Happy Tuesday!  Welcome back to TV Tuesday, today I’m going to be gabbing all about the third season of Black Mirror.

This season has really brought the show into its own. This season really deals with heavy topics, not that past seasons were light, but these topics felt more real and tangible.

So this season starts off with a bit of a strange reality. Everyone survives on ratings. Every interaction someone has with someone, it could be the barista at the coffee shop, to someone passing you by on the street, everyone gives a rating. With these ratings it increases your overall score, based on a five-star scale. The higher your rating, obviously the better off you are.

It’s quite a bizarre reality, but when you think about it, it feels like we’re heading in that direction. Everyone is so obsessed with likes, and follows and ratings on their videos, that living off ratings doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

Our main character Lacie is at a comfortable 4.2, but she aspires for more. The house she dreams of requires her to be at a 4.5 or higher so in order to boost her score she goes to people who already have a high score because their ratings weigh more. Her old best friend, Naomi is among them. When Lacie finds out that Naomi is getting married, Naomi automatically invites her to the wedding, even though the two haven’t spoken in years. To add to that, she makes Lacie her maid of honour. Talk about moving fast, but this will be good for Lacie as all the high rated people will be at the wedding.

Well this wedding is happening now, and Lacie has to get on a plane. This whole plot moved really fast, and I get why they had to do that since this story won’t continue in the next episode so there isn’t a lot of time to really let things play out.

Well when she gets rated badly on the way to the airport this causes her to be declined her flight because she’s not rated high enough for the flight. Talk about drama. Of course she freaks out, and this drops her rating even more. As she struggles to figure out how to get to Naomi, Naomi finds out her rating has dropped and she revokes her invitation, claiming it will ruin her ratings. Lacie is enraged and finds every way to get to the wedding to deliver her speech; and deliver her speech she does. This causes security to get her and put her in a cell.

This is where they take out the rating system from her body (since it’s somehow built in) and she gets into an argument with a man in a cell across from her and it’s refreshing to be a rating free conversation, showing that ratings can’t be everything.

The second episode was actually quite scary. The main character Cooper has left his home in New York to travel the world because he can’t deal with his mother now that his father has died. He ends up in England where things go wrong with his baking information and he needs money. A woman he met helps him find this job testing a video game that alters your reality… reality plays a big role this season.

This video game is supposed to bring all your fears to the forefront. They send him to this creepy mansion for the night, inject the chip into the back of his neck, and monitor him. Only he can see his fears so it starts with these jump scares of spiders and a weird guy he used to know. Soon when he starts to get really freaked out he tells them to stop, and it looks like they are going to take him out, but then they tell him, we can’t get you out and that’s when he starts to lose it mentally.  What we think is him getting out and going home to his mother, is really still part of the game because it shows his worst fear and that’s his mother having Alzheimer’s (which is what his father died from) and forgetting who he is. When his mother does call him on his cell phone this causes an interference in the test and causes him to convulse, said ‘call mom’ and die.

Really morbid, but really scary and makes us think about our worst fears and would we be able to face them if given the chance?

The third episode was probably the best so far. Even though it deals with some very tough subject matters (which isn’t new for the show), this episode they did it so well.

We meet Kenny, a boring teenager who looks like he’s never done a bad thing in his life, well. When he downloads a malware program to fix his infected computer it activates the camera and records him masturbating. He gets an email telling him they will send all his contacts the video. Freaking the fuck out, Kenny does what they ask of him. A first I’m not going to lie I felt bad for this kid, which I’m sure is what was expected of us the viewer. He meets a guy who gives him a package where he has to deliver it and that’s where he meets Hector. Hector is not interested in what Kenny has to say, but when the hackers start to email him, things get really real. Hector’s secret is his infidelity to his wife to a young hooker. If his wife were to find out his life would be over. So the two team up and do everything that is asked of them, that includes stealing a car, robbing a bank, then disposing the car.

Hector is to get rid of the car while Kenny is to drop off the money. Well when Kenny gets there he finds another guy and a drone… the drone is the hackers watching that they fight to the death. This is where we find out that the man watched child porn, and then it’s revealed so did Kenny! And your whole perspective of Kenny changes in an instant. I don’t know if they actually fight to the death, but Kenny has made it out, but does it matter as the hackers release everything they have on everyone. The episode ends on the police taking Kenny away, damn! It was kinda good to see these characters, especially Kenny, be tortured for their crimes because child porn is just a giant no, ugh. This definitely depicted this topic well.