The National Anthem = 10
15 Million Merits = 20
The Entire History of You = 13 (+1)
Be Right Back = 7 (-1)
White Bear = 7
The Waldo Moment = 3
"Be Right Back" has terrific acting, but the movie, Her, said more and delivered the hard-hitting ending that Black Mirror didn't. As novel as the idea is of reconstructing a loved-one who has passed on, it is not a phenomenon that would persist like the horrors raised by the other episodes. Black Mirror is most successful when examining inevitable scenarios or parodying contemporary ones.
"15 Million Merits" is the exemplary episode, but "The Entire History of You" is, for me, very much its equal. Both give us an amplification of what is currently happening with technology, but from very different angles. "15MM" presents a society suffocated in technology that does what we once thought too audacious for society to permit - a lesson we have learned through the internet, which delivers a constant feed of free porn while having evolved into a subliminal delivery service for well-dressed propaganda. While adding new hooks to this frequently-grappled subject, "15MM" dramatizes the moral and philosophical dilemmas without pulling punches.
"The Entire History of You" takes surveillance technology and memory storage to an engaging extreme. While almost as unlikely as masses being swept up in reviving lost love ones, this episode won me over by its novel examination of how video recording hardware being wired into human heads - with the eyes as camera lenses - could provide so many means of interpreting one's own life, and shoot past the morass of subjective memory with cold, reliable data. This type of bioengineering isn't far from what Stephen Hawking warns we must do to keep up with computers before they hit that moment of singularity.
reply
share