Film Review: Black Mirror Series Two
15th
November 2202, 08:21
Time for more Black Mirror goodness, and this time we will be moving on to Series Two!
We have another three stories, all set in a reimagined UK where the prevalence of tech changes lives in the bleakest ways possible. And the horror of it all is, these changes are insidious, with positive developments the most obvious and the less positive aspects all but invisible until it's too late.
The insanely hot Hayley Atwell of Captain America fame is his snarky artist girlfriend Martha, who turns to A.I after his death in a desperate attempt to feel him once again. I found myself surprisingly sympathetic to her struggles.
Claire Keelan as her sister Naomi, who has her own family and is preoccupied with them all the time. She's caring and concerned, but has very little to say.
Sinead Matthews as Sara. She looks a little like Sarah Michelle Gellar who played Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That's how I remember her, anyway. She serves as a plot device to the A.I, signing her up for it and giving her the starter explanation as to how it works. She looks a right mess, by the way.
This is a nice touch. The two of them lived in Ash's grandma's house, and there's this shot of the doorframe being used to measure little Ash's height.
The storyline was good up to the whole A.I angle, where all the data was derived from Social Media. It's an interesting concept. The distinct message is that Social Media only shows a small percentage of what a person is really like. Ash Starmer's public persona was mostly sardonic and funny, but the A.I can't really speak much to his inner, private persona. Ultimately, the copy was hollow.
Generally, the setting is beautiful and serene. It's by a country seaside and all.
Oh yeah, we all knew this was gonna devolve to the sexbot angle at some point.
The ending is a bit of a head-scratcher. So the robot is allowed to live, but in the attic, and Martha's daughter now has some kind of dad?
This episode, quite tellingly, has a very small cast.
Moving on to the next episode... White Bear. This is another utterly dystopian and depressing episode even by Black Mirror's exalted standards.
Things take a turn for the worse when she ventures outside and finds herself in the center of some kind of bizarre hunt. There's a nasty twist at the end when this turns out to be some kind of fucked up reality show.
Tuppence Middleton plays Jem, the ally Victoria encounters during the hunt, who turns out to be messing with her. Middleton didn't do such a great job, really. There was just something really off about how she acted that made me suspect her right from the get-go. Or maybe that's just some really exceptional acting. I can't quite decide.
Michael Smiley is the showrunner Baxter and one of the hunters. He's somehow even more menacing and scary when he's trying to be affable to the audience, than when he's acting like a gun-toting maniac. The accent is pretty fun to listen to, though.
Ian Bonar as Damian, who gets "killed" early. Later on when we see him again, he's pretty matter-of-fact about the job he's doing.
Elisabeth Hopper and Nick Bartlett as the other hunters. They seem to be having a lot of fun in their roles, and really, who wouldn't?
Imani Jackson as Jemima Sykes, the little black girl who was murdered. She's only seen in footage, and she is adorable! Which has the effect of making the crime seem worse, I suppose.
In fact, due to some crime she committed which, in turn due to brainwashing, she cannot recall, she's pretty much the center of a lot of hate at fever pitch.
After that, the scenes are more of the horror of being universally detested - there's no more mystery here.
It's great that little Jemima had a white mother and black father. That's pretty woke and inclusive without being too in-your-face about it.
Ouch. These guys have been repeating the scenario for how many days in a row now?! Victoria must totally stink after that many days of sweating with no time to take a bath!
Making this reality game show about Jemima's white teddy bear is just a devilishly neat touch.
The scenes that come on during the credits, showing everything that went on backstage, really nailed it for me.
It just seems unrealistic that in a three-on-one scenario, with the first hunter tangled up with Damian and Jem having a fire extinguisher with her and Victoria pretty much free to do anything, that they would just leave them there and run. Sure, it was an act, but that's what killed any realism for me at that point.
But the true horror is that the tragedy is being milked for profit. White Bear Monument Park is set up to ostensibly let the public take part in Victoria's punishment, but ultimately this feels like an excuse to cash in on little Jemima's grisly fate. What happens to Victoria, having to relive the terror of being hunted day after day, to finally be confronted by her crimes which she can no longer remember, is nothing short of horrific. Especially since her memory has been repeatedly erased and she's pretty much a clean slate with none of the murderous personality that led her to commit those crimes in the first place. The fact that Baxter and the audience are so self-righteous about it, really underlines the nastiness of Victoria's fate regardless of how horrible her original crime was. Trial by Social Media, anyone?
This episode, The Waldo Moment, is really more about media than it is about tech. Still a fun ride, nonetheless.
