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Black Mirror (Season 4)

Started by Ja'moke, August 25, 2017, 01:46:07 PM

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Catalogue Trousers

QuoteI assumed it was because there was a chain of killings in the wake of the hit-and-run, and crocodile chain is a bit of a phrase. Like, a chain of people holding hands is referred to as such. I don't think I'm making this up.

And also, hello. Haven't talked in a while. Happy New Year.

Well, neveragain, that seems plausible too. Perhaps six of one, half a dozen of t'other. And a Happy New Year to you an' all - and everyone on here, in fact. Yes, even biggytitbo.

Custard

I thought it was titled Crocodile as crocodiles have long memories

Then I remembered it was elephants who have long memories. Possibly. Can't remember.

I didn't mind the end to the episode, but it did remind me of a throwaway silly joke or idea in one of Brooker's Guardian columns. The Bugsy Malone song was a bit on the nose, too. Brooker's never been too great at subtlety.

People being left trapped in digital hellholes is becoming a bit overdone, too

Good season I thought, but the last one was probably stronger overall. Favourite three this year were USS Callister, Hang The DJ, and Metalhead.

Found Black Museum decent, but a bit too daft (the monkey).

As for shows that marry darkness with humour very well, I vote for Inside No.9. What they can do with just half hour is astonishing. I wonder if Netflix has ever tried to poach that show?


Catalogue Trousers

Metalhead works so well because of its very disconnectedness. There's no lengthy explanation for what's happening, we're suddenly just plunged into a vignette of some sort of pseudo-Terminator human vs machines future war. I really wouldn't mind seeing some more Black Mirror episodes in the same setting, giving us various other snapshots of cool stuff going on.

BritishHobo

I really loved the monkey thing, I thought it was a brilliantly sinister idea. Being trapped in this place and the only way to express your existential horror is through such a cutesy phrase.

Malcy

Black Museum is great. Toss up between the last 3 eps for favourite.

monolith

Brooker is taking the piss on Crocodile, absolutely taking the piss.

wooders1978

Oh dear - arkangel was shit - worst episode of all the episodes

Peru

Having watched the second half of the season, I thought there was a major improvement with eps 4,5 and 6. I wish Brooker would stop using children as easy upsetting plot points (in eps 1, 3 and 5 -  the ending to Metalhead, which was otherwise excellent, was a total clanger). I also think that Black Museum should have dropped at least the first story (and arguably the second) and streamlined that third story, which felt like it was given short shrift despite being the heart of the episode.

neveragain

Quote from: wooders1978 on January 01, 2018, 08:46:05 PM
Oh dear - arkangel was shit - worst episode of all the episodes

Noooo no, The Entire History Of You was surely the worst. Just dull. Be Right Back wasn't too good either if memory serves.
Arkangel worked well as a drama I thought. Great performances. Some say it was trite or dull (Lifetime-quality) but I found myself engrossed.

sillymisslily

Quote from: Peru on January 01, 2018, 09:08:13 PM
Having watched the second half of the season, I thought there was a major improvement with eps 4,5 and 6. I wish Brooker would stop using children as easy upsetting plot points (in eps 1, 3 and 5 -  the ending to Metalhead, which was otherwise excellent, was a total clanger). I also think that Black Museum should have dropped at least the first story (and arguably the second) and streamlined that third story, which felt like it was given short shrift despite being the heart of the episode.

Is the whole kid thing to do with him having babbies now? Adds nothing to any of the episodes mentioned- maybe USS Callister to show that he's a complete psycho, but otherwise superfluous to what was actually happening.

Black Museum I liked. Not sure what the first story had to do with the rest of the episode other than showing that Rolo's a scumbag and tech is bad, and by the end of the first two, you're so disgusted and emotionally beaten by what you've just seen, that an innocent guy on death row's sustained torture kind of washes over you.

Crocodile was a load of shit. Sub-ITV drama with an obligatory tech angle. Felt the same about Hated in the Nation (slightly better, but not by much) last series- there's a load of dispiriting cop dramas on TV, show us something new. And why was it filmed in Iceland? What did that add that being filmed in Merseyside or somewhere didn't?

So it goes:-
USS Callister
Black Museum
Hang the DJ
Metalhead
Arkangel
Crocodile

shiftwork2

The incidental music in Metalhead is so similar to that from The Shining that I've put the latter on to check and I'm still not sure it isn't lifted.  Can't be though, can it.

Hang The DJ was a pleasant, upbeat surprise.  But, um, why the title?

Enjoying these so far, two to go - Arkangel and Crocodile, which seemed the least interesting and appear to be 'placed' towards the bottom of posters' lists.

up_the_hampipe

Quote from: neveragain on January 01, 2018, 09:49:59 PM
Noooo no, The Entire History Of You was surely the worst. Just dull.

