Characters / Black Mirror: Hated in the Nation

Law Enforcement

Karin

DCI Karin Parke

Portrayed By: Kelly Macdonald

• The Cynic: Her years on the force, coupled with her private issues, have left her deeply disillusioned about the world at large. It's one of the reasons she's not exactly thrilled to work with Blue on their first day.
• Deadpan Snarker: Several times, but when she's told a list of employees can't be given out because some are from the government, she suggests putting those names in a different font if it helps.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Starts off quite distanced and dismissive of Blue's tech-mindedness and general idealism, but eventually warms up to her until she sincerely comforts Blue during her Darkest Hour. Blue's eventual (faked) death also hits her pretty hard, and she doesn't seem to have any trouble faking her feelings in the court hearing.
• Heroic BSoD: Never seems to recover from the massacre, if her demeanour a year later is anything to go by.
• Hopeless with Tech: Maybe not hopeless, exactly, but it's far from her area of expertise. While Blue unearths the technical details of the case, Karin uncovers the personal aspect.
• Knight in Sour Armour: Kind of her thing.
• Married to the Job: Implied to be this, and it's the reason for her divorce.
• The Scully: Extremely resistant to the idea that the murders might be tech-related crimes.

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Blue

T/DC Blue Coulson

Portrayed By: Faye Marsay

• Agent Mulder: Believes that the murders are linked to the hashtag, and is proven right.
• Blue Is Heroic: For the particularly media-headed, her name may be an indicator that she's not going to be some kind of mole or traitor, which many viewers had suspected.
• Brain Bleach: She used to work for the Met's computer department where she was responsible for sifting through perps' hard drives. After being the one to unlock a real nasty child murderer's "trophy rack", she called it quits and switched to field work instead.
• Embarrassing First Name: Mild case, but folks apparently ask about her given name so often she's come to explain it preemptively.
• Faking the Dead: She fakes her own suicide so she can track Scholes without interference.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Foul-mouthed she may be, but she's clearly a very kind and compassionate person. The ADI case does a serious number on her psyche.
• Heroic BSoD: Her reaction to watching Clara die is as such. And then she gets another one upon seeing the countless dead of Scholes' scheme.
• Nerds Are Sexy: Inevitable when you cast someone like Faye Marsay as a computer/tech expert.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Blue is never short on curse words.

Li

Shaun Li

Portrayed By: Benedict Wong

• For Your Own Good: When Blue calls him out on the government's use of ADIs to spy on civilians, Li angrily replies that loss of life has been prevented by such an act.
  Blue: Total nationwide surveillance.
  Li: We tracked suspects for weeks in ways they couldn't dream of. We prevented bombings, mass shootings.
  Blue: By spying on the public.
  Li: And keeping them safe, which is what they want.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Li is inadvertently instrumental in completing Scholes' master plan. His single-minded desperation to resolve the ADI crisis leads him to ignore Blue's warning not to deactivate the ADIs; in reality, it was a trap that leads to thousands of people dying.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: For good reasons, but still. Could have prevented thousands of deaths if he had told Karin earlier about the surveillance.
• This Is Gonna Suck: He knows he's going to take some serious heat for his role in triggering Scholes' mass murder, and the face he makes while sitting down for the court hearing clearly shows it.

Nick

DS Nick Shelton

Portrayed By: Joe Armstrong

• Killed Offscreen: His death isn't shown, but knowing what happened to all the others who were targeted by the ADI, it's safe to assume he didn't make it to the credits alive.
• Oh, Crap!: His reaction to finding out that the ADIs' true targets aren't the people on the public's hate list, but the ones that used the #DeathTo hashtag. Which he did just a short time prior.
• Sacrificial Lion: Is the only member of the main team to die, and he and Blue seem to have a mutual attraction. This trope is turned Up to Eleven as he's killed in front of all his colleagues, who are powerless to help him.
• What You Are in the Dark: He has a chance to break the #DeathTo cycle on a personal level by not posting the message he prepared to target Scholes. After several seconds of his finger hovering over the mouse button, he fails the secret test and probably ends up dead for it.