Chloe Pirrie is Gwendolyne Harris, the fresh-faced politician. Comes across as a little unsure of herself, and a bit later on, incredibly stupid. I mean, if you're a politician, letting your guard down to a total stranger and spending the night banging him is dumb enough, but letting him know potentially career-ending secrets? Wow.
Tobias Menzies does a fantastic job as Liam Monroe. He's a stuffy and pompous politician, and very unlikeable. But seeing him constantly being Waldo's target is going to make you feel for him, after a while... especially since, in his private moments, it is revealed that he actually does believe in the causes he champions.
Michael Shaeffer as Gwen's Campaign Manager, Roy. Wears that perpetual frown like his life depended on it.
Christina Chong as Tamsin, who seems like a smart independent woman at first, but later acts like the typical yes-woman to Jack.
Jason Flemyng as Jack Napier, Jamie's Manager. He's pragmatic, amoral and gleefully opportunistic. Always looking out for that next hustle.
David Ajala is agent Jeff Carter who wants to make a deal with Jack and "Waldo". He appears only in one scene, but damn, does he steal it!
Pip Torrens as Philip Crane the pundit who interviews Waldo. I like the way he gets discomfited halfway through.
At the end, during the dystopian future depicted, things are a gloomy shade of blue and black.
These mini-Waldos are pretty cute!
"Gwen and Bear It". Love the headline!
The names of the characters seem especially meaningful. "Jack Napier" itself strikes home because it is the name for The Joker's original name in Batman. And seconds earlier during a skit, "Batman" is name-dropped by Waldo. Coincidence? Maybe. But a neat one, if so. Especially when you consider how cynical and nihilistic Jack Napier is. Jamie "Salter" is meaningful too - the character is salty in language and demeanor. For Gwendolyne, what struck me was her last name, Harris. She gets pretty harried later on!
I really love the plot development later on when Jamie discovers that nobody in his audience actually cares about him as a person, and he's very much easily replaced. The lesson being that it's easy to be crude and obviously stand for nothing... but it's also nothing special. Any idiot could do it.
Also, I didn't get why Gwendolyne not actually intending to win the current campaign and just using it to raise her profile, was seen as so objectionable. After all, isn't seeing the big picture and taking the long view a perfectly sensible thing to do for anyone, much less someone running for public office? Like, realistically were they thinking that a relative unknown on the political scene would somehow win her maiden election?
The dystopian ending was a bit too far-fetched for believability. I mean, it was interesting and all, but the cognitive leap was just too much.
Tags
See also
We have another three stories, all set in a reimagined UK where the prevalence of tech changes lives in the bleakest ways possible. And the horror of it all is, these changes are insidious, with positive developments the most obvious and the less positive aspects all but invisible until it's too late.
Warning
Strong language and the ugly parts of human nature acerbated by technology. Also, spoilers. You've been warned!The Premise
The first story is Be Right Back, and it deals with the death of Ash Starmer. An A.I gleans data of his speech patterns and mannerisms from from footage of Ash himself, to create a facsimile of Ash for his grieving girlfriend. This eventually escalates to a physical manifestation instead of just text and audio.The Characters
Domhnall Gleeson as Ash Starmer, a guy who's somewhat addicted to Social Media and is often pretty distracted. The actor later has to play a robotic version of himself, and he does a decent job, I suppose. At least he doesn't ham it up to unbelievable levels.The insanely hot Hayley Atwell of Captain America fame is his snarky artist girlfriend Martha, who turns to A.I after his death in a desperate attempt to feel him once again. I found myself surprisingly sympathetic to her struggles.
Claire Keelan as her sister Naomi, who has her own family and is preoccupied with them all the time. She's caring and concerned, but has very little to say.
Sinead Matthews as Sara. She looks a little like Sarah Michelle Gellar who played Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That's how I remember her, anyway. She serves as a plot device to the A.I, signing her up for it and giving her the starter explanation as to how it works. She looks a right mess, by the way.
The Mood
Other than the original rainy nights, most of this episode takes place in good old country weather - sunny and cloudy. Later on, things get grim and foreboding but it never goes full creep. The music is slow and wistful, and the entire setting is more melancholy than scary.What I liked
This is a recurring theme. Martha checks that Ash is paying attention to her, by saying the most outrageous things. That level of snark!This is a nice touch. The two of them lived in Ash's grandma's house, and there's this shot of the doorframe being used to measure little Ash's height.
