Charlie Brooker's BLACK MIRROR

Seriously. I can't get that moment out of my head now

Calz is right, demon 79 is the best one. As a millennial who grew up in the tmz era, I should have loved e4, but it was the most forgettable.

I liked the idea of e4 a lot but it was lacking … something.

I found Demon 79 the most emotive episode and appreciated the lols with the graphic violence and Anjana Vasan's performance as a "corruptible" downtrodden good person was just perfect.

It was totally great, I was so sold on the ending after the last one was prevented from happening. I suspect you felt the same, calz!

you only had to smash a fucking fascist tory cnut in the heed with a claw hammer!

"no, you're not a knife person ... way too grabby... that's it! your a basher!"

xp lol the minute I saw where the plot was going I started laughing. I liked the period settings for some of these as well, reminded me a bit of the various settings of San Junipero (still a top five episode for me). Wish she’d nabbed the racist colleague but I guess the ending took care of all that. And Brooker not even remotely subtle about “Smart,” lol.

San Junipero is all time for me

In ep 3 I thought the guy with the dead wife would kill the other guy and steal his avatar body permanently so I didnt quite predict it. Still enjoyed it, if a little long-paced. I get there were nods to 2001, but I also felt a little nod to PK Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", but with a robot body rather than the "Can-D" hallucinatory reality?

Holy shit this Loch Henry episode. Still watching. Terrified.

Ok I agree with gyac. I feel very unhappy right now.

The infamous videocassette footage has been in my head all day. Will not leave

Unbelievably disturbing

I actually found it too comic to be disturbing (and NB this is my failing, not a judgement on anyone who found the creepy thing creepy). Like Loch Henry was kind of the B-side to Joan is Awful - one was puerile but funny, the other was puerile disgusting. Like a kid in GCSE English class deliberately coming out with something disgusting to shock teacher. It’s hard to watch these without thinking of Brooker, off-panel, with a speech balloon that says “tee hee!” (That is not a complaint, though.)

All the people at the pub wearing that red mask

I don’t watch a lot of horror so I might not be desensitized enough.

boy does this show love its Chekhov's guns, lol....

Joan is Awful wasn't terrible (though some have said it was 'shitty', yuk yuk), but the big reveal was pretty lame because it's just been done sooooo many times before and as a result, completely eliminated the stakes that previously existed in the episode. I call it the Identity problem, as much like that movie, a lot of the tension dissolves when you realize the main character isn't real

The twist was, you'd never expect that twist because they've done that twist so many times before, but -- twist! -- they did it again

thought I had Beyond the Sea predicted until the green light appeared on the hatch door, then I realized what David had actually done.

found it an effective episode dealing with loss, PTSD, and the unhealthy ways pain can manifest itself when society deprives citizens of outlets for processing trauma

what about Cate Blanchett?

FUCK HER!

What I thought odd about E3 was that after watching his family get brutally murdered - they just expected him to stew up there by himself without much (any?) support and keep working like it never happened.

And maybe I’m just juvenile but I thought Joan is Awful was great.

Joan was good and fun imo

I’m partway through episode 3 and I’m teetering on the edge hoping and hating that this is going to take the obvious turn but Brooker is good at subverting expectations in a way parallel to the first guess at the plot

Yeah re ep3 I was like "where is NASA or whoever's support here?!"

Isn't it set in an alternative 1969 though - back in the dark ages in terms of psychological support etc...

Joan is Awful wasn't terrible (though some have said it was 'shitty', yuk yuk), but the big reveal was pretty lame because it's just been done sooooo many times before and as a result, completely eliminated the stakes that previously existed in the episode

i really enjoyed it - i was just thinking '"oh it's gone a bit conventional, where is the multiverse shenanigans we glimpsed with cate blanchett" when the big reveal came. I know that kind of twist is his stock-in-trade but a) i didn't watch series 4 or 5 at all and ii) that shit is catnip to me and I will never tire of it.

I’ve never watched a Black Mirror should I watch this ‘Loch Henry’? Is there any reason to start from the beginning or whatever?

I think there's a throwaway reference to Loch Henry appearing in the Streamberry lineup of Episode 1, but all the episodes are standalone.
First and last episodes are the most fun, I'd say.

The setting in the astronaut episode is weird. Is it supposed to be alternate 60s/70s where we have replicants and space brain beaming but no cellphones or ebook readers? There were hippies, too?

yeah, though the hippies were the least hippie-like people I'd ever seen, they were pretty much an allegory for an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. not chill at all.

xp were they not a straight up allusion to the Manson family

Yeah they were

lol I knew cult leader guy was a Culkin but couldn't tell which one.

