Charlie Brooker's BLACK MIRROR

I'm just not seeing the morality angle in a lot of episodes

Really? many of them seem really "see? This is where social media/staring at phones all day/bioengineering/[insert here] will lead us in the end!".

But I dont find it too overweening, that said.

lol, I mostly get "wow what if.. phones bad"

not "omg PHONES BAD warning warning!"

it's speculative, but not telling you things will be this way, repent now

never repent, just find new ways to fuck up before the current fuckery goes that bad

"see? This is where social media/staring at phones all day/bioengineering/[insert here] will lead us in the end!"

Yeah, this is not what it's about at all. It's not instructive, it's speculative.

Or basically, what mh said.

I was about to say you said it better!

so many OTMs in these last posts

Playtest is great. lol at 'yawn, so derivative' comments.. it's a well-executed, sick joke. main character was perfect Seth Rogen-like, stereotypical American/cocksure 'dude'. good job Black Mirror

seth rogen is canadian

for better or worse he's ours now

If a gaming company wants to kill Seth Rogen too I'm fine with that.

Watched them all now - Nosedive and San Junipero were the best ones

agreed

https://twitter.com/blackmirror/status/799702690796216321

^scared the crap out of me

They turned up the music-creepifier filter to the max!

Put off starting this (from the beginning) forever, but just dove in last night with the first episode, the prime minister/pig one. I'm really not sure what to think of it, but it felt pretty ... mean? And with no real object of satire. But look forward to more, I guess, since the anthology format can make things pretty hit or miss.

Loved the first 2/3 of 'San Junipero' unreservedly, felt like the last bit was unnecessarily Black Mirror-y, could have left it with an explanation of what was technically happening then a cut to the real world and fade to black.

first of the season, awful, next two meh - the show so often fails to make an interesting comment on the nihilistic dystopia it's providing.

the only good eps of the new batch were nosedive & playtest

Nosedive was the absolute worst. GUYS DO U SEE SOCIAL MEDIA IS PERVASIVE AND UNDERMINING OUR HUMANITY

it was cute, but its also something i see zero need to argue abt; all these are p subjective in a way, mores than other tv i think

I thought Men Against Fire was great. Same for Hated In the Nation.

So wait, the show remains frustrating and sort of nihilistically pointless throughout all three seasons? I really liked "Dead Set," I thought it was clever and well-done.

still haven't watched Men Against Fire, should get around to that

Watched "Shut Up and Dance" a couple of nights ago. That one was pretty brutal.

See now I didnt like men Against Fire. I thought it was using too blunt a moral hammer. Also it just wasnt very engaging, for me.

I think I may have already said so up thread lol.

I kinds figured out Men Against Fire halfway through, but it was still chilling.

kinda

imo nosedive was great and not undermining because the person doing the most common job, driving a truck, was outside the system. so society still is based on people doing things and the social media garbage is just icing on the moneyed fantasy, with the only jail representation just being two people breaking out of structured society

also there was cake I think

so much terrible acting throughout this. i didn't mind american guy in playtest so much, he was annoying sure, but ultimately believable. his tinder date was terrible, so wooden and 'acty'. same with most people in hated in the nation, not to mention broad dumb characters (she's a hardnosed DI who has no truck with modern technology! she's a lovable northern IT boffin who can't help spouting impenetrable jargon!). trainspotting lady sometimes ok but her sidekick was painful to watch, as was b wong's scenery-chewing.

i'm torn, i enjoyed it mostly and i'm glad it exists but the smug bluntness and heavy-handed 'we r making serious point' really grated. trying but failing to be the 2k twilight zone, often because of the weak endings. shut up & dance felt boringly inevitable and unsatisfying - no depth, just an exercise in dumb darkness. playtest probably my favourite but it lost me with the try-hard ending-within-ending-within-ending rubbish.

it's frustrating because it all has potential to be great but CB's desire to be a hitchcockalike auteur leaves massive gaping holes. get more talented writers in! telling that the best one of the entire show had nothing to do with him (entire history of you). feels like it'd really benefit from a US-style writing team to fight off the more hokey dialogue and sixth formy writing.

also that song at the end of hated nation was fucking godawful.

