I've been watching Black Mirror since season one. I'm a sucker for psychological thrillers, science fiction, and existential crises, so this series is right up my alley. I'd binge watch seasons at a time and stay up all night trying to parse through them, relating and writing about the implications. The intricate plot threads in some episodes wrecked me. I love how a happy ending is never guaranteed, but there's sometimes the possibility, and you just never know.
While some episodes fall short, that's to be expected in an anthology. But season four was by far my favorite. A strong set of intense stories, all stylized and interesting in their own standalone way. Black Mirror found its perfect groove in this season, its exact style solidified by Bandersnatch. The standalone movie-length feature solidified Black Mirror as a groundbreaking cultural phenomenon that everyone I knew was talking about.
So you can imagine my disappointment with season five.
I don't know about you, but I could see where the plotlines were headed halfway through. They felt dry, unimaginative, and...settled. The only one I felt truly invested in was Smithereen, but we'll get to that later. For now, let's do a breakdown by episode.
This is an extremely spoiler-heavy review. I also understand that not everyone will agree with my opinion, I'm just getting it out there for the sake of content. So, with that...
Striking Vipers.
I really started this season taking notes as if this episode was going to say something new. The entire series has an aura of pretentiousness, but I'm a pretentious hipster myself, so I can't fully criticize it based on that. This episode, however, just felt jumbled and unorganized.
The episode starts with a pretty standard setting. Danny, a married father with children, is at his birthday barbecue talking to Karl, his friend who he rarely gets to see. Karl tells Danny about this girl he's been hitting up and we later see them in a relationship. Karl gets Danny the brand new video game that's an intense technological phenomenon, Striking Vipers X. First off, Danny should definitely know about the new level of VR this game has if he already has the console, but let's let that slide.
Everything seems happy and dandy, as expected. Someone in my chat said, "f for when everything inevitably goes to shit."
That night, Karl invites Danny to play together and kicks his ass before kissing him as his female character. Danny, panicked and confused, exits the game shortly after Karl does and goes into a gay panic. End Act I.
There's also a couple things in here that I thought was setting up later plot points, like the several times the dishwasher scolds Danny and his wife. But that never came to fruition, so I don't really want to talk about it. At this point, however, it's clear that the episode is about the dangers of VR, escapism, and how fucking easy it is to cheat via long distance relationships.
Throughout this episode, there's a lot of interesting color grading. I love the editing. The real world seems dull in comparison to the video game world with its bright neons and flashy signs. It gives it a little more immersion.
Okay, so let's keep going. Danny and Karl meet in the game again and immediately bang, beginning a montage of a sordid affair as Danny's wife grows more and more suspicious. It gets to the point where Danny is sending Karl heart emojis while forgetting his own anniversary. At this anniversary dinner, Danny's wife confronts him and he lies to her face, saying nothing is going on. He then breaks off contact with Karl.
About six months later, we cut to Danny with his heavily pregnant wife. Karl is in his massive apartment, looking like the absolute epitome of a sore ex. However, it's a little unclear if this is him all the time for six full months or if it's just today, as this is the day he's going to have dinner with Danny.
While his wife is out of the room, Danny tells Karl he shouldn't have come. Karl seduces Danny back by saying he's tried fucking every person and character in the game, and none of them make him feel as good as Danny did. This includes an actual polar bear character. Danny gives in and decides to plug in, leading us to our climax.
I found it really hard to connect the real world actors to the game actors. They don't carry themselves in the same way, and it made it hard to remember at times that they were actually the characters it kept cutting back to.
So it didn't hold quite the same weight when Danny told Karl to meet him in the real world at one in the morning. But they're there, they kiss and find there's no real connection between them, and start physically fighting. The music during this scene tells us it's supposed to be a dramatic, emotionally heavy scene, and I could not help but laugh at the idiotic tensity. A police car finds them and Danny's wife has to bail him out, at which point he tells her everything.
Cut to months later for our resolution, where Danny and his wife have an agreement to have affairs on a very closed and consistent basis. They exchange their symbols of freedom or restriction, and go out for the night. Karl has a cat. All is well.
