Charlie Brooker's BLACK MIRROR

Ok there are plenty of details that make this seem like a plausible near future world (slightly sexier phones and desktops) but that doesn't mean it's an actual possible world. It's an SF fairy story. SF can be good without being 100% technologically plausible.

also i don't understand why they have the technology to build near-perfect humanoid robots that self-heal, and yet they post her a dormant android covered in vaseline and she has to tip powder into the bath like it's a sea monkey

Ok there are plenty of details that make this seem like a plausible near future world (slightly sexier phones and desktops) but that doesn't mean it's an actual possible world. It's an SF fairy story. SF can be good without being 100% technologically plausible.

when the plausibility is unprecedented by anything else in the story, it gets in the way. emil.y mentioned that news clip right at the start, which was fairly obviously chucked in during post production, and which i and (presumably) kinder didn't even notice. that's not enough. maybe, i dunno, the protagonists could have had a chat about 'those creepy robots', or a proto-humanoid could have served vol-au-vents at the funeral or something.

I guess my problem is that I don't see why your suggestions make *anything* more plausible. They just clutter up a story with rubbish to hammer home a point. I mean, it is far more plausible to me that the nosy friend is never heard of again, because they weren't close in the first place and that's what happens when you're grieving, but you would relinquish plausibility in this case for plot device to make sure that everything is tied up neatly. Guess what? Life isn't tied up neatly. It's not plausible for all the loose ends to be tied.

And, you know, *why* is it more plausible to have a robot butler be the first instantiation rather than medical uses followed by a weirdo start-up company that preys on grief? I'm not at all sure that it is.

(Also, I assume you were eliding/joking with your interpretation that 'facebook invented it', right? It utilises data from all digital interactions and records in a future where even more interactions are online than they are now, it isn't just 'I have made you out of facebook'.)

It's an SF fairy story. SF can be good without being 100% technologically plausible.

yeah, you basically have to give them this and then judge everything else on its own merits. It's not like it's particularly likely that someone would survive a nuclear apocalypse by being trapped in a a bank vault etc. etc.

(I'm going to stop now... these arguments in a nutshell boil down to 'your plausibility isn't the same as mine', and it's impossible to go anywhere from there.)

They just clutter up a story with rubbish to hammer home a point.

haha, that's the exact point i'm making about this episode, so i'm lost now.

Guess what? Life isn't tied up neatly. It's not plausible for all the loose ends to be tied.

life is also full of really long boring bits. i mean brooker could have made an episode of black mirror with people sitting on a sofa using a transparent ipad for 45 minutes. it's plausible, it could happen, but it wouldn't work as a piece of viewing. that's my point. those loose ends shouldn't have been there, and they arguably wouldn't have been if the episode were half as long.

And, you know, *why* is it more plausible to have a robot butler be the first instantiation rather than medical uses followed by a weirdo start-up company that preys on grief? I'm not at all sure that it is.

as a prelude to a near-perfect humanoid robot? of course it is.

(Also, I assume you were eliding/joking with your interpretation that 'facebook invented it', right? It utilises data from all digital interactions and records in a future where even more interactions are online than they are now, it isn't just 'I have made you out of facebook'.)

i meant the first appearance of these robots was through beta deployment by a social media firm, not as a sex toy for rich blokes or anything (of course i had forgotten about the opening news clip when i wrote that)

(I'm going to stop now... these arguments in a nutshell boil down to 'your plausibility isn't the same as mine', and it's impossible to go anywhere from there.)

it's about more than that. it's about chucking in a load of peripheral elements to pad an hour-long time slot. it's about setting up events, or plot twists, or comeuppances that don't ever happen.

Except that they're not set up to happen to anyone except you!

i think i might resent these films for the crappily portentous series title as much as anything (unless it's a deliberate lol nod to Blue Jam) and the ham-fisted "do you see?"ness of his targets but i've got to agree that arguing plausibility of fantasy/satire plotting always seems like a massive missing of the point to me.

Except that they're not set up to happen to anyone except you!

based on the sample size of this ilx thread? 'er indoors had exactly the same concerns, and we weren't even discussing them as they happened.

I like the title! I mean all these smartphones are literally black mirrors, the double meaning just comes for free so it's not really trying too hard to be clever.

the whole series is called that tho innit? it may've been kinda apposite for that particular ep but y'know

i admit i watch v. sporadically, Brooker's more Partridge than Swift imo

i think all the eps are some variation on technology - specifically the black mirrors/glowing screens consuming 90% of our waking hours - taken TOO FAR.

where does rod serling lie on the partridge/swift axis?

yeah, p sure he said that in an interview last year xp

xp

never really felt that when Shatner was being trolled by that dude in the gorilla suit that Rod Serling was making a telling comment about life in 60s USA

Episodes such as; "The Shelter","He's Alive" or "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" offered specific commentary on current events and social issues

i know, i know, but let's be honest everybody likes the "To Serve Man" stuff better

Burgess Meredith fascist book burning episode = best of both worlds

i think there's something about the aesthetic of the Brooker thing i don't dig, it does remind me of that Adam and Joe pisstake of Blue Jam

CB obviously went to great pains to avoid having people like us go 'but society would be completely different if we had adapted to clones because the whole concepts of mortality and employment and ethics and humanity and law would be unrecognisable compared to today', by way of: Ash no longer had any other family to complicate things, she lived alone in the middle of nowhere so we see nothing of the rest of society (I mean, assuming half the people at the funeral weren't clones? No way of knowing that), also her job is ART which we all know robots can't do.
So I like that he deliberately removed all that stuff so he could focus on what this was about which was grief and how what tech we already have leaves bits of people after they've gone and what would happen if etc etc. I'm not going OH WE DIDN'T SEE ROBOT BUTLERS FAIIILLL.

