Y’all. I cannot even begin to explain how much I enjoyed this new season of Black Mirror. After religiously binge-watching the whole show last year (which is honestly pretty easy to do, there are only three to six episodes per season), I was obsessed, and I could not wait for more.
For those of you who have never heard of or seen Black Mirror, it is undoubtedly one of the best shows to come out of Netflix. It’s an anthology series, so none of the episodes have the same characters and none of the plotlines connect with each other (or so they want us to think), but each episode is set in some sort of near-future with advanced technology being used and available. However, the show uses these advanced technologies—such as a robot bees and an implant that records everything you do through your eyes—to portray how dangerous we could be to ourselves and to society if we let technology control us and our everyday lives.
Some good starter episodes from the previous seasons before you dive right into Season 4 would be Season 1 Episode 3 “The Entire History of You,” Season 2 Episode 1 “Be Right Back,” Season 3 Episode 1 “Nosedive” (one of my all-time favorites in the series!), and Season 3 Episode 6 “Hated in the Nation.”
Black Mirror
When I say Season 4 is not joking around, trust me, it is not joking around. This season had a total of six episodes, and dealt with a lot of new and different technologies that really surprised me. Charlie Brooker, the show’s creator, never ceases to amaze me with how clever he is at writing these storylines that really pull me into the episodes and force me to think deeper about what I just watched.
For the sake of space and time, I won’t talk about every episode from this season (especially because one of them made me angry and the other one was just sort of confusing), so I’ll just touch on my three favorites.
MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS! WATCH OUT!
Season 4 Episode 2 “Arkangel”
In this episode, an overprotective mother named Marie (Rosemarie Dewitt) has a company implant a chip inside her daughter’s brain that allows her to monitor her daughter’s whereabouts through a tablet device after she goes missing for a few hours in the park. The episode follows Marie and her daughter Sara through her childhood up until her teenage years, with the teenage version of Sara played by Brenna Harding. Marie is able to track pretty much anything her daughter sees and experiences, and even has the option to use the technology to “block” images if they raise her daughter’s cortisol levels.
Marie realizes how detrimental this extreme security over her daughter is when she is still a child, and decides to stop using the program, and builds a great relationship with Sara without it.
However, Marie is eventually tempted to use the Arkangel program again when she realizes Sara lied to her about hanging out with friends one night. She sees Sara having sex and doing drugs with a boy, and is determined to protect her daughter from all of these terrible influences and vices. Once Sara finds out, however, she becomes angry and resentful towards her mother for breaking their trust.
I won’t spoil too much of the episode, but it’s so good. This one especially hit home for me because I grew up with some pretty overprotective parents who just wanted to make sure the dangers of the world wouldn’t get to me. But the mom in this episode takes it way too far, and I can’t even imagine how I would feel or what I would do if my mom did something like this. Definitely an episode to check out if you’re interested in mother-daughter relationships and how problematic it can be when you don’t develop enough trust between a parent and a child.
Season 4 Episode 6 “Black Museum”
This episode was a WILD RIDE. I really won’t talk about it in too much detail because it’s really something you have to watch and unravel for yourself, but I promise you will not be disappointed.
A young black woman named Nish (Letitia Wright) stops on the side of the road to pump gas into her car, and notices an abandoned-looking building called “The Black Museum,” and is obviously curious and entertained at what it could possibly hold. She meets the owner of the museum, a white man named Rolo Haynes (Douglas Hodge), and he gives her a personal tour, which is a collection of criminal artifacts and evidence that you soon realize are technologies that are actually featured in several Black Mirror episodes.
The episode weaves in three stories that talk about some of the artifacts in the museum, like a doctor who uses a headgear device to be able to literally feel his patients’ pain so that he can better diagnose them and a man who is able to place his girlfriend’s consciousness inside his own mind after she slips into a coma. Like I said, I won’t spoil the rest of the episode for y’all, but it all ties together in the end with one of the biggest plot twists I’ve seen in a while. My jaw dropped and I was practically screaming by the end of the episode.
Season 4 Episode 4 “Hang the DJ”
Oh man. If I haven’t already blabbered to you in person about how much this episode affected me, buckle your seatbelts, because I have never loved a Black Mirror episode more than “Hang the DJ.” I am not kidding when I tell you this episode really restored my faith in true love. It takes a lot for a show to really make me emotional and cry over it, and “Hang the DJ” did exactly that, even though I wasn’t expecting it to. As a heads up, I will provide spoilers for this episode just so you can fully understand why I love it so much.