And that's all fine, I'm not one to complain about a happy ending in a series that rarely has such a thing. But it sure would have been nice if I was rooting for these characters at all. The only one I ever felt bad for or really wanted to see succeed was Danny's wife. But overall, I cared so little about this episode that I couldn't care enough to go back and find her name.
Smithereens.
I mentioned that I'm a sucker for psych thrillers and existential crises, right? Well, I'm also a sucker for unfolding mystery. And this episode was...decent at that, actually. It gave me a similar feeling to Shut Up and Dance, in that it could happen to anyone in modern times. Its message was all too predictable, but there's still a sense of mystery in how Chris will react to everything and watching all of the officers and Smithereens agents come together.
Grievances: Every series that deals with mental illness ends up playing into this trope of a dangerous psychopath and I can't fully get through that mentally, especially when it includes things like sensory overload. But hey, whatever. It's the plot. Fuck it.
My thoughts on this episode are a little more jumbled. The destination is clear once Act I ends, but there's still the journey to get there.
A strange driver for Not-Uber/Lyft picks up exclusively people from the Smithereens (not-Twitter) building and looks for people who work there. He eventually finds one and drives him out to the middle of nowhere to kidnap him, taking advantage of the man's obliviousness as he stares at his phone. We find out the man is an intern, and for the sake of confusion I'll just say more about him now. His name is Jaden, he's 22 years old, and he only gets to sit in the back for this episode because he's claustrophobic. Incidentally, this sets off the chain of events for the rest of the plot.
How convenient.
The two of them are caught by police officers and run off the road into the field, where the rideshare driver uses Jaden's phone to contact his boss, who contacts her boss, who--you get the idea. Chris demands to speak to Billy Bauer, the CEO of Smithereens, who is on a ten-day isolation retreat.
Meanwhile, the police are closing in on the driver and hostage and he knows he won't be able to get away. The episode uses the rest of its time to play on varying perspectives. I have to really commend the editors for this episode. There was never a point where I got lost as to who knew what, even when there were four or five perspectives running at the same time. The way it was cut together made everything flow easily.
We find out that the driver's name is Chris, and that he lives alone in his mother's house as she passed a while back. The Smithereens crew figures this all out long before the police, as well as a slew of other information. And as soon as we find out he had a fiancee that died in a car crash, we can figure out exactly where this is going and why he's so obsessed with a social media he no longer uses. Not only that, but he later says "today is my last day" and again, it is immensely clear what the plot twist is that they're setting up.
I'm just gonna go off the rails at this point.
I liked all of the characters in this episode! I found myself hoping that all of them would come out of this okay even when I knew Chris would end up dead at the end of the episode. None of them felt overly contrived or detrimental to the plot--or my enjoyment. Even Billy Bauer, who was meant to be the type of guy to go on a ten-day isolation retreat, felt natural and multi-dimensional.
This episode wasn't a masterpiece or anything, but it felt very clear with a distinct purpose and outcome. It was something that I felt genuinely invested in, and that's why it's my favorite in the season.
...And then we get to episode three.
Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too.
Alright. The plot is divided into two concurrent plots for the first act and a half. Rachel is a teenager obsessed with an idol named Ashley. She's the new kid with no friends, and this doesn't appear to change throughout the episode. Her older sister, Jack, is a goth rock 'n' roller who thinks her obsession is stupid. Rachel gets Ashley Too, a poorly-sold robot that's a copy of Ashley and her upbeat personality.
Ashley, notably played by Miley Cyrus, is an idol who wants to change her style from pop to rock but is stopped by her aunt and manager. She rebels by not taking the drugs pushed on her to keep her silent, and her aunt retaliates by spiking her food with the stash Ashley kept for evidence, destroying the rest of the evidence, and putting her in a chemical coma.
The aunt makes up some story about an allergy to shellfish, Rachel grieves, etc. We cut to the aunt's story about how she is still piecing songs from Ashley's mind as she's in this comatose state. This is the point where I wrote in my journal, "oh this is stupid. what the living fuck." and chose to stare into my screen like the brainless zombie this episode took me for.
