Black Mirror series 5
I didn’t really get the point of Striking Vipers at first, I thought them getting together in the game would lead to something else, but then that was basically the entire plot and there was no real twist to smack you in the face like I kept waiting for. It seems like they could have told the story in half the time as well, it really dragged after a while and was soooo slow, but then I don’t think that any of the episodes from series 5 needed to be over an hour long personally. Part of me wondered if they were deliberately making the episodes really bloated just so that they would feel more like mini movies, and thus could compete more in certain categories in the Emmys and other award shows, otherwise it seems that they could easily all have been tightened to 30-40 minutes to help with the pacing?
Still Striking Vipers is an episode that improves on rewatch once you actually know where it’s going, and that it’s more of an exploration of sexuality than it is an episode with the usual Black Mirror twist. My interpretation was that Karl was just in it for the sex between their avatars, but it came across to me from how the actor played it that Danny really did feel feeling something after they kissed? But it seemed like the idea was meant to be that they were in love, but they couldn’t physically be together as themselves because they just weren’t attracted to one another outside of the game? I’m assuming that’s what the episode was going for at least, that they were emotionally intimate, but not physically compatible in the real world? It wouldn’t make sense for them to be willing to kiss and test it out if they were that repressed about possibly being gay, so it seemed like the idea was meant to be that the attraction honestly wasn’t there in RL, but I don’t know if the actor playing Danny got the memo :P
It was interesting how it seems like a happy ending at first, but then actually when you think about it, it’s pretty depressing that Danny and Karl only get one day a year together that they can really look forward too with Danny getting to escape the monotony of his marriage, while Karl is just desperate to really connect with another person. It didn’t have the usual shocking Black Mirror twist at the end, but I did find the whole episode quite bittersweet and depressing if you think about it as them using the game to escape from the mundane reality that is their adult lives :(
And Smithereens was mixed for me. The acting was good, but it was basically just a standard hostage drama, it didn’t really feel like a Black Mirror episode. It felt like there was too much emphasis on the police POV, even though clearly they really wanted to make their point be about social media and how much information those companies can store on us, but it didn’t fully come across when most of the episode just felt like your standard detective show. And then the ending felt a bit too on the nose and preachy imo when we found out that the entire scenario was because of his phone distracting him while driving. The episode just felt like Charlie Brooker lecturing the younger generation and their obsession with never looking up from their smartphones, and I guess that is Black Mirror’s thing to be fair lol, but I just found it to be really heavy handed when it’s played completely straight and without the usual slightly distorted and futuristic version of our world that you get. Something like Nosedive made far more of an impact with its look at how far we might eventually take our chasing of social media likes.
Idk though, maybe I find it hard to fully buy into episodes that are all about how social media has desensitised us and everyone is more disengaged from the real world, because really humans have historically *always* brushed most tragedies aside and got on with their day unless it immediately affects them. I don’t see how having a brief reaction to a breaking news twitter notification is so drastically different from how someone might have responded to a newspaper story or a television news story 30 years ago that involves people that they don’t know. Might sound harsh, but you can’t sit there crying and having ~deep thoughts~ every time there’s a loss of life, you’d basically be spending every day depressed and over emphasising in that case, so I don’t agree that social media has made humans worse in that respect.
