Black Mirror S05 E01: Striking Vipers

Striking Vipers is the first episode of the 5th season of Black Mirror.

The episode features best friends Karl and Danny use the video game 'Striking Vipers' as an escape from their day to day lives. The game offers players a chance to choose between a plethora of characters. Danny chooses a ripped male fighter Lance and Karl opts for scantily clad female fighter Roxette.

There is a line in this pre game dialogue between Karl and Danny which shows that Danny is one who has responsibility at the back of his mind and uses the game as a fantasy escape from reality. His tone shows that he is slightly sad, but that is a constant of Danny throughout the episode. It's sad-sad, sad-angry and shows us that he is just resigned to accepting life.

We jump 11 years to Danny's birthday barbecue party. He is now in his late 30s and doesn't seem that into his love life and is searching for excuses to avoid a second child. At this gathering his old friend Karl comes back into his life and his gift is the 'Striking Vipers X' game complete with all the technological upgrades of a decade.

Callister Inc (from the episode USS Calister) has released its technology which allows humans to transfer their consciousness onto the characters they play and even gives them the exact experience their on screen persona is going through. This is like Westworld come real except that here there are no other characters (hosts) apart from the ones you choose to lose yourself in.

They choose the same characters as they did over a decade ago, inhibit the characters consciousness in the virtual world and resume their battles. Then they have virtual sex with each other. It's a heterosexual encounter w.r.t. the virtual characters but the consciousness inhabiting the characters and experiencing the pleasure results in it being a homosexual encounter.

This frequent virtual sex leads to a further decline in Danny's marital life with Theo and she can sense it as she literally asks is there someone else. He forgets important dates and lives each day of his life waiting to get to the time he and Karl's consciousness will meet. And soon he feels guilty and locks the game, but Karl who continues to play reveals to Danny that virtual sex with other characters doesn't feel the same.

Striking Vipers a solid episode which manages to provide a balance between technology, fantasy and a way of escape and real life and responsibilities in keeping the commitments people have made to one another. It focuses on how people consider their virtual in game identities as a projection of their real lives unfulfilled desires and at times they become unable to differentiate between the boundaries of real and virtual.

It speaks about how technology can also be used to satisfy ones intrinsic needs but it's usage in limitation with the consent of all parties is a solution which has benefits for all.

The cast of is one of the best ever ensemble lineups for a Netflix episode and honestly such a line up should be getting much more attention than Miley Cyrus received for her appearance in the third episode of the series. 

Black Mirror S05 E03: Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too

Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too is the third and final episode of the 5th season of Black Mirror. 

The episode features sisters Rachel and Jack who live with their father who is designing a humane replacement to eliminate mice from households. The family has moved to another city and the 2 girls are struggling to come to terms with the loss of their mother. Rachel is gifted an Ashley Too doll on her birthday which spouts out motivational lines resulting in it (a robot doll) becoming a 15-year-olds closest companion and alienating her from other humans in her life. 

Miley Cyrus as Ashley O along with the AI doll Ashley Too

Their story runs parallel with teenage music sensation Ashley O who we see as happy on camera but her off screen persona is a complete contrast. She is under the control of her manager/aunt/guardian who is keen to make money off her niece until she turns 25 and maybe even after that. As Ashley O rebels against her support system (controllers) and refuses to take her pills they are slipped to her over the course of a single dinner rendering comatose. Ashley O is hospitalized and her legion of fans are distraught. 

Technology is used to interpret her subconscious thoughts and shape her preferred crude rock music into pop (because just hiring a ghost writer would be too non Black Mirror right) with the voice recordings taken for the Ashley O dolls serve as the audio for Ashley Eternal (a holographic version of Ashley which kind of makes front row seat demand at concerts to be useless)

When the words Black Mirror flashed on screen at the beginning of the episode and the glass cracked up until this point we had an episode showing us a glimpse into the future of concerts and a possibility of simultaneous concerts as well as the horrific possibility of technology controlling the real pop star. It was a representation of the culture of controlling people for profits and going to any measure to achieve that control. The 'my way or the highway' culture. This is/will be/could be the future and was perfect for an ending. 