I loved that one.

sillymisslily

Quote from: shiftwork2 on January 01, 2018, 10:48:01 PM

Hang The DJ was a pleasant, upbeat surprise.  But, um, why the title?


Fuck off that stupid dating system, maybe?

olliebean

I'm not sure it had any relevance apart from being the song playing in the bar at the end of the episode.

neveragain


Enzo

Quote from: sillymisslily on January 01, 2018, 10:15:54 PM
And why was it filmed in Iceland? What did that add that being filmed in Merseyside or somewhere didn't?

My theory is that as this was clearly in the same universe as 15 million merits (the song, wraith babes & the reference to Rupert Everett's character being found in the hotel with a rent boy), the arctic setting is Britain in a post-climate change world where power is generated by the lads on bikes.

Peru

Quote from: shiftwork2 on January 01, 2018, 10:48:01 PM
The incidental music in Metalhead is so similar to that from The Shining that I've put the latter on to check and I'm still not sure it isn't lifted.  Can't be though, can it.

It is, sadly. It's not just Penderecki, it's all the specific Penderecki cues from The Shining. I have absolutely no idea what David Slade thought he was doing there. Ironically with Twin Peaks it's not even the best use of Penderecki in a TV show this year.

Skip Bittman

Loved the very William Burroughs pain junkie routine in Black Museum.

thugler

As usual, I don't think any of them are that good, nothing on par with junipero, but they're all interesting enough to hold my attention and make me want to know what happens. Thought some of it was a bit silly. Why are the three of them in metalhead looking for a bear? Seems a stupid thing to risk multiple lives to get hold of.

Thomas

I think the spirit of Black Mirror is misrepresented by the vibe surrounding the programme. Watching that interesting discussion I linked to above (the one with Alastair Campbell), I was struck by how 'silly' Charlie felt many of the ideas in the show were. He used that word quite a bit.

And some of the ideas really are profoundly silly. I enjoyed 'USS Callister' very much, but the idea of a digital clone - complete with consciousness and memories - being extracted from nothing more than a DNA sample seems a basic impossibility unless the context is pure fantasy fiction.

Rather than watching it as if it's supposed to be a genuine warning about actual technology of the near-future, I now treat every episode as being a science fiction story, or like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - an unusual, even silly, idea played straight for dramatic effect, and to facilitate a human story or prod at human nature. A couple of the best examples of this are 'Be Right Back' and 'The Entire History of You'. I think the show improves and broadens if you drop the expectation that it's always explicitly about Possible Bad Technology of the Future - which, as the (very funny) threads on here have proven, sometimes renders it easily piss-takable. Of course, to be fair to them, some of the episodes do feature recognisably realistic technology, and certain pieces seem eerily plausible - for example, the artificial text chat early in 'Be Right Back', before the more fantastical element of the episode arrives.

As Charlie says in the above discussion, it's like The Twilight Zone but with a technological element instead of a supernatural one. You could easily take the piss out of The Twilight Zone if you were taking it too seriously - a nuclear bomb explodes and a sad man breaks his glasses. It's more interesting if the threats and 'warnings' of these shows are taken in more of a metaphorical, existential way. The world of '15 Million Merits', for example, is never literally going to happen - but it's a great, imaginative, self-contained satire. I've just started a thread on Kafka over in the books subforum - The Metamorphosis would never actually happen, but - as well as being a story about something mad happening to a fictional character- it's a striking metaphorical exploration of very real alienation and dehumanisation. 

I think it's rewarding to take Black Mirror a similar way.

Malcy

Quote from: Enzo on January 02, 2018, 01:02:49 AM
My theory is that as this was clearly in the same universe as 15 million merits (the song, wraith babes & the reference to Rupert Everett's character being found in the hotel with a rent boy), the arctic setting is Britain in a post-climate change world where power is generated by the lads on bikes.

With an inexplicable change on the side of road cars drive on?

notjosh

Totally agree with Thomas. Why would you not want to watch a show where SPOILERS a man brings back his dead wife as a toy monkey and the police mind-read a guinea pig to catch a murderer? Very often it's an experiment in making an utterly preposterous idea as credible as possible. I like it, and I hope in the next series he brings back the actual devil, like what they had in The Twilight Zone.


Icehaven

#83
Quote from: Enzo on January 02, 2018, 01:02:49 AM
My theory is that as this was clearly in the same universe as 15 million merits (the song, wraith babes & the reference to Rupert Everett's character being found in the hotel with a rent boy), the arctic setting is Britain in a post-climate change world where power is generated by the lads on bikes.