Rory Culkin!

between this role and Euronymous of Mayhem he's got to play a wide range of sons of bitches

definitely didn't peg there being a werewolf episode

lots of my friends are into pegging werewolves

Fuck. This is why I don't watch things like Black Mirror, I think.

If y'all are gonna be watching this show, I feel like it's probably OK to talk about... why I can't watch these shows, or any shows, really.

I was watching _Boyhood_, some years back, because it seemed like an interesting concept, and it was. I'm drawn to the past but I haven't always known why. And then I get to the point where the boy and his mom have to flee an abusive relationship, and I had to stop watching. I didn't know why at the time.

Years later I thought about it again and this time I understood. I was one of the kids left behind. My dad left my mom because she was horribly abusive, tremendously abusive, to him and to us. But he couldn't take us. Because he couldn't take care of us. He knew it. We knew it. My mom knew it, because every time we objected to one of her abuses she'd acidly say that if we didn't like it, maybe we could go live with our _father_.

But I'm curious about things, I read about them, because it's easier than experiencing them firsthand.

Brooker wrote the episode as a reaction to COVID-19 lockdowns in the U.K. during that period. He saw it as an episode about working from home. Hartnett said that a person's soul will "atrophy" if "love and connection" are taken from them, as in David's case. Mara saw that David, Cliff and Lana all experienced isolation.

I know about cabin fever. I know what it does to people. I know what it did to me. Everybody complained about people who didn't comply with "social isolation" as if it was trivial, as if it was a petty thing, and I'm sitting here for years watching the woman I love slowly turn into a monster, become isolated and paranoid and cruel.

I'm supposed to be the crazy one. That's my job. That's always been my job. All my life, though, all my life, the people around me have been trying to steal my job, they do it better and more thoroughly than I ever could. How am I supposed to have low self esteem when all the people I trust turn out to be worse than me? My mom, my childhood best friend, my ex-wife, the other server mods. They all wanted me to be The Crazy One but they can't do that and then do shit that's worse than anything I would ever dream of. It's not _fair_.

And then what she did to me when I tried to leave was...

I don't watch psychological horror because it's too much like my fucking life.

mk2 really really hated the werewolf one.
which is unlike him as he is quite mild mannered.
i thought it was ok until the reveal at which point its 'ooh, right, got it now',
but mk2 was genuinely 'worst episode ever'.
spotted the whole loch henry twist way too early, so expected the video footage.
guess i have watched too many b-movie/psycho horror films.

that said, we both loved the 'beyond the sea', 'demon 79', and 'joan is awful' episodes.
the whole look of the dept store in 'demon 79' was a massive throwback for me.
used to go to a shop in the 70s/early 80s in Skipton calle Rackhams, that looked exactly like that.

initially when they found a video cassette and said "let's see what's on it", that's when I expected some kind of big reveal. when it didn't come, I suspected there was someone else involved besides Iain but figured it might be bartender son.

I did spend half the episode thinking of gibberish words to throw off my own brain from trying to figure it out though because these days I figure out almost every twist early even if I'm not trying and I don't wanna spoil my own fun.

also, re 'beyond the sea' : re the earlier comment about no comms between NASA and the ship.
i took this as a case of they had figured out how to make the necessary link between the ship and their replicas,
but there was no option for audio/visual communication given the early days tech.

also took it to be reflective of some form of neglect on NASA's end. feel like Cliff made some comment suggesting they felt abandoned up there at one point.

I’ve never watched a Black Mirror should I watch this ‘Loch Henry’? Is there any reason to start from the beginning or whatever?

xxp that's got to be wrong because at one point there's a black and white screen showing live footage of the funeral

I'm only a few in, but much of this recent batch seem like commentary, and in the case of the first episode direct commentary, on the content prevalent on streaming services.

Loch Henry is "what if streaming services, but you sickos keep watching true crime stuff and maybe you're bad"

Most episodes of the show are commentary on something. I really despise true crime content creators and audiences so I definitely appreciated it.

Two of may favs not already listed by gyac:
- White Bear
- Hated in the Nation

Oh I actually love Hated in the Nation as well, good shout, I’d watch Kelly Macdonald in anything so I can overlook the MESSAGE aspect of this. White Bear is good but it’s not a favourite because it’s too on the nose.

I suspect most of us have "The National Anthem" as one of our least favorites.

I liked White Christmas a lot, even though it's probably one of the bleakest in the franchise.

Metalhead was a fantastic SF action horror episode imo

I don't think starting with San Junipero is a good idea, it will give you a false reassurance compared to how bleak/brutal some of the rest is!

Demon 79 was fun - and I thought the set design was fantastic. Decent music cues, colouring, furniture/TVs were all drably on point.