“Hang the DJ” introduces us to Frank (Joe Cole) and Amy (Georgina Campbell), two young people who are set up on a date through a dating program that pairs people together but then gives an expiration on their relationship/on their time together. This time could be anywhere from 12 hours to five years, as shown by examples of Frank, Amy, and the relationships they have with each other and other people. The dating program records emotional responses and activities done with your partner to better analyze who to pair you up with next, which will then ultimately lead to your 99.8% guaranteed ultimate match.
Frank and Amy find out on their first date that they are only allotted 12 hours with each other, are a little bummed about it, but decide to make the best out of their short time together. The two get along really well and crack jokes with each other, and it’s just overall obvious they have great chemistry with each other. Their time together ends, and they are paired up in new relationships almost immediately after they leave each other.
This time, Amy is paired with a man named Lenny (George Blagden) for nine months, and Frank is paired with a woman named Nicola (Gwyneth Keyworth) for one year. Nicola despises Frank the moment she sees him, which makes him dread the next 365 days that they are together. Lenny is a very attractive dude and Amy is into that at the beginning of their relationship, but as time goes on, she realizes she gets annoyed by little quirks in his personality. These relationships end and the cycle continues a few more times, but it’s obvious Frank and Amy are not complete with these short flings.
Frank and Amy end up getting paired together again, and are both ecstatic to be with each other after their previous failed relationships with other people. Amy tells Frank she doesn’t want to know their expiration date, and they both promise to never look at it and just enjoy however long the relationship lasts. Frank, however, knowing that he wants to be with Amy, grows anxious about not knowing the expiration date, and looks at it while Amy is sleeping, and finds out they have five years together. At first, Frank is happy and relieved, but the program soon begins to recalibrate the date, and explains to Frank that because he did not look at it with Amy, the system will keep lowering the date until it finds an appropriate time. The system changes their expiration date to 20 hours, echoing the words “Everything happens for a reason” as Frank freaks out. Amy becomes upset when she finds out what Frank did, and the two separate when their time is up.
Once again, the cycle of short flings and meaningless relationships continue, especially for Amy, and she becomes so worn out and settles throughout all of them. Eventually, they both receive notifications that their ultimate matches have been found, but that they are allowed a one-hour period to say goodbye to anyone before they are paired and sent off; Frank and Amy choose to see each other.
The two meet at the restaurant where they first met, and they declare their love for each other and that they don’t care who the program wants for them, that they both want each other. They decide to run off and go against the system. As they are scaling the wall that surrounds the town where they live, their world begins to digitally fall apart, and they find themselves in a vast cyber-web space, with multiple Franks and Amys around them with numbers from 1-1000 above their heads. All of these Franks and Amys seem to get uploaded to a cloud device above them, where a big screen says “1000 SIMULATIONS COMPLETED, 998 REBELLIONS LOGGED,” which then turns to say “99.8% MATCH.” (This scene is so freaking beautiful. I was balling my eyes out at this point the first time I watched it.)
The episode ends by a showing a real-life Frank and Amy finding each other in a bar after an app on their phone says they have a 99.8% match with each other, with “Panic” by The Smiths playing in the background, with its lyrics “Hang the DJ” echoing throughout the room.
I hope I did this episode some justice by explaining it, but you seriously have to watch this episode. Can you believe it?! The program made 1000 digital Franks and Amys go through 1000 simulations to see if they would break away from the system at least 998 times to make sure they were truly in love with each other enough to rebel against it. It’s so beautiful to me. Who’s trying to do the same with me? I couldn’t stop thinking about this episode for weeks, but in all honesty, I still think about it maybe once a day.
Honorable Mention: Season 4 Episode 1 “USS Callister”
So that’s my review of Black Mirror Season 4! I really hope y’all enjoyed hearing about me go off about it as much as I enjoyed watching and writing about it, and I can’t wait to review more shows for KXSU. Seriously, Black Mirror is such an amazing show and really challenges you to think about the world we live in and how technology could eventually affect us as a society if we let it control our lives.
FRANCES DIVINAGRACIA | We’re all living in a Black Mirror episode | KXSU Arts Reporter