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Granular

Rasmus

Rasmus Sjoberg

Portrayed By: Jonas Karlsson

• Red Herring: He has nothing to do with the crimes.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Unwitting to the final massacre, and unwilling to the surveillance.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Unlike the other characters, we get no indication what might've happened post-massacre to him or Granular.

Scholes

Garrett Scholes

Portrayed By: Duncan Pow

• Asshole Victim: If Blue indeed killed him after finding him in hiding, but it's just as possible she brought him in.
• Big Bad: He is the man behind the ADI hacking and the #DeathTo campaign. By the end of the episode, he's killed hundreds of thousands of people through the ADIs.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The attempted suicide of someone he had a crush on leads him to orchestrate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. It's a bit of an overreaction, all things considered.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: He wears glasses, and he sees no problem with murdering hundreds of thousands of people.
• Heroism Addict: Implied to be one of the motives behind his massacre. He saves his crush from suicide after she's bullied by the angry mob, which then motivates him to kill people to avenge her.
• Hypocrite: His rationale for the murder of hundreds of thousands is that people need to face the consequences of their actions. He's unwilling to face the consequences of his own actions.
• Important Haircut: He shaves his hair and his beard, and dons coloured contact lenses, before he goes to ground after his scheme is successful. That's his post-makeover look on his page image.
• Karma Houdini: Possibly. He didn't hesitate killing 400,000 people on a whim, we sure can see him killing the one lead anyone has on him.
• Love Makes You Evil: He had an unrequited crush on his co-worker at Granular.
• Silent Antagonist: Despite being the Big Bad he doesn’t speak at all in the episode.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The death of his crush is what lead him to teach people about online-hating.

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#DeathTo Targets

Jo Powers

Jo Powers

Portrayed By: Elizabeth Berrington

• Asshole Victim: Invoked. She's hated by everyone, but maybe doesn't deserve her fate.
• Driven to Suicide: As a result of the ADIs.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Possibly, when she calls out Gwen Marbury for committing suicide in front of a group of children.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: She could be seen as a stand-in for every opinionated, lacking-in-personal-integrity columnist who thrives on clickbait for their hateful articles, but she's especially similiar to Katie Hopkins and Richard Littlejohn. Both are British columnists for the right-wing newspaper The Daily Mail; Hopkins is well-known for her snobbish and racist opinions, while the title of Jo's article calls to mind an article of Richard Littlejohn in which he derided young women murdered by a serial killer as worthless human beings who didn't deserve to be mourned due to being sex workers.

Tusk

Tusk

Portrayed By: Charles Babalola

• Asshole Victim: As are all the first ADI victims. Whether or not he deserves his fate is left deliberately open-ended.
• Jerkass: When shown a video of a young fan covering one of his songs, he immediately mocks the kid as "goofy-looking" on national TV, and shrugs off every attempt by his interviewer to be less hurtful about it. This directly results in him being killed.
• Right Behind Me: What Tusk didn't know was that the kid from the video actually was right there in the TV studio, the plan apparently having been for him to come out from behind the stage and meet his idol. Instead the poor boy had to witness first-hand how said idol was mercilessly mocking him.

Pickering

Chancellor Tom Pickering

Portrayed By: Ben Miles

• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Of Jeremy Hunt, whose career as health secretary was likewise marked by intense controversy.
• Sleazy Politician: He's a self-serving suit who only cares about himself, not to mention his cutting of health benefits. It's little wonder so many people despise him. It's also implied he was very much aware of Lord Farrington's paedophilic nature but chose not to pursue it for one reason or another.
• Uncertain Doom: A non-lethal example. He is mentioned in a news feed as "Former Chancellor" suggesting he has been voted out of office.

Meades

Clara Meades

Portrayed By: Holli Dempsey

• Disproportionate Retribution: She has a lot of people demanding her execution with the #DeathTo hashtag. What was her crime? Making an insensitive and disrespectful post online at a military war monument.
• Last Disrespects: She makes a disrespectful gesture to a military war monument.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Of a variety of individuals being mass-shamed for releasing photographs of them doing disrespectful acts. The biggest one possibly being Lindsey Stone.

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