But no, the two sets of parallel stories intervene with Rachel's Ashley Too watching a broadcast about Ashley O which causes it to glitch out? Too convenient for the doll to suddenly break out against the limiter installed in it as the siblings find out when they set about to repair it. The beans are spilled and aided by the two sisters the digital Ashley O i.e. Ashley Too goes to set things right and then guess what Ashley O and Ashley Too team up. Are you kidding me?

It seems as though Charlie Brooker has taken to watching and getting heavily inspired by Disney which is where the star of this episode Miley Cyrus made her name as Hannah Montana. 

After watching 'Smithereens' I had big hopes from this episode but rather than end the episode at a proper moment which would have maybe appealed to more fans as well as earned praise for its shorter runtime they chose to give the big star her defining moment in beating the villains. The 'Ashley Eternal' reveal would have worked well without all of the other forced drama. 

In the final credits scene, I was stunned to see Charlie Brooker credited as the writer. Was this uh this..... thing actually written by the brain behind 'White Bear'? 

Just because 'Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too' is part of the iconic 'Black Mirror' series people may start thinking about it and try to interpret various sorts of conclusions. Social media comment sections may be filled with ardent fans debating this stuff. But honestly, if this episode had been the series premiere instead of 'The National Anthem' then Black Mirror would have remained a Channel 4 show and probably ended in the early part of the decade. For now though this would be considered as one of the most disappointing episodes of Black Mirror and possibly be remembered as 'That Miley Cyrus episode.' Quite a shame considering that Miley's performance is one of the better ones of the series. 

Black Mirror S05 E02: Smithereens

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. 

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

Black Mirror: Bandersnach is the first ever Black Mirror movie and is an interactive film experience which offers everyone their own movie. Stefan has to create a video game called Bandersnatch. That's all that is the same.

The film has a run time ranging from anywhere between 35 to 90 minutes. How it ends is completely dependent on you. You have 'complete control.'

Being a Black Mirror film, Bandersnatch will obviously focus on how behaviour is manipulated by technology and how people's actions and thoughts are shaped by it.

Yes, it is possible to watch Black Mirror:Bandersnatch like a traditional movie where you refrain from making a single choice. So then....

Why do we even make that first choice?

If we don't make it, it will be made for us and we will be controlled.

Just like Netflix offering us the choice of 'Next episode' and 'go back' and making the choice of next episode if we refrain from clicking on either of the options, the movie too choses either of the two options if you do not make a choice within 10 seconds. It's not that the two options will remain there until you decide. So we make a choice to be in control, but....

Are we the ones in control, or, is control an illusion?

The film has certain supposed endings which are actually resets. A reset is when you reach an ending and then are taken back to the place where you made the wrong choice. You are taken back to that place in a manner akin to episodic television's "previously on so and so show" type of way. A fast forward from the start. Till.... That choice confronts you again.

Infinite loops are real until we accept that we are being controlled.

The film shows us again that despite having control, we are controlled. At times (based on the path you chose) Bandersnatch proves to be an infinite loop. I was repeatedly given a choice between the same password or symbol. At times i was faced with two televisions with two choices from the past, one was the previously ignored one and the other was 'go back'. At times I'm told stuff along the lines of "try again" or the usual, "wrong choice." I'm in the loop till I make the choice they want me to make.

It's a restart. Like a video game. Like life. It's up to you. You will be a bit more aware than you were the last time. It'll show. Make the right choice or live with what your choices, till you eventually learn that what you chose was wrong, or, you can go back make the wrong choice again and stay in the loop. You chose wrong and are stuck. In the end you need to choose what they want you to choose. Control is an illusion.

Consuming content or consumed by content?