And certainly going online to talk to people has enriched the lives of many people who are socially awkward and don’t have any rl friends. Introverted and shy people would not have any more friends if the internet had never existed, they would just be a lot lonelier if they didn’t have that option to meet likeminded people online to share their common interests, so to my mind the internet was really a blessing for them :shrug: I know that today’s older generation aren’t as tech savvy, but I imagine also that a lot of older people in future years will feel far less isolated when they have the internet to connect with people from all over the world, although obviously physical human contact is important as well
And I’m not 100% sure how I feel about Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too. I know that some people *really* hated it, it seems like it was too Americanised for a lot of viewers, but I didn’t think it was horrible or anything. At first I was pretty into the idea of an episode focused on music industry exploitation, I would have liked a darker ending actually of her remaining in a coma and still aware of what was going on, while her hologram keeps her career going, instead things did get a bit cheesy towards the end. But at the same time a lot of really dark things did happen to Ashley, I thought it was horrifying that her aunt basically brought her up, and yet only cared about her as a product and the best way to market her. It felt like a very effective commentary on how the music industry markets singers, it’s already been pointed out that there were a lot of parallels to Britney Spears if you believe the stories that are currently going round on her father holding her under a conservatorship against her will
I saw a suggestion on reddit for an alternative ending that I really liked, where Rachel is confronted with the real edgier and darker Ashley coming out of the coma, and ultimately decides to plug her back in so that she can keep Ashley Eternity instead, and apologises, ‘sorry, I’m just such a big fan’. That would have been a more typically Black Mirror ending and way of commenting on how fans love the product over the person, instead of having it end on the slightly cheesy moment of Ashley rocking out, and her two former fans running out saying that they hated it. I’m going to assume that the second half of the episode was a deliberate satire of Disney movies, but it still felt a bit 🙄 at times lol. I think the episode would of worked better with more focus on Ashley and her management team maybe, and less on the two sisters going to rescue her
Overall I felt like Bandersnatch kind of overshadowed series 5, I suspect it was more work than they had anticipated, and they spend so much time and money on it that they ended up rushing these three episodes. I liked Bandersnatch, but none of series 5 produced any standout episodes for me, and that was disappointing when quite honestly you’d have expected all three of them to be classics considering that well there were only three episodes
And on another note, it seems like Netflix has really been lacking in the U.K. recently, I’ve noticed that they hardly add any new shows these days that aren’t Netflix originals. It seems like their deal with the CW must have come to an end for starters as they haven’t added any of their newer shows like Legacies and Roswell New Mexico (and I really wanted to see that one!), it’s just been the new seasons of shows that they already had an existing arrangement with. Traditionally they’ve always included tons of shows from the other US networks, they were one of the easiest ways to find shows like Breaking Bad, The Good Place, Suits, Hannibal etc etc. And they’re all still there thankfully, but they’ve hardly picking up any new shows. Hopefully not a sign of things to come, but I suspect that it is :(
Still Striking Vipers is an episode that improves on rewatch once you actually know where it’s going, and that it’s more of an exploration of sexuality than it is an episode with the usual Black Mirror twist. My interpretation was that Karl was just in it for the sex between their avatars, but it came across to me from how the actor played it that Danny really did feel feeling something after they kissed? But it seemed like the idea was meant to be that they were in love, but they couldn’t physically be together as themselves because they just weren’t attracted to one another outside of the game? I’m assuming that’s what the episode was going for at least, that they were emotionally intimate, but not physically compatible in the real world? It wouldn’t make sense for them to be willing to kiss and test it out if they were that repressed about possibly being gay, so it seemed like the idea was meant to be that the attraction honestly wasn’t there in RL, but I don’t know if the actor playing Danny got the memo :P
It was interesting how it seems like a happy ending at first, but then actually when you think about it, it’s pretty depressing that Danny and Karl only get one day a year together that they can really look forward too with Danny getting to escape the monotony of his marriage, while Karl is just desperate to really connect with another person. It didn’t have the usual shocking Black Mirror twist at the end, but I did find the whole episode quite bittersweet and depressing if you think about it as them using the game to escape from the mundane reality that is their adult lives :(
And Smithereens was mixed for me. The acting was good, but it was basically just a standard hostage drama, it didn’t really feel like a Black Mirror episode. It felt like there was too much emphasis on the police POV, even though clearly they really wanted to make their point be about social media and how much information those companies can store on us, but it didn’t fully come across when most of the episode just felt like your standard detective show. And then the ending felt a bit too on the nose and preachy imo when we found out that the entire scenario was because of his phone distracting him while driving. The episode just felt like Charlie Brooker lecturing the younger generation and their obsession with never looking up from their smartphones, and I guess that is Black Mirror’s thing to be fair lol, but I just found it to be really heavy handed when it’s played completely straight and without the usual slightly distorted and futuristic version of our world that you get. Something like Nosedive made far more of an impact with its look at how far we might eventually take our chasing of social media likes.
