I’ve watched four of the six episodes of the recently released seventh season of Black Mirror and, like all Black Mirror seasons, it’s a love-hate relationship. I don’t think I’ve watched something I’ve hated more than the first episode. In that one, a wife, Amanda, gets a traumatic brain injury and they digitally replace her brain under the condition that it be hooked up to a server that cost 300 dollars a month.
Everything’s great at first but then this service starts inserting ads (Amanda will randomly recite a commercial ad out of nowhere) and the only way to stop hearing them is to upgrade to the higher tier, at $800 a month. And then it keeps going up from there.
It’s not the worst idea in the world but the contrast between the marriage, which is played completely straight, and the service, which is played like it takes place in the Monty Python universe, is so jarring that nothing ever feels right. And the actors, Rashida Jones and Chris O’Dowd, who play the husband and wife, are beyond nauseating. If you had told me that the over-under for how many times two people could proclaim their love for one another going into this show was 500, I never would’ve thought it would hit the over. But they did! They’re trying sooooooooo hard to make you love them and all it does is push us further away. And Rashida Jones may be the single most boring actress who’s ever graced the screen. I absolutely hated this episode.
The next episode had zero pretense, zero satire. It was trashy. It was dramatic. And I loved it! This girl who works at a Bon Appetite like food company is thrown into disarray when a weird girl from her former high school starts working there. Soon, our heroine starts making mistakes that she’s never made before and suspects that her new coworker is responsible. But she can’t prove it. So she goes to extreme measures to take her down.
What I liked about this episode was that it proves you don’t need a ton to write a strong story. You really only need a good starting point (a solid premise) and some conflict. The heavier you can make that conflict, the juicier the story tends to be. And the writers here do such a good job creating the conflict between these two women. In the end, that’s all that was needed – two people going at each other and let’s see how this ends.
The third episode, Plaything, is the darkest of the four episodes I watched. It follows this strange older man who’s arrested by police under the suspicion that he’s responsible for a recently discovered suitcase that contains body parts in it.
The episode takes place mostly in an interrogation room at the police station and the two cops interrogating the man are baffled and frustrated when he tells them that all of this goes back to a video game he used to play 30 years ago – “The Throng.” The game consisted of the first digitally sentient beings in a game. These things understood their own existence. And they started replicating over the years, becoming a bigger and bigger civilization. As a result, he’d been tasked with growing the hardware over the decades so they could keep expanding.
But, finally, they’ve gotten too big for the hardware, which means there’s only one place left to expand – the internet. This, it turns out, was our older man’s plan all along. Get captured, come in here, and use a sleight-of-hand QR code trick to send the Throng into the UK’s governmental computer, via a nearby security cam. Soon, the Throng will be everywhere. And humanity will never be the same again.
If you know me, you know that I like when writers use common scenarios to build their scenes and stories around. I talk about this in my dialogue book. Common situations are your friend in writing. Interrogations, in particular, are fertile grounds to create interesting scenarios because the audience already understands the rules and these situations themselves are often high stakes, since murder is usually involved.
And you can see, with this episode, that as long as you inject that scenario with a fresh angle, you can still tell a fresh story. Interrogations very well may be 500 years old. But none of them have involved somebody talking about a video game that eventually becomes a threat to all of humanity. You take something old and you combine it with something new. That’s what makes it fresh (and that’s what’s made Black Mirror such a success).
The final episode I watched was the sequel to U.S.S. Callister. The U.S.S. Callister is considered by many to be the best episode of Black Mirror ever. It follows an evil coder, Robert Daly, at a game company, who digitally replicates his coworkers via a DNA-to-digital machine, which allows him to put their digital clones into his own version of the game, where he can then lord over them like a God.
In this sequel to the original, the New York Times has gotten wind of a rumor about the digital clones. If true, it would sink the company. So the president tasks one of his coders, a young woman named Nannette, to figure out what’s going on. When Nannette learns that her own digital clone, as well as five others, are in the game, she must figure out a way to save them. Meanwhile, the digital clones are in the game fighting off real players. The difference between them is, if the players die, they can just respawn. If a digital clone dies, they die for good.
For the most part, I enjoyed this sequel. However, it’s a reminder that the more complex the rules are, the harder it is for the average reader/viewer to keep up. I’d forgotten the rules from the original movie, and it took a good 45 minutes to remember how it all worked. Basically, it was hard to track the exact connection between the real world people and their digital clones. How much did they know about each other? How did they communicate?
I always tell writers to keep your sci-fi rule-set as simple as possible. Most writers enjoy getting into the weeds of their rules and, in the process, we, the reader, get left behind. This just happened recently. I read a sci-fi script with way too many rules and it, ultimately, took the screenplay down.
At the very least, if you have a lot of rules, you have to be awesome at explaining them to the reader in an understandable way. That’s where you see the biggest difference between pros and amateurs. Despite some of my issues with the excessive rule set here, I ended up understanding them by the end and, in most amateur scripts that tackle rules this extensive, that wouldn’t have happened.
Ultimately, I think the movie suffers from Cristin Miloti carrying the load. She’s great to look at but she is nowhere close to being able to carry a movie all on her own. She’s just not interesting enough as an actress. The reason that first movie was so good was 50% due to the writing and 50% due to Jesse Plemons. Without Plemons playing a major role here, the sequel doesn’t compare to the original.
But it’s still solid. What did you guys think?
