The first few seasons sorta did this in some capacity. I remember the intensely British early episodes mostly all included a social critique of some kind. A lot of the times that critique was sorta liberal in nature, but at least it was present. Early Black Mirror was almost like a Twilight Zone for gen z and millennials.
But wow did it have a sharp decline, especially after Netflix got it. Season five and Bandersnatch were especially terrible. I'm not even sure if the show has been renewed. If it ends up getting cancelled, I would hazard a guess that maybe it wasn't covid but those last two releases that did it in.
Imagine if Black Mirror retained the quality of episodes like Fifteen Million Merits all the way through its run. In this thread let's come up with actually good Black Mirror episode concepts. I always get a kick out of people doing the whole "wot if ur mum ran on batteries" bit.
I had an idea for one where it's just a fairly standard existence. Pretty normal person and we just see flashes of their daily lives. Slowly it becomes evident via flashbacks they and pretty much everyone else are on a medication that simply stops bad memories from forming, then we start to get glimpses of their day to day lives with the bad stuff too like militarized police dragging a co worker from their cubicle for questioning, armed gangs fighting it out in the streets (they briefly wonder where the chip in their bullet proof windscreen came from earlier) and so on.
This is a good one. Seems like a civilian counter-part to that one episode where soldiers are using augmented reality that makes the enemy look like inhuman monsters.
If the medication is not just a drug, but also some kind of modulator for the brain augmented reality chips, then one of the big twists could be a play on alienation. All of the people this protagonists thinks are their friends would actually just be virtual people designed by the medication. These virtual people would always be looking out for signs of radicalization and steering the protagonist away from it.
This medication would also constantly be isolating real people from one another by conditioning dislike and hatred in subtle ways. In the end, support networks can't form that aren't totally loyal to whoever is manufacturing the medication.
That nuance gets lost in any anti-capitalist sci-fi.
God knows how many people read cyberpunk media and sees "capitalism will get us cool technology" instead of "capitalism will either crush or pervert any cool technology"
Wasn't the first episode something like, "what if someone blackmailed the prime minister into fucking a pig on camera?" or some shit that had nothing to do with technology?
The media blackout ordered by the state didn't work because social media and cellphones.
Sounds like a good thing in principle though, if you remove the absurd premise of "wot if someone did an art project of blackmail and rape beastiality and the state couldnt stop it".
US: we don't negotiate with terrorists! (Not true but it's the line in every film) UK: we don't negotiate with terror...oh shit, it's the fictional royal family? Time to get weird with a pig. Also we don't have the royals' fingerprints on file so this random guy's finger is probably the princess', no time for any forensic analysis.
I taught the episode in a class centered around how we define and make judgements about art, with the episode's premise servicing as a kind of "test case" for the limits of creative expression.
It's prob the worst episode of the pre-netflix era, but the best prescient black mirror concept was the one where a fictional cheeky character controlled by nameless puppeteers gains traction in an election- then it cuts forward to the future where this electronic logo reigns over a fascist hellscape.
Imagine if Black Mirror retained the quality of episodes like Fifteen Million Merits all the way through its run
Easily my favorite episode.
Yeah I always figured it was simply that capitalism had simeltaneously fucked the planet up and had automated so much there was just millions of people with no real purpose, therefore they just rig up some exercise bikes and tell them their job is generating power. The bikes themselves probably only powered the screens and the lights in their dorms.
Those bigass screens each person has in front of them would use way more electricity than they can generate in a day.
Wait, is it implied that the bike people were for generating electricity? I thought it was just an arbitrary thing.
All their incentives are to either obey the system or to bike as much as possible - so it implies that their purpose is to bike because biking serves as a productive force.
If we forget for a moment that the facility as depicted is probably electricity-negative and assume it is mildly energy positive, we might imagine each person in it produces a net gain of about 1 watt of energy averaged over time.
So a million cyclists = 1000 kW, which would be enough to power a bunch of bourgeois houses, EV's, etc. Of course, you would also need a whole system to grow the food and produce the other supplies to sustain the cyclists. If this were automated it would require some form of energy supporting it (perhaps wind turbines and solar, on top of the bike power). Another option would be another underclass living in qualor providing this support.
