Black Mirror Review: Hunky Dory Aboard the USS Callister
Image: IMDB
WARNING: Spoilers Ahead
Season 4 of the noir/thought-provoking/thriller anthology Black Mirror opens with 4:3 aspect ratio footage designed to look like vintage footage from the 60s to really drive home the original Star Trek member-berries. Every component of Star Trek is blatantly ripped from the Bridge set, the wardrobe, to every female actor kissing actor Jesse Plemons who lends his best impression of William Shatner's Captain James T. Kirk.
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Read Steemit User @namiks review here.
The lack of originality in the recreated scene turns into deeper meaning as the show progresses. Plemons is the meek/spineless CTO (Robert Daly) of a gaming company that created an online virtual reality game called "Infinity", and all of his crew from the Star Trek scene as his co-workers, who have somehow wronged or rubbed him the wrong way.
This includes the CEO of Infinity (Walton) played by Jimmi Simpson. Who, smooth and charismatic, is Daly's antithesis. Though in the beginning we are led to believe that Daly is our protagonist, we find out he is in fact a bad guy when he steals a coffee cup lid from the trash can of new Employee Nanette Cole to take her DNA home and create a digital copy of her to put in his game, which is an offline mod of "Infinity".
As we find out from Cole's point of view, these are not just game characters, but sentient copies of the coworkers trapped inside a digital prison. They have all the memories of the coworkers up until the point the DNA is lifted. These characters know and recognize each other from the real world and it raises interesting questions about the sentience of computers, software and AI. In this digital prison, Daly talks to and treats these characters the way he wishes he could in real life. He relishes making the characters submit to the vision he has for the game and tortures them to ensure they do.
After the first scene, all the scenes in Daly's mod are 16:9, vibrant and sleekly shot. Walton's character even references Daly's exquisite attention to detail, the contrast is supposed to denote Daly's obsession with cloning and lack of original thought, which is the core of his evilness.
The plot eventually settles to Cole convincing the others on the ship they can break out of the game through the network update to "Infinity." It turns out the game was not actually offline and the update manifests itself as a wormhole. If they can make it to the wormhole, the firewall should destroy them, which is a better alternative than being Daly's digital plaything for eternity.
The crux of her scheme is being able to contact her real self and blackmail her with naughty photos from her cloud photo account. None of the photos shown on camera are bad (lingerie) but they imply there are worse. It seems a tad thin that she could be convinced to break into the house of her boss who she idolizes (this is shown earlier in the episode), but I watched the episode with a female and she did say that there could be a certain kind of photo that would make her act that way.
Image: IMDB
In the end, digital Cole is successful, which isn't always a given with Black Mirror, but I feel like watching this episode you knew it was going to turn out that way, and that the minds behind the episode were using the Black Mirror brand to give a false sense of levity to stakes that weren't really there.
The crew of the ship escapes through the wormhole and instead of being destroyed by the firewall, the mod is simply removed and they are now free to roam the "Infinity" procedurally generated universe. While Daly is trapped in the mod where the firewall deletes the game leaving him stuck in a VR state of blank consciousness for who does how long, though we are led to believe a while because it's Christmas Eve, the employees talked earlier about having 10 days off, and a pizza delivery man asking for a larger tip led to Daly turning on the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on his futuristic door. Typically in the sci-fi genre, that long in a blank VR game would fry your brain for sure, so I feel like we can assume once found, if not dead, he's at least braindead. Which raises another interested question because although Daly is a dick in the game, he hasn't done anything in real life to merit such a harsh punishment.
This makes this episode push the bounds of how much does judgement does your online/game persona merit in real life?
The perceived consciousness of these characters adds several layers to the discussion as their 'realness' can be debated. They are trapped inside a computer, but can contact people in the real world and have been copied from it. Are they real? Do they have rights? Is Daly a bad person for treating them badly or is it a slightly unhealthy form of therapy? These are the types of ideas this episode tackles and makes it worthy of being an episode of Black Mirror
However, the plot line can out too neat to be considered in the upper echelon of the anthology. The crew members moving to the "Infinity" open world was too convenient and denotes a shift to positive outlook for the anthology. Even when given the opportunity to drive home the bleakness/unforgiving nature of both physical and digital universes at the end with a Aaron Paul voice cameo, they instead opted for the characters to escape, which for me, pulled the teeth out of this episode.
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i really love your cliff notes type of overview or these episodes. This one had me feeling for the guy Daly because it kept him sane in the outside world but it sucked that the copies where in slaved so it makes you feel for him . I think it was best he got trapped in the game because I feel with out miss messed up therapy the real people would not have faired well with him ☠️☠️☠️
You're right about that, I didn't think of how he'd cope with reality without his game. He'd probably try and recreate the game again with another build given his penchant for cloning, he wouldn't have been able to use the same people though, or swipe more of their DNA. Tommy would probably be the only hard one to nab again.
I had some criticisms of this episode as well. It's being hailed by some as the best of the season and among the best of the serious over all but I give it a C- tops.
https://steemit.com/blackmirror/@g-com/black-mirror-season-4-reveiws-episode-1-the-uss-callister