Robots and clone news stories have been around my entire life, I guess my point is that I couldn't work out whether this was actually supposed to be a very near-future world where surprise! We suddenly have clones, or whether it was actually supposed to reflect a world where, by the time Joe Public could phone-order something that is technologically basically amounts to magic, the concepts of humanity and death etc etc would already have changed. I just couldn't get which it was SUPPOSED to be. And I really don't think it matters much, but both me and my partner were like oh, right, they had magic all along in the world she lives in.

As everyone says, it still works as a what-if story, I just was a bit thrown by which 'what-if'.

he was warning her that she must do something to prepare the realdoll, but she never heard what it was, and again (just like nosy friend) there was no consequence. so why do it? this episode was littered with bombs that never went of

huh yeah, forgot about that, wonder what that was meant to be. Maybe he was trying to say 'there's always money in the banana stand'

swear it was "dont turn on the bathroom light"

Yeah, that's what I thought it was.

Black Mirror works for me as a title because it calls to the mind 'The Haunted Mirror' sequence of Dead of Night, which is obv the ur-text for this kind of thing

"bombs that never go off", like - hot coffee in the car; "don't turn on the light"; etc - these are brilliant ways of making the drama feel sinister and ominous without actually requiring BIG BAD THINGS to happen. love that this Evil Zombie story didn't actually contain an evil zombie.

Thinking about it more, I'm convinced that was what he said when the phone went weird. Why else would have I felt EXTREMELY anxious when she DID the turn the bathroom light on? I thought it was going to lead to some mutation with the eventual clone that emerged.

http://site.mycybertwin.com/

watching it again today, the attic thing is referenced very early on.

tech stuff obviously a pointer that this was near future. and all the AI stuff and real doll stuff was 'in beta'. what gibson said about the future not being well distributed.

and friend only introduced the Eliza-like AI thing, which wasn't even realtime, everything else was suggested by the chatbot itself (as it became available?)

the one thing that did stand out to me as a glaring error was the police car with its lights going when delivering the bad news. why? it wasn't urgent. plus place was isolated, there'd be no traffic.

i find it odd / good that this is about the only non-serial 1hr drama on tv at the moment. are there any others?

48 mins, but who's torrenting

CB obviously went to great pains to avoid having people like us go 'but society would be completely different if we had adapted to clones because the whole concepts of mortality and employment and ethics and humanity and law would be unrecognisable compared to today', by way of: Ash no longer had any other family to complicate things, she lived alone in the middle of nowhere so we see nothing of the rest of society (I mean, assuming half the people at the funeral weren't clones? No way of knowing that), also her job is ART which we all know robots can't do.

i didn't go into this earlier but the pains to which he went jumped out at me like a <thing that jumps out of stuff>. ymmv but to me that feels like a copout, when it would have been more efficient in exposition terms to integrate cues properly. maybe he ran out of time, i dunno.

yes there's no way of knowing half the people at the funeral weren't clones, but again no storytelling device was employed to convey that. it's only the worst and most cynical science fiction writer who suddenly plugs flying cars into book three of lord of the rings and then says 'oh but in book one they all got to rivendell in a flying car, i just didn't tell you about it'

So I like that he deliberately removed all that stuff so he could focus on what this was about which was grief and how what tech we already have leaves bits of people after they've gone and what would happen if etc etc.

the core concept is fantastic, so it's great that he removed some stuff so he could focus on it. what threw both of us off is that he didn't remove more stuff—again, it felt like padding to fill the running time. also i get that the realdoll awakening is supposed to be a stomach-dropping moment for the viewer, but for us it was the moment we gave up suspending our disbelief.

i've focused wholly on the aspects that killed the experience for us, but there were a lot of really lovely and well-executed moment right the way through this.

guys what he said before the phone went weird was don't forget to leave me some clothes, innit.

it was a shit episode by the way.

at least there was shagging in it though. i was worried that there was going to be one episode in which there's no shagging

http://thetweethereafter.com/

aye well. still not fussed about the 'it could never happen' aspect, but that seemed needlessly cruel. are we meant to take home some kind of "retributive justice is bad mmmkay" messsage?

that sucked.

Yeah, that was... muddy.

Not big on this one. We'd seen the reality TV thing done in the first series, and this one felt much clumsier, like it was being made up as it went along.

not her fault, but the lead actress was spectacularly irritating

Ugh. Way too torture-porn-y for me. (The fact that that's what it "about", in part, doesn't really make it any more clever than Human Cenntipede II

Saw two mins of this. It was enough, quite enough.

how do you gauge anything based on two minutes?

probably works for wire songs.

If films were/weren't like Wire songs. I'd like to see a film that choruses out.

i can usually spot shite within two minutes, i dont consider it a rare gift tbh

one instinctively knows when something is shite

People talked about Facebook doing shit like that maybe 10 years and I wouldn’t put ANYTHING past them

even with microphone access denied THEY KNOW

I looked up using an expired passport to get back into the UK, and same day got a text from HM Passport about passport renewal. I have never before had a text from them and haven't since, and generally try to keep cookies etc locked down so I was/am a bit freaked out

a Polish/UK expat currently living in Germany I know who is a friend of my brother was convinced lots of hassle he was getting from HMRC coincided with him opening a FB account with his government name. But this was in the early days of FB and was a big influence on me never getting a FB account.

lol, apart from being an asocial fuckup!

I’m not saying our phones are definitely listening in on us, but I get a lot of ads for ways to stop snoring

My Alexa barely responds even when I say the "Alexa" prompt, so I doubt mine is paying any attention to my every day mutterings.