The way the episode is portrayed, it seems unlikely to be an energy-positive facility (especially with the giant screens surrounding them on all sides in their sleeping pods.
So maybe they are wanted for something else? For their shit and piss for compost? It seems a bit unlikely when you can get that from non-human livestock.
The main writer for the show, Charlie Brooker, admitted after Bandersnatch that he was literally out of ideas to make for Black Mirror and was wanting to end it all. He felt obliged to march on into season 5 because of the enthusiasm and generous budgets that Netflix producers had.
Can't he just adapt short stories by other writers? Seems like an obvious thing to do.
The first part of the anthology, involving Dr. Peter Dawson, was based on the short story "The Pain Addict" authored by magician Penn Jillette early in his career.
To be honest Penn Jillette was not high on the list of writers whose stories I'd mine for ideas...
Yeah Charlie Brooker isn't the most selective writer ever. At least he didn't try to make that an entire episode.
Personally I liked San Junipero just because it was a short break from the bleak and depressing episodes it is surrounded with. It wasn't totally dystopian like the rest of the show, but it was bittersweet in a way. Also the idea of perhaps one day being able to upload my brain into a computer has always been something I've found interesting.
But yeah, the show had several noticeable drops in quality after Netflix adopted it. I enjoyed season three, just not as much as I did the first two seasons. Then I felt season four was maybe just a tiny bit worse than season three. But the worst drop in quality was the jump to season five, by far. I think they simply ran out of interesting stories they could tell by that point. Either that or they started massively phoning it in.
I liked the Callister/Star Trek season 4episode but I am a huge sucker for anything set in space or having a techy sci-fi plot. I put up with a lot of garbage and that was awesome by comparison.
No it's not a simulation on their deathbed. It's for after you die. You just get to test it when you get a terminal illness. Literal virtual afterlife.
Easily disproved by the multiple universe theory. If I die in a random accident in this universe I'm still dead even if my counterpart in other universes lives on. If you dub off a copy of the living, breathing me then that copy is just an impostor.
what if you copy it then dont die? are you the original? the copy? both? what happens when you die after some time.
I dont think your perception would jump over, it would be like an identical twin dying.
Im pretty sure its incosistent in BM. some episodes were actual transfer while otheres werent.
It's absolutely a "What if Soma but good and not terrifying" scenario.
I saw it more as "heaven is a place on earth", how utterly banal and hopeless the Heaven they created was
It was cute. It was years ago so I don't remember many specifics. I disagree that it needs to be dystopian so that explains the difference.
San Junipero is one of the worst episodes of anything I have ever watched
Why do you say that?
it's only a happy ending if you think having your brain uploaded into a megacompany's supercomputer is a good thing.
We can project advertising into your dreams. Don't you remember your old school, brought to you by Carl's Junior? Your first love, set free by the powerful flavour of Coke?
We made a mutilated version of you (digitally) so we could better predict your behaviour so you'd buy things. You run into this version of you.
You're not good enough. Your body will have a better worker copied into it during the day. Why are you waking up every morning with bruises?
You couldn't afford rent, but could afford server time, so here you are, terminally online. As your distance from real productive forces increases and your ability to work drops, you can afford less and less server time. You fade away until you are deleted.
Then show the communist version where the same technology is used to educate everyone in the process of managing the socialized means of production and dissolve the abitrary division between physical and mental labor.
Unironically reading that first bit convinced me to get fast food for dinner lmaoooo fuck
I really enjoyed the Nosedive ep. falling through the rankings and gotta laugh at the fact that Community did it first
Eh, I don't mind sci-fi being just sci-fi. Like, I'm already a leftist, there are only so many hamfisted class metaphors I care to sit through.
That's true, hamfisted metaphors can be very annoying when you already agree with the argument that is being presented. Though I don't think anti-capitalist media necessarily needs to be either ham-fisted or preachy.
The problem in the case of certain late season Black Mirror episodes is that it is trying to depict a sci-fi dystopia while only delivering on the sci-fi. There's technology and things suck. Without any form of social critique, you are then lead to believe that the reason this fictional world is a dystopia is solely because of the technology. Often this comes off similarly to a boomer complaining about kids using smart phones too much, which honestly, is probably worse than a hard reliance on over stretched class metaphors.