Other notes include:
While some episodes fall short, that's to be expected in an anthology. But season four was by far my favorite. A strong set of intense stories, all stylized and interesting in their own standalone way. Black Mirror found its perfect groove in this season, its exact style solidified by Bandersnatch. The standalone movie-length feature solidified Black Mirror as a groundbreaking cultural phenomenon that everyone I knew was talking about.
So you can imagine my disappointment with season five.
I don't know about you, but I could see where the plotlines were headed halfway through. They felt dry, unimaginative, and...settled. The only one I felt truly invested in was Smithereen, but we'll get to that later. For now, let's do a breakdown by episode.
This is an extremely spoiler-heavy review. I also understand that not everyone will agree with my opinion, I'm just getting it out there for the sake of content. So, with that...
Striking Vipers.
I really started this season taking notes as if this episode was going to say something new. The entire series has an aura of pretentiousness, but I'm a pretentious hipster myself, so I can't fully criticize it based on that. This episode, however, just felt jumbled and unorganized.
The episode starts with a pretty standard setting. Danny, a married father with children, is at his birthday barbecue talking to Karl, his friend who he rarely gets to see. Karl tells Danny about this girl he's been hitting up and we later see them in a relationship. Karl gets Danny the brand new video game that's an intense technological phenomenon, Striking Vipers X. First off, Danny should definitely know about the new level of VR this game has if he already has the console, but let's let that slide.
Everything seems happy and dandy, as expected. Someone in my chat said, "f for when everything inevitably goes to shit."
That night, Karl invites Danny to play together and kicks his ass before kissing him as his female character. Danny, panicked and confused, exits the game shortly after Karl does and goes into a gay panic. End Act I.
There's also a couple things in here that I thought was setting up later plot points, like the several times the dishwasher scolds Danny and his wife. But that never came to fruition, so I don't really want to talk about it. At this point, however, it's clear that the episode is about the dangers of VR, escapism, and how fucking easy it is to cheat via long distance relationships.
Throughout this episode, there's a lot of interesting color grading. I love the editing. The real world seems dull in comparison to the video game world with its bright neons and flashy signs. It gives it a little more immersion.
Okay, so let's keep going. Danny and Karl meet in the game again and immediately bang, beginning a montage of a sordid affair as Danny's wife grows more and more suspicious. It gets to the point where Danny is sending Karl heart emojis while forgetting his own anniversary. At this anniversary dinner, Danny's wife confronts him and he lies to her face, saying nothing is going on. He then breaks off contact with Karl.
About six months later, we cut to Danny with his heavily pregnant wife. Karl is in his massive apartment, looking like the absolute epitome of a sore ex. However, it's a little unclear if this is him all the time for six full months or if it's just today, as this is the day he's going to have dinner with Danny.
While his wife is out of the room, Danny tells Karl he shouldn't have come. Karl seduces Danny back by saying he's tried fucking every person and character in the game, and none of them make him feel as good as Danny did. This includes an actual polar bear character. Danny gives in and decides to plug in, leading us to our climax.
I found it really hard to connect the real world actors to the game actors. They don't carry themselves in the same way, and it made it hard to remember at times that they were actually the characters it kept cutting back to.
So it didn't hold quite the same weight when Danny told Karl to meet him in the real world at one in the morning. But they're there, they kiss and find there's no real connection between them, and start physically fighting. The music during this scene tells us it's supposed to be a dramatic, emotionally heavy scene, and I could not help but laugh at the idiotic tensity. A police car finds them and Danny's wife has to bail him out, at which point he tells her everything.
Cut to months later for our resolution, where Danny and his wife have an agreement to have affairs on a very closed and consistent basis. They exchange their symbols of freedom or restriction, and go out for the night. Karl has a cat. All is well.
And that's all fine, I'm not one to complain about a happy ending in a series that rarely has such a thing. But it sure would have been nice if I was rooting for these characters at all. The only one I ever felt bad for or really wanted to see succeed was Danny's wife. But overall, I cared so little about this episode that I couldn't care enough to go back and find her name.
