Charlie Brooker's BLACK MIRROR

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

feel like the dystopia we're living in is tonally more nathan barley than black mirror

Watching over 12 hours of a show you "basically hate" in one week is pretty good fodder for a Black Mirror episode, it has to be said.

lol otm

https://irishkirsche.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/tumblr_neqzq9kmrk1u3o8rto2_500.jpg

cant wait for the fidget spinner ep in seies 4

― kurt schwitterz, Thursday, June 1, 2017 10:58 AM (twelve hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read this while holding my fidget spinner so you best believe i'm excited too

Bring on the war with the fidget cubes

In a dystopian future, all citizens must spin their fidget spinners at all time. If they stop, they lose a finger. Episode ends with the entire nation fingerless and helpless. And then you see someone spin one ... on their TONGUE! DO YOU SEE WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT!?!?!

the severed fingers are used to make more fidget spinners

fidget spinners are PEOPLE

In a dystopian future, everyone is glued to an outlandish, ott reality TV show featuring totally insane, depraved acts. They just can't stop watching because it is so crazy. But then it turns out ... that crazy reality TV show *is* reality, and the people on the "shows" have all been watching everyone else, amazed at how boring and "fake" their lives are!

In a dystopian future, we replace our teachers with perfect robots, and the schools improve significantly. Grades and tests are up, our kids are smarter and more competent. And then we discover ... the robot teachers have replaced all our kids with robots!

In a dystopian future, a new strain of addictive pornography proliferates. Almost everyone becomes entranced, despite the fact that it eventually literally makes you go blind. It turns out this strain of pornography was devised ... by blind people! They have a big victory party and assume control until - twist! - they are beset by a newer strain of addictive audio pornography ... devised by deaf people!

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

credit where due to CB, apparently that phrase can actually be seen in a newspaper headline or something somewhere in s3

what if robot sex, but too much?

In a dystopian future, an insecure man spends his life's savings to get a cybernetic robot penis installed and becomes a literal sex machine. But then it turns out his lover has been a secret robot sub all along, and his partner long ago left him for another man ... who turns out to be a robot! With a REAL penis! Irony!

Brilliant work by Josh in Chicago in this thread.

Basically, sure, but my love for this series isn't lessened.

I thought we went over all that way back when

Ok I hadn't seen this before. Lol.

Ahead of its time.

now I feel old because all of Black Mirror seems to have aired recently, or at least in the "now," but I guess it did start in 2011

I just watched season 1 episode 1.

"Jane...... please"

Episode 2 sucks

Season 4 coming soon. Episode titles & credits:

“Arkangel”
Cast: Rosemarie Dewitt (La La Land, Mad Men), Brenna Harding (A Place to Call Home), Owen Teague (Bloodline)
Director: Jodie Foster
Written by: Charlie Brooker

“USS Callister”
Cast: Jesse Plemons (Black Mass, Fargo), Cristin Milioti (The Wolf of Wall Street, Fargo), Jimmi Simpson (Westworld, House of Cards), Michaela Coel (Chewing Gum, Monsters: Dark Continent)
Director: Toby Haynes (Dr Who, Sherlock)
Written By: Charlie Brooker & William Bridges

“Crocodile”
Cast: Andrea Riseborough (Birdman, Bloodline), Andrew Gower (Outlander), Kiran Sonia Sawar (Murdered By My Father)
Director: John Hillcoat (Triple Nine, Lawless)
Written By: Charlie Brooker

“Hang the DJ”
Cast: Georgina Campbell (Flowers, Broadchurch), Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders, Green Room), George Blagden (Versailles, Vikings)
Director: Tim Van Patten (The Sopranos, Game of Thrones)
Written By: Charlie Brooker

“Metalhead”
Cast: Maxine Peake (The Theory Of Everything, The Village), Jake Davies (The Missing, A Brilliant Young Mind), Clint Dyer (Hope Springs)
Director: David Slade (Hannibal, American Gods)
Written By: Charlie Brooker

“Black Museum”
Cast: Douglas Hodge (The Night Manager, Catastrophe), Letitia Wright (Humans, Ready Player One), Babs Olusanmokun (Roots, The Defenders)
Director: Colm McCarthy
Written By: Charlie Brooker

Teaser is out..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH85obU350E

Premieres December 29th
https://pitchfork.com/news/netflix-announces-black-mirror-season-4-premiere-date/

still excited for the possibility of a fidget spinner episode