Black Museum
had loads of references to previous episodes. In the 2nd segment about the coma woman being transferred into her boyfriend's head, when they're reading a graphic novel together it's called 15 Million Merits, the hospital the museum owner had worked in was called St. Juniper's, which is an anglicisation of San Junipero, and some of exhibits in the museum were from other episodes from this series, the DNA machine and lollipop from Callister was there, and the bath the insurance woman's husband was stabbed in from Crocodile, and there may well have been others, and possibly from other series too. There was a hanging model as well, and I can't quite remember but doesn't someone get hung in Shut Up And Dance?

Anyway I mostly enjoyed these, as usual few niggles;

- In Black Museum Did 'Nish' just delete coma woman's consciousness from the monkey and replace it with her Mum? That's not very fair if she did.

-Maybe this is just personal choice but it kind of bugged me not knowing what had happened in Metalhead. I'm guessing it was some kind of security-gone-mad thing and the robots had been guard dogs intended to hunt thieves and protect Amazon warehouses but had gone haywire for some reason, but it felt a bit incomplete, and it being at least half an hour shorter than a few of the other eps really showed.

-Agree with what someone above said about the overuse of children as motivation for character's actions. It was a major feature of all but one episode and it smacks of lazy writing a bit. Need to get this character to do something they'd be otherwise unlikely to do? Have them doing it for/to help/to save a kid, as if it's the only irrefutable thing the audience will believe could make them do it.   

-Twice (In Arkangel and Black Museum) they not only made a point of saying brain implant procedures were irreversible, but then fell back on ''...and of course this technology is banned now'' to explain why it hadn't revolutionised the world, which is sort of BM making itself a bit redundant by implying if a lot of this stuff was really possible it'd be banned it as soon as it was invented anyway.   

notjosh

Quote from: icehaven on January 02, 2018, 02:13:48 PM

Black Museum
had loads of references to previous episodes. In the 2nd segment about the coma woman being transferred into her boyfriend's head, when they're reading a graphic novel together it's called 15 Million Merits, the hospital the museum owner had worked in was called St. Juniper's, which is an anglicisation of San Junipero, and some of exhibits in the museum were from other episodes from this series, the DNA machine and lollipop from Callister was there, and the bath the insurance woman's husband was stabbed to death in in Crocodile, and there may well have been others, and possibly from other series too. There was a hanging model as well, and I can't quite remember but does someone get hung in Shut Up And Dance?

The outfit from White Bear was there too:


St_Eddie

#85
Quote from: Thomas on January 02, 2018, 11:46:49 AM
...I enjoyed 'USS Callister' very much, but the idea of a digital clone - complete with consciousness and memories - being extracted from nothing more than a DNA sample seems a basic impossibility unless the context is pure fantasy fiction.

Thank you for mentioning this.  It bothered me when watching that episode too.  I brought it up with my Dad, as we were watching it together and he tried to claim that's how DNA works, even though he clearly doesn't actually think that.  My Dad has an amazing capacity to find fault with every little thing, if he's not enjoying something.  Yet he'll rigorously defend something which he is enjoying.  Oh well, at least he didn't trot out his usual bollocks defense of "you're reading too much into it, it's just a film!" (funny how that particular door doesn't swing both ways).

Anyway, I'd somehow forgotten about the DNA nonsense when it come to writing my mini-review of the episode but now that you've reminded me, I hereby demote my rating from a 10/10 to a 9/10.  It's all rather arbitrary, really.

Cerys

Quote from: icehaven on January 02, 2018, 02:13:48 PM- In Black Museum Did 'Nish' just delete coma woman's consciousness from the monkey and replace it with her Mum?

No - her mum's consciousness is in her.

Icehaven

Quote from: Cerys on January 02, 2018, 03:24:22 PM
No - her mum's consciousness is in her.

Ohhhh, that also explains why she can hear her too. So she was just being nice taking coma woman/monkey with her, fair doos.

Dr Syntax Head

A poster of the killer from White Bear was on the wall on the entrance to the Black Museum too. And a metal bee from whatever episode the killer assassin drone bees was from (Hated in the nation?).

I personally thought Entire History of You was great. It was obvious what it was trying to say but it was still quite affecting I thought.

Really looking forward to the next lot of episodes. BM is one of my favourite TV shows ever despite it's obvious flaws. It unsettles the normals who don't really think about the stuff that BM explores. The likes of us on here think about that stuff all the time which is why we see the sometimes obviousness of BM I reckon.


Dr Syntax Head

Quote from: icehaven on January 02, 2018, 04:17:16 PM
Ohhhh, that also explains why she can hear her too. So she was just being nice taking coma woman/monkey with her, fair doos.

Yeah Nish even mentions the humanity and ethics when Rolo talks about the monkey, in passing IIRC