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.

    • cosecantphi [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      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.

    • cilantrofellow [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      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.

          • StolenStalin [comrade/them,they/them]
            ·
            4 years ago

            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.

                • ToastGhost [he/him]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  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.

                    • ToastGhost [he/him]
                      ·
                      4 years ago

                      none of that makes any sense, less thesaurus words and more words off the back of a cereal box pls.

                      What i think youre saying is that conciousness doesnt really exist, and it just a trick our minds play on ourselves. And to that i say its just way too philosophy brained for it to have any real world application, especially in the original context of helping terminal patients. How does it help someone who is dying if someone who shares all of their memories and their personality if theyll just die in a couple weeks? Sure it may be helpful to family both emotionally and materially if they were dependant on the person who is dying, but it doesnt help the actual person, the one who persists after the process. Hey healthy me, be good to my family and have a nice life, then flatline. That one is dead, they were a living, feeling person who died, all that was accomplished is they gave birth to a very similar person to themself, but they still experienced death and now theyre gone forever.

                      just cut pasting someone isnt really them, since the paste is the same whether it was a cut paste or copy paste. it all feels like immortality cope. Yeah i wish it were that easy, and its the kind of immortality scifi often portrays because its the closest to being possible with our current technology, but perhaps a different way would remove some doubt as to whether you actually survive the process. Your brain is continuously rewiring, connecting and disconnecting neurons, all day every day in situations no one would believe to be your death or disappearance. Perhaps if you give your brain access to new neurons, perhaps synthetic, nanotechnology of sorts with more resillience that biological neurons, your brain could by its natural process of rewiring integrate those into your brain, while disconnecting the dying biological neurons, with time, your brain would be entirely constructed of synthetic neurons, which would allow for further integration with synthetic bodies, as they were designed by humans and thus fully compatible with a brain to machine interface. If the mind copy you describe is like crashing a program on one computer, then starting that same program on another computer, this gradual neuron replacement method is like plugging in a big new stick of RAM, then letting running programs move their processes over onto the new RAM uninterrupted, and disconnecting the old broken ram only when it has become completely unutilized.

                        • ToastGhost [he/him]
                          ·
                          4 years ago

                          So its just last thursdayism pretty much? still not quite understanding. This just has so little application to real life, no one thinks of their yesterdays self as dead, and if your position is that no one really exists, then why even care? why be a communist if no one exists and people dont matter?

                          You claim its "the best explaination" but its still a pretty dogshit one. I just say IDFK, and so does everyone else.

                            • ToastGhost [he/him]
                              ·
                              4 years ago

                              oh so this is like an existentialist thing, never really understood that stuff, had to read the stranger in high school and the book bored the fuck out of me, all i got from it is hes a bitter sociopath with racial hatered for arabs. Ive kinda perceived stuff like sartre and other weird hyper-philosophy like nihilism as radlib, and felt they take the pain capital causes and spin it into some cosmic unfairness we have no power over, when really we do.

                              So at the end of the day, im not gonna put my head in a people cloning machine :anprim-pat:

                • meme_monster [none/use name]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  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.

                    • meme_monster [none/use name]
                      ·
                      4 years ago

                      The point is that an exact copy of me from another universe is not me, ergo an exact copy of me in this universe still isn't me.

                        • meme_monster [none/use name]
                          ·
                          4 years ago

                          If the self is just emergent behavior does that just make us all p-zombies then? If I kill my copy is it murder? If my copy kills me should society be indifferent? Can my family even get upset over it?

          • carbohydra [des/pair]
            ·
            4 years ago

            I saw it more as "heaven is a place on earth", how utterly banal and hopeless the Heaven they created was

        • glk [none/use name]
          ·
          4 years ago

          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.

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      San Junipero is one of the worst episodes of anything I have ever watched

      Why do you say that?

        • joseph [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          it's only a happy ending if you think having your brain uploaded into a megacompany's supercomputer is a good thing.