The storyline was good up to the whole A.I angle, where all the data was derived from Social Media. It's an interesting concept. The distinct message is that Social Media only shows a small percentage of what a person is really like. Ash Starmer's public persona was mostly sardonic and funny, but the A.I can't really speak much to his inner, private persona. Ultimately, the copy was hollow.
Generally, the setting is beautiful and serene. It's by a country seaside and all.
What I didn't
The entire storyline just got a bit much near the end. Seriously, a full-on sentient robot?!Oh yeah, we all knew this was gonna devolve to the sexbot angle at some point.
The ending is a bit of a head-scratcher. So the robot is allowed to live, but in the attic, and Martha's daughter now has some kind of dad?
Conclusion
Not much to this plot. Just a lot of sorrow, and a heavy and somber atmosphere. I'll be honest - I liked the story a whole lot better before the robot showed up, and from there on, it all got increasingly ridiculous. Honestly, it would have been a nice touch if the robot turned homicidal or something.This episode, quite tellingly, has a very small cast.
My Rating
6 / 10Moving on to the next episode... White Bear. This is another utterly dystopian and depressing episode even by Black Mirror's exalted standards.
The Premise
A woman wakes up with a headache in what appears to be a strange house. She has no recollection of how she got here. The symbol below is shown on all the TV screens she encounters.Things take a turn for the worse when she ventures outside and finds herself in the center of some kind of bizarre hunt. There's a nasty twist at the end when this turns out to be some kind of fucked up reality show.
The Characters
Lenora Crichlow is Victoria Skillane, and boy does she do some fine work here. Her pain, fear and distress are palpable at every turn, and even when I learned what she's done to deserve this cruel and unusual punishment, I didn't stop feeling sympathy.Tuppence Middleton plays Jem, the ally Victoria encounters during the hunt, who turns out to be messing with her. Middleton didn't do such a great job, really. There was just something really off about how she acted that made me suspect her right from the get-go. Or maybe that's just some really exceptional acting. I can't quite decide.
Michael Smiley is the showrunner Baxter and one of the hunters. He's somehow even more menacing and scary when he's trying to be affable to the audience, than when he's acting like a gun-toting maniac. The accent is pretty fun to listen to, though.
Ian Bonar as Damian, who gets "killed" early. Later on when we see him again, he's pretty matter-of-fact about the job he's doing.
Elisabeth Hopper and Nick Bartlett as the other hunters. They seem to be having a lot of fun in their roles, and really, who wouldn't?
Imani Jackson as Jemima Sykes, the little black girl who was murdered. She's only seen in footage, and she is adorable! Which has the effect of making the crime seem worse, I suppose.
The Mood
The paranoia has been ratcheted up to unreal levels during this entire episode. When Victoria is being hunted by masked killers, there's shades of The Purge coupled with the ridiculous sight of people recording all this footage on their cellphones. It's unknown who is actually on Victoria's side, until the final moment where it's revealed that nobody is.In fact, due to some crime she committed which, in turn due to brainwashing, she cannot recall, she's pretty much the center of a lot of hate at fever pitch.
After that, the scenes are more of the horror of being universally detested - there's no more mystery here.
What I liked
The setup is so chilling, OMG. These shots of victims being strung up on trees is so macabre.It's great that little Jemima had a white mother and black father. That's pretty woke and inclusive without being too in-your-face about it.
Ouch. These guys have been repeating the scenario for how many days in a row now?! Victoria must totally stink after that many days of sweating with no time to take a bath!
Making this reality game show about Jemima's white teddy bear is just a devilishly neat touch.
The scenes that come on during the credits, showing everything that went on backstage, really nailed it for me.
What I didn't
That White Bear symbol looks like a Tetris block and really serves no purpose whatsoever. Ostensibly it was the same tattoo on Victoria's boyfriend's skin and used as the symbol for this hunt, but I wonder if the show would have been better without it.It just seems unrealistic that in a three-on-one scenario, with the first hunter tangled up with Damian and Jem having a fire extinguisher with her and Victoria pretty much free to do anything, that they would just leave them there and run. Sure, it was an act, but that's what killed any realism for me at that point.
Conclusion
This episode does so much with a small main cast and an hour's running time. Like the last episode, there's almost zero humor in this one, but fuck it, it doesn't need any. The story spun around this extremely nasty punishment is masterfully done. It also manages to poke fun at the Bystander Syndrome, that phenomenon where people tend to just take cellphone footage of people in trouble, without even trying to help.But the true horror is that the tragedy is being milked for profit. White Bear Monument Park is set up to ostensibly let the public take part in Victoria's punishment, but ultimately this feels like an excuse to cash in on little Jemima's grisly fate. What happens to Victoria, having to relive the terror of being hunted day after day, to finally be confronted by her crimes which she can no longer remember, is nothing short of horrific. Especially since her memory has been repeatedly erased and she's pretty much a clean slate with none of the murderous personality that led her to commit those crimes in the first place. The fact that Baxter and the audience are so self-righteous about it, really underlines the nastiness of Victoria's fate regardless of how horrible her original crime was. Trial by Social Media, anyone?
