up reminding a man that he was wearing a "poor guy's hat" at a previous party rather than a pork pie hat.
74	* SuicidePact: Jennifer starts a one-sided pact with him after witnessing him speaking to Matt through his head, appearing as if talking to himself, and thinking he shares her schizophrenia. He doesn't realise this until it's too late.
75	* TokenGoodTeammate: He is the only person in Matt's dating group who questions the part where they experience live porn of an unknowing and unconsenting woman as she's having sex with the dater. He just needs help getting over his nerves, and he expresses that he doesn't want them watching while he's having sex, whereas the others quickly start getting impatient when Jennifer doesn't take her top off.
76	[[/folder]]
77
78	[[folder:Jennifer]]
79	!!Jennifer
80	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/latest_1_62.jpg]]
81	->'''Portrayed By:''' Music/NataliaTena
82
83	* AloofDarkHairedGirl: Compared to her bubbly blonde co-worker, Amy, Jennifer is pointed out as being aloof and reserved. It turns out there's a reason for that.
84	* BrokenBird: She suffered from schizophrenia, and commits a murder-suicide with a suitor convinced that he is also tortured by "the voices in the head".
85	* HearingVoices: It turns out that her line about having voices arguing in your head wasn't metaphorical; she actually has schizophrenia.
86	[[/folder]]
87
88	!!!Part II
89
90	[[folder:Greta]]
91	!!Greta
92	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/black_mirror_slavery1.jpg]]
93	->'''Portrayed By:''' Creator/OonaChaplin
94	* CloneAngst: Her cookie has trouble accepting that she's a copy of the original Greta's mind, and Matt needs to [[GoMadFromTheIsolation break her]] in order to get her to comply.
95	* EmptyShell: Greta's cookie, by the end of the segment she appears in.
96	* GoMadFromTheIsolation: And she's the current page image!
97	* NiceToTheWaiter: Played with. She does her best to be pleasant to the people around her when she's at the hospital, but she shows herself to be rather picky, sending a toast behind because it wasn't exactly how she likes them, and is condescending of the woman in charge of retrieving the copy of her mind due to her age and wonders if she's qualified for the job, although she only expresses her opinion about the doctor in thought.
98	* PrefersGoingBarefoot: Goes barefoot for the whole episode, even in her virtual reality form. It appears to be a characteristic of Oona Chaplin roles.
99	* RichBitch: She's clearly wealthy but also impatient and condescending to most people around her.
100	[[/folder]]
101
102	!!!Part III
103
104	[[folder:Beth]]
105	!!Bethany Grey
106	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/2184820_r_x_600_f_jpg_q_x_xxyxx.jpg]]
107	->'''Portrayed By:''' Creator/JanetMontgomery
108
109	* DaddysGirl: Which seems to arise from her father apparently being a single father, but he reminds Joe that he's not good enough for his daughter, while she defends him.
110	* DroppedABridgeOnHer: Is [[spoiler:unceremoniously killed offscreen in a train accident]], something Joe learns watching a news report.
111	* JerkassHasAPoint: Beth is a liar, a cheater, and probably somewhat of a sociopath herself for blocking Joe so quickly...but Joe was also wrong to flip out at her about having an abortion, even if she changed her mind. Joe is also shown to be TheAlcoholic perfectly capable of violence, so it wasn't entirely unreasonable of her to block him (and keep him blocked).
112	* PoorCommunicationKills: When she finds out she's pregnant, she tells Joe she's going to have an abortion, then blocks him when he objects, making communication literally impossible. If she had simply [[spoiler:admitted to Joe that she didn't love him anymore and that the baby she was pregnant with was not his kid, her own father and daughter might still be alive]].
113	[[/folder]]

Context Characters / BlackMirrorWhiteChristmas