One thing I frequently forget about Black Mirror is that creator Charlie Booker gets the sole writing credit on almost every single episode and is a co-writer on the rest of them; for better or worse, every single Black Mirror episode has come out of his mind, and it only makes sense that the show has grown a little repetitive with its themes over the past ten years or so. Clearly the guy has a fascination with certain specific questions like "can software feel pain?" and... yeah, pretty much just that one, really.
Early June was an ominous dumping ground for the fifth season of Black Mirror, the Emmy eligibility equivalent of an early January movie release, and most people seem to agree that this was kind of an overall forgettable season of Black Mirror. My take is that the last two seasons being six episodes each kind of fooled people with quantity, not quality, and that the show's kind of been on a slow downward trajectory for a while. Regardless, it's still more or less appointment streaming for me and will probably remain that way as long as episodes keep coming. So let's go ahead and jump into these three episodes individually, why not?
Striking Vipers - My feelings toward this one are about as complicated as they get when it comes to television. There's some stuff going on here, especially in the first act, that completely spoke to me, like how a couple in their twenties spending a lot of time with their friends becomes a couple in their thirties carving out a monotonous existence alone in the suburbs, or like how two friends who no longer see each other in person all that often can stay in touch by playing video games together. (Interestingly Kotaku just had a piece on this phenomenon, and I can relate!) But then everything takes a hard turn and the two guys start making out - and then fucking - in the VR world afforded them by the video game. It's suddenly "Moonlight with video games" and there are all kinds of new questions about whether this constitutes infidelity, or whether the one guy playing the video game as a female character is somewhat trans, or whether or not this qualifies as a homosexual experience for one or both of them. And I don't think any of it really gets explored in depth or lands. Plus there are the "hey wait a minute" questions that come along with any sci-fi, like, "why did these game developers make a game where you can just have sex?" and "if the technology to simulate orgasms exists, why are people playing video games to use it instead of just looking at porn or whatever?" and "how exactly does the guy playing as a woman, you know, 'feel' the mind-blowing sex he's having?" It's an episode I'll need to stew on for a while, but my reaction at this point is more or less, "just make an episode about VR porn addiction ruining a marriage and make a different episode about a guy using VR to explore being trans and/or gay with his friend, and do both storylines fully instead of baking each of them halfway like this."
Smithereens - Far and away the most straightforward episode of the season, which has its pros and cons. On one hand, while the other two episodes kind of flail around and look at a variety of different things partially, this one remains hyper-focused and it's the tensest and most immediately entertaining episode because of it. On the other hand, the entire technophobic punchline here is more or less "we look at our phones too much!" and as such there's no lasting impact here at all. It's eerie and dystopian and plays into the "social media companies know everything about us" angle very well, but I don't find myself thinking about it much, if at all, now that I've seen it. And this is the problem with ranking and rating individual episodes of Black Mirror. It's like, what do you want them to be? Tight and enjoyable and well-made little thrillers like this one? Or messier things that poke at lots of different spots and linger in your mind, but don't really make for compelling hours of television?
Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too - First of all, ugh, guys, put the Oxford comma in there! Now that that's out of the way, man - this was a weird one that, once again, pokes in all kinds of directions at once and feels like it was Frankensteined together out of several different ideas. There are two teenaged sisters - let's call them Pop Sister and Grunge Sister - and their mom is dead and they're new in town and both of them are kind of social outcasts but Pop Sister longs for friends and a social life whereas Grunge Sister happily leans into her identity of sitting on her bed playing bass guitar with headphones on. Also, Miley Cyrus is here, playing a Miley Cyrus-like pop star who wants to write sadder, darker, "more mature" music but can't because her manager-agent is her vile, evil aunt, who knows the money is in making songs for girls like Pop Sister, not Grunge Sister. Okay, that's just the set up! So next a Miley Cyrus robo-doll gets released, and it's basically Siri or Alexa, voiced by Miley Cyrus. Pop Sister buys one and it becomes her best and only friend, and Grunge Sister is disgusted by the whole thing - but maybe also kind of jealous that Pop Sister has a friend? - and there's a high school talent show and Pop Sister's Miley doll has been teaching her how to do dance moves and so Pop Sister goes ahead and does a Miley Cyrus dance in front of her whole school and it's as awkward and bad and cringey as you can imagine, and Grunge Sister is kind of smug like "you fool, of course this is what happens when you think a pop star robot is your friend!" and meanwhile actual Miley Cyrus gets put into a coma by her aunt, who then hooks up a brain monitoring device to harvest Miley's dreams and mine new pop songs out of them, her intention being to just have a simulated Miley Cyrus writing albums and doing live performances. Months pass, and back at Pop Sister and Grunge Sister's house, a news report wakes up the long-dormant Miley doll - Pop Sister seems to have sworn her off after the big talent show debacle - and the Miley doll sees that actual Miley is in a coma, and wigs out, and then Grunge sister plugs the doll into a computer and rewrites some software - a skill we never knew she had, which, how hard would that have been to set up? - and suddenly "unlocks" the doll. The Miley doll reveals that she is in fact Miley's entire brain, personality, consciousness, what have you, uploaded onto a doll and inhibited by a blocking device that Grunge Sister has removed. And now Miley doll is like "my aunt is a total bitch, I know she put me in that coma on purpose, we have to go rescue... me." And so the three of them steal their dad's van and pose as exterminators and infiltrate the aunt's mansion with just the dumbest disguises and cover stories, and they trick and then taze the big lunkheaded security goons, and the whole thing just feels like the dumbest Disney Channel original movie - probably intentionally, but still, what a weird choice! - and sure enough they save comatose Miley Cyrus who's just strapped to a bed in a room in the mansion. And then the four of them - the sisters, Miley Doll, and actual Miley - drive off in the van to go crash the aunt's big PR stunt which is happening right now. It is, wihtout question, the single dumbest episode of Black Mirror. It is also one of the sloppiest, completely abandoning questions and themes and character arcs at will. I can imagine a pared down version of this working better! Like what if the whole story were about celebrity worship - the first fifteen minutes certainly are! - and the Miley dolls are meant to bilk as much money as possible out of the teen girls who love them so much? Or like, indoctrinate them with very specific political or cultural beliefs? That sounds like it could make for an interesting Black Mirror episode! Or what if the whole thing were about the contrast between the two sister outcasts, and an exploration of whether someone can get a fulfilling amount of social interaction entirely from advanced AI in this day and age? Holy crap is this paragraph long and bad. I'm bailing! Get me out!
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