Happy Tuesday! The first TV Tuesday of the year! Starting the year off with a new TV show, today I’m going to be gabbing all about the first season of Black Mirror.

I was going to write all the seasons of Black Mirror together in one post because the seasons are so short (3 episodes in one season is crazy!), but I realized I had more to say than I thought I did.

My first thoughts of the show, is what the hell did I first watch. It’s something to get used to. I’m glad I didn’t watch the first episode first because I don’t think I would have continued with the series otherwise. The show has some gruesome and strange plots that leave me sitting here going, why did they have to take it there, but I’ll dig more into that as I talk about each episode.

I like that each episode is its own story and none of the episodes continue, which makes it really easy to watch.

What I also really like about the show is that it’s got a futuristic feel to it and shows how social media really controls our lives. It’s brilliantly done, until it gets weird.

So the shows first episode (which I watched third) is about a princess that has been kidnapped and her captors have made of video asking the prime minister for a ransom, only it’s not money, but for him to have sex with a pig. Like I said, very glad I didn’t watch this first.

Of course the PM doesn’t want to and they have until a certain time to find her and things seem to be looking up.

They take to social media and the news to do a man on the street to ask the people what they think he should do. The majority all say that of course the PM shouldn’t do it because, uhm it is gross.

But as time goes on, they get a severed finger which they are led to believe belongs to the princess, so now the stakes are even higher and time is running out.

Once again they go out on a man on the street and interview citizens about what the PM should do and it’s amazing to see that the mood has shifted so much; now everyone is saying that he should in order to save the princess. Damn!

They find the building in which she was held at one point, but she’s no longer there and it’s just a decoy so things take a turn. Now everyone thinks the PM should do this indecent act to save her life and so it’s decided, he’s doing it.

I didn’t think they would actually go this far, but they do. So not only does he have to have sex with this pig, it has to be aired on live television. What?

The news hopes that people won’t watch, but of course everyone is watching. You just see the PMs head as this is happening, but the noises are bad enough. Talk about disturbing.

In the end, right before he’s about to do the act, the princess gets released in the middle of London and so he kinda does this for nothing. We also learn that it wasn’t her finger, but her captor’s and he ends up killing himself once he releases her.

This really showed how far someone will go with the force of the media. They show a one year later clip and he’s acting like nothing has ever happened, and his wife is all good. But then it turns and you see how she can’t even look at him, again showing the power of media they want to make it seem like everything is all ok. I don’t blame his wife, I wouldn’t want to be her after your husband has had sex with a pig, nope.

The second episode I found hard to stay engaged to. It’s set in this gym where apparently the people who go to this gym also live there. They spend all day working out (I should say riding the bikes) and watching these videos. The more videos they watch; the more points they get. Those points are what is keeping them alive pretty much.

One day the main character, Bing, starts to notice this girl because he hears her singing in the bathroom. He thinks she’s so good that he wants her to enter in a singing competition, but she doesn’t have enough points for it. He has all these points that he inherited from his dead brother and he gives them to her. The two of them go and it’s not anything like she thought it would be. They make her drink this weird drink so she’s not all there. The judges say she’d be better at pornography than singing, and she just accepts it like it’s nothing. Why does this show always have to take it to that level?

Now Bing returns to the gym environment to get points so that he can go back and enter the contest himself. We’re not quite sure why he wants to enter, but it’s later he threatens to kill himself on stage of they don’t listen to him. In the end the judges offer to give him his own show where he gets to rant about the system and how bad it is.

I had a hard time staying invested for this episode, it was all over the place and the way it just ended felt very anti-climactic.

The final episode of the first season, which was the first one I watched, had to do with this whole thing called a re-do. This one is very futuristic and basically every action and thing they do is recorded and they have this remote in which they can use to re-watch and go back if they want to. To be honest that’s a pretty cool thing to be able to do, but I know that I wouldn’t want that in this lifetime. It’s all possible because there is this ‘grain’ behind their ear that records everything.

The main character, Liam, has gone to meet his wife at a house party and when he finds her, she’s speaking with this guy, Jonas. Turns out Jonas is her ex-boyfriend from years ago and he has this whole thought process on this re-do, as in going back and watching old flings as they have sex. This sets Liam’s mind in motion. He keeps looking at the way his wife looks and interacts with her ex (who at his point he doesn’t know is her ex) and he starts to drive himself mad. That’s when the truth comes out that Jonas is her ex. Liam gets so mad that he drives to the other Jonas’ house and beats him up and tells him to stop watching his wife in his re-dos. He threatens his life and makes him delete all memories of her.

He can’t believe he just did all that and goes home. His wife is a little scared and then he wants to know if their child is really his child. The kid is all of 18 months old and he wants to prove it by showing her memories, but she refuses, says they are deleted. He goes great there should be a black hole then, and now she’s really panicking because she thought she got away with it, and now she’s trying to delete the memories in her head, but he’s caught on. He makes her put them on the TV and he wants to watch it. And they do. My gosh so much embarrassment there.

In the end she leaves, and Liam is left alone, so he takes a razor blade to take the grain out of his head. Then the episode ends. I’d love to know what would happen to his life once he takes it out! They leave these episodes so open ended at times that one episode with these characters is sometimes not enough.

For the first season it was well done, if not a little disturbing. It definitely leaves the viewer questioning and wanting to know more.