Smithereens.
I mentioned that I'm a sucker for psych thrillers and existential crises, right? Well, I'm also a sucker for unfolding mystery. And this episode was...decent at that, actually. It gave me a similar feeling to Shut Up and Dance, in that it could happen to anyone in modern times. Its message was all too predictable, but there's still a sense of mystery in how Chris will react to everything and watching all of the officers and Smithereens agents come together.
Grievances: Every series that deals with mental illness ends up playing into this trope of a dangerous psychopath and I can't fully get through that mentally, especially when it includes things like sensory overload. But hey, whatever. It's the plot. Fuck it.
My thoughts on this episode are a little more jumbled. The destination is clear once Act I ends, but there's still the journey to get there.
A strange driver for Not-Uber/Lyft picks up exclusively people from the Smithereens (not-Twitter) building and looks for people who work there. He eventually finds one and drives him out to the middle of nowhere to kidnap him, taking advantage of the man's obliviousness as he stares at his phone. We find out the man is an intern, and for the sake of confusion I'll just say more about him now. His name is Jaden, he's 22 years old, and he only gets to sit in the back for this episode because he's claustrophobic. Incidentally, this sets off the chain of events for the rest of the plot.
How convenient.
The two of them are caught by police officers and run off the road into the field, where the rideshare driver uses Jaden's phone to contact his boss, who contacts her boss, who--you get the idea. Chris demands to speak to Billy Bauer, the CEO of Smithereens, who is on a ten-day isolation retreat.
Meanwhile, the police are closing in on the driver and hostage and he knows he won't be able to get away. The episode uses the rest of its time to play on varying perspectives. I have to really commend the editors for this episode. There was never a point where I got lost as to who knew what, even when there were four or five perspectives running at the same time. The way it was cut together made everything flow easily.
We find out that the driver's name is Chris, and that he lives alone in his mother's house as she passed a while back. The Smithereens crew figures this all out long before the police, as well as a slew of other information. And as soon as we find out he had a fiancee that died in a car crash, we can figure out exactly where this is going and why he's so obsessed with a social media he no longer uses. Not only that, but he later says "today is my last day" and again, it is immensely clear what the plot twist is that they're setting up.
I'm just gonna go off the rails at this point.
I liked all of the characters in this episode! I found myself hoping that all of them would come out of this okay even when I knew Chris would end up dead at the end of the episode. None of them felt overly contrived or detrimental to the plot--or my enjoyment. Even Billy Bauer, who was meant to be the type of guy to go on a ten-day isolation retreat, felt natural and multi-dimensional.
This episode wasn't a masterpiece or anything, but it felt very clear with a distinct purpose and outcome. It was something that I felt genuinely invested in, and that's why it's my favorite in the season.
...And then we get to episode three.
Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too.
Ashley, notably played by Miley Cyrus, is an idol who wants to change her style from pop to rock but is stopped by her aunt and manager. She rebels by not taking the drugs pushed on her to keep her silent, and her aunt retaliates by spiking her food with the stash Ashley kept for evidence, destroying the rest of the evidence, and putting her in a chemical coma.
The aunt makes up some story about an allergy to shellfish, Rachel grieves, etc. We cut to the aunt's story about how she is still piecing songs from Ashley's mind as she's in this comatose state. This is the point where I wrote in my journal, "oh this is stupid. what the living fuck." and chose to stare into my screen like the brainless zombie this episode took me for.
Other notes include:
- this is dumb.
- Pixar who???
- kid me would have died to hear miley say all of this.
- I've heard this song three times and I'm already tired of it.
- the dominos video
I'm done with this episode.
Overall, I didn't really hate this season...if I include Bandersnatch in it, like much of the fanbase seems to. Or if I focus on the editing. It seems that Brooker and his team have just gotten really settled and unchallenged. I'd rather go watch Love, Death, and Robots again. Given everything, I wouldn't be surprised if Black Mirror has one more season at most.
Comments
Post a Comment