Idk though, maybe I find it hard to fully buy into episodes that are all about how social media has desensitised us and everyone is more disengaged from the real world, because really humans have historically *always* brushed most tragedies aside and got on with their day unless it immediately affects them. I don’t see how having a brief reaction to a breaking news twitter notification is so drastically different from how someone might have responded to a newspaper story or a television news story 30 years ago that involves people that they don’t know. Might sound harsh, but you can’t sit there crying and having ~deep thoughts~ every time there’s a loss of life, you’d basically be spending every day depressed and over emphasising in that case, so I don’t agree that social media has made humans worse in that respect.
And certainly going online to talk to people has enriched the lives of many people who are socially awkward and don’t have any rl friends. Introverted and shy people would not have any more friends if the internet had never existed, they would just be a lot lonelier if they didn’t have that option to meet likeminded people online to share their common interests, so to my mind the internet was really a blessing for them :shrug: I know that today’s older generation aren’t as tech savvy, but I imagine also that a lot of older people in future years will feel far less isolated when they have the internet to connect with people from all over the world, although obviously physical human contact is important as well
And I’m not 100% sure how I feel about Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too. I know that some people *really* hated it, it seems like it was too Americanised for a lot of viewers, but I didn’t think it was horrible or anything. At first I was pretty into the idea of an episode focused on music industry exploitation, I would have liked a darker ending actually of her remaining in a coma and still aware of what was going on, while her hologram keeps her career going, instead things did get a bit cheesy towards the end. But at the same time a lot of really dark things did happen to Ashley, I thought it was horrifying that her aunt basically brought her up, and yet only cared about her as a product and the best way to market her. It felt like a very effective commentary on how the music industry markets singers, it’s already been pointed out that there were a lot of parallels to Britney Spears if you believe the stories that are currently going round on her father holding her under a conservatorship against her will
I saw a suggestion on reddit for an alternative ending that I really liked, where Rachel is confronted with the real edgier and darker Ashley coming out of the coma, and ultimately decides to plug her back in so that she can keep Ashley Eternity instead, and apologises, ‘sorry, I’m just such a big fan’. That would have been a more typically Black Mirror ending and way of commenting on how fans love the product over the person, instead of having it end on the slightly cheesy moment of Ashley rocking out, and her two former fans running out saying that they hated it. I’m going to assume that the second half of the episode was a deliberate satire of Disney movies, but it still felt a bit 🙄 at times lol. I think the episode would of worked better with more focus on Ashley and her management team maybe, and less on the two sisters going to rescue her
Overall I felt like Bandersnatch kind of overshadowed series 5, I suspect it was more work than they had anticipated, and they spend so much time and money on it that they ended up rushing these three episodes. I liked Bandersnatch, but none of series 5 produced any standout episodes for me, and that was disappointing when quite honestly you’d have expected all three of them to be classics considering that well there were only three episodes
And on another note, it seems like Netflix has really been lacking in the U.K. recently, I’ve noticed that they hardly add any new shows these days that aren’t Netflix originals. It seems like their deal with the CW must have come to an end for starters as they haven’t added any of their newer shows like Legacies and Roswell New Mexico (and I really wanted to see that one!), it’s just been the new seasons of shows that they already had an existing arrangement with. Traditionally they’ve always included tons of shows from the other US networks, they were one of the easiest ways to find shows like Breaking Bad, The Good Place, Suits, Hannibal etc etc. And they’re all still there thankfully, but they’ve hardly picking up any new shows. Hopefully not a sign of things to come, but I suspect that it is :(