I find it really weird that BM is so self-serious, but maybe that's just cause I've watched A Touch of Cloth more than once.

i watched the pigfucking one a few years ago, then everything else over the past few month or so. it's sometimes a good show but i wish they'd take it farther you know? i mean what if at the end of the episode it's not just that they're trapped in an endless cycle of hardware copies but also the creator and only person with they key is YOURSELF but yourself can only make changes based on a near-future social media system of likes and in order to gather up enough Likepoints to free your digital copy in hell you have to become the pig that gets fucked in the first episode via a chip that allows you to inhabit the mind of the pig in that particular simulation BUT it turns out that each of those simulations are controlled by a shadow government that controls the minds of its citizens using a

on and on and on, this show is a verb, it means to take anything and just exhaust the living fuck out of it until you no longer recognize it

with that said i did watch all of them so it must have done something right

damn dude i can't handle more than one episode of this a night. still haven't gone back to watch Men Against Fire.

i don't recognize any of the titles, but i believe that's the one that where it turned out that everything that had just happened was just an "experience" to be integrated into the next model version of himself, untold billions of which would be used to populate a new universe/simulation trying to take over another universe controlled by a rival human/bot/creator but THEN

you're supposed to read all that in garth voice

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan

Iain M Banks did a great flip side take (obviously before BM) on San Junipero called Surface Detail.

I cracked the seal on this last weekend by watching San Junipero first, fully aware that it's atypical of the rest of the series. Since then, I've watched the pig fucking one, the xmas episode with Jon Hamm, and the one where the girl buys an AI version of her dead boyfriend/husband only to get completely freaked out.

Not sure what to hit next. Guess I'll just keep jumping around.

Nosedive and Playtest are my favorites from S3.

watched the 1st three seasons over the past week. like 10 episodes total. occasionally clever, but i basically hate this show. like, half the episodes are tired (and inevitably male) sexual anxiety nightmares in paper thin sci-fi drag. oh no, she cheated on me. oh no, she done a porn. oh no, i fucked a pig on the telly.

Sounds about right. I couldn't take it, because it seemed so shallow and lazy, even when it had a good idea/cast.

did you just name all of the male sexual anxiety nightmares in those 3 examples?

feel like that's a super reductive take and i'm not even one of this show's true believers. it's all "x anxiety nightmares" of some sort.

xp

I'm sorry you had this experience. it must have been very difficult for you.

I'm not surprised Charlie Brooker has sexual anxiety nightmares, no-one can work out how he ended up married to Konnie Huq.

Is the she did porn episode the one where they bicycle for credits all day?

The setups are less of a problem to me than the show having almost nothing interesting to say about the situations it's portraying. Social media is taking over our lives!!! Yes, and...

It's more like OK, here's this extremely specific dead-end dystopian situation, OMG, they can't get out of this extremely specific dead-end dystopian situation!

Here's one: we're in the future, where a giant public pool is filled with robot piranhas, and once a year, a child is chosen to throw in to be eaten by the robot piranhas, and when the child is chosen her parents step up and volunteer to be eaten by piranhas instead, and they are, and then we see the child film it on her cellphone and post it to the internet to share with her friends, and it turns out the children are the ones that devised the robot piranhas because they are psychopaths who like their screens more than mom and dad who want their parents eaten by robot fish. What sort of sick society have we become!?!

cant wait for the fidget spinner ep in seies 4

did you just name all of the male sexual anxiety nightmares in those 3 examples?

yeah, i figure infidelity, porn sadness and the telly pig pretty much cover it

"what if phones, but too much?" is a lot of these episodes... great fb group, i recommend it