Charlie Brooker's BLACK MIRROR

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

I've now watched the S1 episodes. They have a habit they share with S2 that the first 20 mins is thrilling and then you get the sense that they're not sure where to take the concept. The only episode that really worked all the way through was The Entire History of Your Life or whatever. I was genuinely surprised by the way it ended, and it it really showed the messy interstices of people's thoughts and private lives in a way the others have tried but generally failed to do

(Have not seen last night's yet btw)

my problem with last night's was the actors were famous for other things (comedy things) and that got in the way somewhat.

The only episode that really worked all the way through was The Entire History of Your Life or whatever

This one has been sold to Robert Downey, Jr., who's planning to produce a feature out of it. Sam Bain/Jesse Armstrong are writing it (as they did the original).

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

Man, there are SO many shows/movies/albums that I am so glad that I haven't dismissed after two potentially-totally-misleading minutes.

I think all of Black Mirror has been brilliant so I guess this thread isn't for me -- it seems more like a thread to complain about how shitty it is. The first series was better than this one though. I think my favorite was the cycling/pop idol future one.

Me too. It felt like the best conceived even if it did borrow huge chunks from The Machine Stops

This was actually one of my favourites too. It was the horriblest but not knowing what was going on kept it interesting. The 'do you see' is obviously there but a little less hammered home than others? maybe? I dunno.
When Tyres steps out from behind the doors at the end he's totally meant to be Derren Brown, right? I thought it was him.

oh wait it's not your favourite. I dunno, I wouldn't watch it again but I think I enjoyed guessing the setup whereas before it's all laid out for you. Also it feels like it's just based on a TV Go Home idea.

Yeah I was getting a lot of Derren Brown vibes from that character's reveal.

I thought last night's one was kinda stupid for 50 minutes or so and then the ending mitigated it somewhat, but it was pointlessly cruel and manipulative nevertheless. I'm a cynical guy and all, but it was nuance-free cynicism. One of the interesting things about humans is how they can be hateful in general but invariably sympathetic up close. You can despair at the culture but I don't think this kind of exaggeration has anything useful to tell us about society. You could say the same about, I suppose, Nineteen Eighty-Four but the difference is that a story like that puts us, up close, with people who have some good inside them acting within a merciless framework. But there is nobody good in Black Mirror, or at least last night's one, so I don't believe in it. There were good Nazis even. People everywhere are holding doors open for and rescuing from drowning those who they would otherwise mock on Facebook. I'm kinda comfortable with that - though we could improve!

Considering it's been 20 years now, do you think there were parallels with the Bulger murder; how there'll always be a part of society that would like to see those boys tortured for eternity, regardless of if they ever learn their lesson?

I do think Bulger-murderer hatred is mostly kind of abstract and would be shown up as such if it came up against the killers, face to face. Some people would just stab them given the chance, no doubt, but it's not my experience that the hatred projected towards these people - or others in the past e.g. Myra Hindley - represents the soul of humanity. Far from it. I think the disparity is more interesting than portraying others as a clump. I'd give Brooker the benefit of the doubt and assume he's considered this - e.g. his proxy in the 15 Million Merits episode in the first series - but his depersonalisation of fictional depersonalisation seems too easily cynical.

Trailer for pt3 makes it look shit

Good posts EK

I don't know, I thought this was pretty much the best from either series. For all the comparisons you could make to Bulger or Brady/Hindley, it seems to me the nearest rivals are the April Jones case, Charlene Downes (and the attendant exploitation by the far Right) and the media circus of the Shannon Matthews case. As mainstream politics lurches all the time rightward and into populism (Labour's BNP styled People's Policy X-Factor is a prime example) it wouldn't be a step too far to imagine exactly what's portrayed here as a knee-jerk vote grabber. On the basis that there was a guy following Vicky Pryce as she walked to court with a placard slagging her off, it's not too far a jump that the public - or at least enough to make the park viable - would willingly want to participate in the 'justice'. In fact, the only players that I don't get are the actors. I don't see what they get out of it or their motivation.

comparisons with the human centipede are otm, especially in her sobbing nonstop for the whole final act. that went far beyond sympathetic/retributive and was just annoying.

as mentioned upthread this was far too long for its story (surprise surprise), but the concept was certainly fascinating, and encourages reevaluating the possible extent of people's obsession with celebrity/infamy, the popular thirst for visceral justice, videophones &c.

thought this was the best one of this run.

i generally find that the tone of these things is uncomfortably "off" - the blue bear was so so shit, but I guess that was the point. but they stick with me for the most part and i find myself thinking about them for weeks after, like a half-recalled nightmare.

saw first series in its entirety, and first ep of this series - feels like its professed strangeness is not at all strange and quite a dull strate extrapolation of current elements that don't cohere into something other than being direct refs of those elements.

(watched Penda's Fen (play for today) on YouTube the other week - now that IS fucked up and v good.)

feel these tend to do machinery of the future quite well tho.

this was awful! they didn't really explore anything? Just like, yeah, this is what the people want, all of the time, someone's finally realised and that lets him rule the world.

also I hate all his characters.

horrible episode, stupid glib ending