It possible that you may get this notification whilst driving or walking or doing something much more important before the cell phone beeped and alerted you to this. Please ignore this if you are busy with anything. Too late right? You already will have yanked out your phone, glanced at the notification, swiped it out of sight and refocused on your task at hand. Those few seconds of lost focus would be detrimental though. For you or for anyone else, but after the seconds hand completes a 360° journey around the face of the clock do you even remember what you looked at?
'Smithereens' is the 2nd episode of the 5th season of Black Mirror. It targets the present day obsession i.e. our addiction to social media and how evolution has resulted in us not having the self control to shun our desire to reach for our phones when we hear a beep. It also shows us how trivial and uniform our reactions seem to be no matter what the thing we are reacting to. Do we actually care about what happens?
Chris Gillhaney (Andrew Scott) is a cab driver who wishes to speak to Smithereen (a social media platform) founder Billy Bauer. Simple right? Not so. Chris has been planning this for a long time. The episode starts off in a suspicious manner as Chris is waiting for his passenger. Such a thing happening without the passenger uttering a courteous apology about his/her tardiness is very unusual.
What comes off as casual conversation is later on revealed to be a master plan hatched by the driver to achieve his goal i.e. ensure that his feedback reaches the top rather than the feedback option which is read by employees sitting before a screen and providing feedback to a board. He finally gets hold of an employee (intern) and takes him hostage.
Andrew Scott as Chris Gillhaney in the drivers seat with his hostage Damson Idris as Jaden Thomas
The next 40 minutes feature scenes from within the taxi where Chris and Jaden are sitting, the British police officers on the periphery of the field, the FBI and the top brass of Smihereen.
Despite all the key pieces in this episode scattered across 2 different continents there isn't a feeling as though we are randomly jumping from one spot to the other.
When watching this episode most of us would recognise Chris Gillhaney (Andrew Scott) as BBC Sherlock's Jim Moriarty, but as the episode progresses we do not see a single trace of the iconic villain and instead see a person who is frustrated and deeply traumatised but is essentially good at heart.
Andrew Scott had to tap into some really personal trauma to summon up all the facial expressions and the choking voice when with pent up frustration he delivers his lines.
In another monologue he also manages pull off what in the hands of other actors would have been seen as an over the top comedic turn and make the audience actually understand and relate to his frustration at our lifestyle where a beep mechanically draws our hand to our pockets to whip out a device which we unlock without even realising, all this while not stopping what we were doing before.
The regular action and the setting of the scenes in the episode providing the background music makes the audience feel like they are actually there and are part of the action unfolding on screen. The episode catches in the elements of the characters and minor details that lead to absolutely no questions about why something was included which could have cut short the duration by a few seconds despite having a longish run time of over an hour.
A fade out climax after the high drama drives home the key points of the episode once again in case it slipped our mind as audiences began analysing Stockholm Syndrome
Just for he sake of finding a flaw in the episode I'll talk about the abyssmal aim of the British police sniper. He could have moved a bit right, but to miss twice? They need to recruit Euron Greyjoy for that role.
'Smihereens' doesn't touch upon the fact that humans must have self control despite admitting that the applications are designed to be so addictive that it's almost like muscle memory for us to open it on our phones whenever they are in our hands. However, it does focus on other things such as that of our culture of being controlled by notifications for a split second and then not giving a damn about it, it also focuses on topics such as the robotic language of negotiations, the way the human mind has forgotten the importance of memorizing another person's number, the way in which social media can be used to decipher a person's state of mind, the fact that we are broadcasting our true selves to the world and providing the social media giants with every minute detail about ourselves thus rendering anybody a detective as they can just log on and find out anything about anyone, and the evils of social media and minute by minute news in a crisis situation.
This episode has a Black Mirror feel to it but it doesn't feel edgy or offer that sort of shock ending akin to some of the iconic episodes of this series. Smithereens is the saving grace of Black Mirror Season 5. Unlike 'Striking Vipers' and 'Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too' this episode is set in the present day and we can relate to these events as we have gone through them. Maybe not at the extent at which Chris Gillhaney did, but one may have bumped into someone at a crowded place when their phone rang which caused them to look at some nonsense like snapstreak notification or an Instagram notification that someone is going live and honestly how important is all that? Like all the characters swiping their phones and like Billy Bauer flicking his mental switch post the crisis and resuming whatever he was doing, you too will forget about this in about much lesser time than it took you to read and peruse it.
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