Ideally the first proper ending (not reset) that a viewer reached which led them to the end credits sequence would be the ending they had chosen out of interest. An actual choice. What if the first ending was the perfect ending (not in the game, but perfect on the basis of how we would control our character). I watched 4 endings. But actually, the first one I saw was the perfect one. The second and the third and all the endings are the result of us wanting to see whether the other choice was better. It was us choosing what we didn't choose earlier.

The show gave me the option of going to the end credits, or go back, and I chose to go back. Black Mirror and Netflix obviously knew I would go back. We think we control Netflix as we can choose what we want to watch, when we want to watch it and how many times we want to watch it. But isn't it actually Netflix that is controlling us and attracting us to them, like how the fly is attracted to the sweet scent of the flytrap only for it to be consumed. We know there are five endings and we are desperate to unlock them all And find out what would have been had we chosen differently. Not only with this. We want to know what happens in that new show or movie as well.
We are consumed by the overload of content.

There is too much content online, some of it not even entertaining

The overload of content on Netflix and other platforms and even TV may have been addressed in the show. Why is everything so ordinary. Shouldn't it be spiced up a bit, isn't that what we would do. Do you imagine yourself in extremely mundane situations and at those times you suddenly transform into something and spice up the moment a bit? Isn't that, what would be considered as entertaining? Don't we watch some show and think, "this is how I would spice it up a bit." Yet you watch what you find uninteresting or you have changed your definition of interesting to fit in things that are called interesting. Why? Again. Netflix wants you to choose to watch it. Netflix wants me to watch Bird Box. I am inundated with posts about that movie on my feed.

Different routes may lead to the same goal

At the start we were unaware of th key choices and did doovers on quite a few of the choices only to go down a different road and reach an ending we had already witnessed.
Every single choice made by every single person is different hence every single outcome experienced by everyone is different. And then there are different routes to reach the same place. Many roads. Audiences the world over would behoove from realising this.

Is insanity the key to success?

Does every artist need to be a damaged and destroyed, non conforming being? Do they have to have some dark secrets for then to succeed. Can't they conform or get cured, or even accept and repent and then achieve success. Is every single artist someone who has a dark past?

What's Good?

Netflix may have found the answer to combat piracy. A new form of storytelling and movie watching had been experimented with. Audiences cannot be unhappy with the ending as every ending they discover is a result of their choices. Subtle commentary about technology and how technology are our masters.

What's Bad?

A film is something where we go and watch what unfolds before us and not something where we make the choices. Movies are usually enjoyed when one can focus or maybe watch it with a snack in one hand and a drink in the other. You make decisions in your daily lives, you decide to switch on your laptop or open your phone and log onto Netflix in either device and then that's not the last decision for the next couple of hours as you have to make decisions throughout the movie itself.

I chose an option, I was taken to an ending. And then I went back to my last choice. I chose the other option. Now that choice has somehow resurrected a character I had chosen to take a leap. How is that possible?

Also a time travelling sequence? Really? Atleast the T.A.R.D.I.S. and the waverider are believable time travel devices. But what was used to time travel in this episode was just weird. This is the storyline i didn't buy into. Atleast they didn't mess around with the laws of time travel from popular time travel shows.

Tolerance level of the audience in desperately searching for commentaries of technology will not mask absurd storylines and will alienate the loyal fanbase.

I felt that making your choice viewing was extremely annoying as the screen just freezes for 10 seconds despite me sometimes making a choice within 5 seconds. And the two choice option box popping up constantly on screen spoils the viewing experience.

Who should watch it?

Watch this movie if you want to literally play a movie. Watch it if you got nothing to watch for the next 5 evenings and wish to watch 5 different movies. All you need to do is remember the choices you make so that you can avoid making them on the next day.
If you think Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is that typical two hour entertaining movie which you can watch,laugh about and forget. You probably should refrain from watching it. Bandersnatch is filmed, edited and presented in a way to make us all paranoid, and to make us think, our choices can end up scarring us as well. 

Rating
Just for the first of its kind new format.
3.5/5