My Rating
9.5 / 10This episode, The Waldo Moment, is really more about media than it is about tech. Still a fun ride, nonetheless.
The Premise
Waldo is an animated character, a blue bear, voiced and controlled by Jamie. Waldo is crude, rude and obnoxious - and he's a huge hit. Things escalate during the election where Waldo is deployed to harass a local politician for ratings. And later Jamie finds out, to his dismay, that the character of Waldo has grown beyond his ability to manage.The Characters
Daniel Rigby plays James "Jamie" Salter as a scruffy alcoholic who believes in nothing, and Waldo is an extension of that nihilism. The character comes off as extremely bitter, and there's a nasty side to him we see later on.Chloe Pirrie is Gwendolyne Harris, the fresh-faced politician. Comes across as a little unsure of herself, and a bit later on, incredibly stupid. I mean, if you're a politician, letting your guard down to a total stranger and spending the night banging him is dumb enough, but letting him know potentially career-ending secrets? Wow.
Tobias Menzies does a fantastic job as Liam Monroe. He's a stuffy and pompous politician, and very unlikeable. But seeing him constantly being Waldo's target is going to make you feel for him, after a while... especially since, in his private moments, it is revealed that he actually does believe in the causes he champions.
Michael Shaeffer as Gwen's Campaign Manager, Roy. Wears that perpetual frown like his life depended on it.
Christina Chong as Tamsin, who seems like a smart independent woman at first, but later acts like the typical yes-woman to Jack.
Jason Flemyng as Jack Napier, Jamie's Manager. He's pragmatic, amoral and gleefully opportunistic. Always looking out for that next hustle.
David Ajala is agent Jeff Carter who wants to make a deal with Jack and "Waldo". He appears only in one scene, but damn, does he steal it!
Pip Torrens as Philip Crane the pundit who interviews Waldo. I like the way he gets discomfited halfway through.
The Mood
It's the big-city vibes. Vibrant, noisy and colorful.At the end, during the dystopian future depicted, things are a gloomy shade of blue and black.
What I liked
The white board showing the plans of the team elicited a snicker.These mini-Waldos are pretty cute!
"Gwen and Bear It". Love the headline!
The names of the characters seem especially meaningful. "Jack Napier" itself strikes home because it is the name for The Joker's original name in Batman. And seconds earlier during a skit, "Batman" is name-dropped by Waldo. Coincidence? Maybe. But a neat one, if so. Especially when you consider how cynical and nihilistic Jack Napier is. Jamie "Salter" is meaningful too - the character is salty in language and demeanor. For Gwendolyne, what struck me was her last name, Harris. She gets pretty harried later on!
I really love the plot development later on when Jamie discovers that nobody in his audience actually cares about him as a person, and he's very much easily replaced. The lesson being that it's easy to be crude and obviously stand for nothing... but it's also nothing special. Any idiot could do it.
What I didn't
Jamie's motivation for ruining Gwendolyne's career just seemed a little too petty. I mean, a woman doesn't call you after a one-night stand because she's in the middle of an electoral campaign - an absolutely valid reason, by the way - and somehow that's justification for humiliating her on live TV?! Weird.Also, I didn't get why Gwendolyne not actually intending to win the current campaign and just using it to raise her profile, was seen as so objectionable. After all, isn't seeing the big picture and taking the long view a perfectly sensible thing to do for anyone, much less someone running for public office? Like, realistically were they thinking that a relative unknown on the political scene would somehow win her maiden election?
The dystopian ending was a bit too far-fetched for believability. I mean, it was interesting and all, but the cognitive leap was just too much.
Conclusion
This episode was a study of the ugliness and stupidity of the human collective consciousness. Not much about tech, at all, but no less impressive in terms of execution.My Rating
7.5 / 10Final thoughts on Black Mirror Series Two
Series Two, for me, was a step down from Series One. Series One was consistently good throughout whereas Series Two hits the high notes with White Bear and kind of tamps it down with Be Right Back and The Waldo Moment. Doesn't stop this from being a fantastic concept, and definitely looking forward to Series Three!Series Two was pretty... bearable!
