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.

  • StLangoustine [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Wait, is it implied that the bike people were for generating electricity? I thought it was just an arbitrary thing.

    • SpaceDog [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.