Happy Tuesday! Welcome back to TV Tuesday, today I’m going to be gabbing all about the fourth season of Black Mirror.
I would let you know how season 4 started, if only I had watched it in the correct order. So Netflix has the past 3 seasons starting with the last episode first, so I figured season 4 would be the same, well that was not the case and so I watched from the last to the first for season four and so I’ll be talking about them in that order.
The first I watched was Black Museum and it starts off slowly. A girl named Nish traveling through the desert and stopping to charge her car she goes to the Black Museum to kill time. This place is run by a guy named Rolo and it’s filled with lot of artifacts that are related to banned pieces of technology that he has been apart of creating.
He goes through and shows her how these devices worked. The first was a device that helped doctors feel the pain of their patients to better help them. Only the doctor they piloted this one went crazy and started to feed off the pain and wanted to be in pain all the time, getting this sick pleasure from it. He went so far as to kill a man. Gruesome, but it gets worse.
The next was a device that he used on a coma patient who was never going to wake up. They were able to transfer her consciousness to her husband who now heard her in his head and felt what he felt, but things started to get real bad when the guy, Jack wanted to move on and so they transferred her to a plush monkey, which then got got rid of it once he grew up, Rolo still has this monkey on display and the woman is still in there. That was just for one, creepy, but also why would you agree to have her implanted in you. I know you’re missing your wife, but that just makes it worse to have someone else in your head.
The last thing Rolo shows her is a hologram of a man, Clayton, a convicted murder, just before his electrocution, the point of having him in his Museum is so that people can have the chance to electrocute him, over and over. That’s when it’s revealed that it’s no coinencedensce that she’s there, Clayton is her father and so she uses the device that took the woman’s consciousness and put Rolo’s in Clayton’s head which forces him to get the last electrocution because the thing explodes but his agony is captured in a keychain somehow. The whole museum turns to flames and she gets out and leaves with her mother, claiming that her father would be proud of her for what she did.
Were they a family of murders? Like what?! We will never know.
Metal head. This episode confused me. It’s hard to tell what’s really going on, and why was it filmed in black and white?
Apparently robotic dogs have turned against humans, or what humans are left and the main character, Bella, is out with a group of people trying to gather supplies. Things don’t go so well because everyone she was with get killed by these dogs. The dogs have these tracking devices that keep getting embedded in her skin that she keeps having to take out. In the end she finds that it’s useless to fight these things, and I’m pretty sure she kills herself.
This was such a strange episode and I had a hard time connecting with the main character and what was happening to her. It was also hard to figure out what was actually happening to her. In the end we see a box of teddy bears and it’s so unclear what that means. Apparently her team were trying to get these bears to give to the survivors. Nothing was really explained very well, so it was more of a mediocre episode.
Hang the DJ. This was a fantastic episode. We first meet our two main characters, Frank and Amy as they meet for dinner for the first time. They both claim it’s their first time, and as the viewer you’re like first time doing what, online dating? Then they agree to see their end date and the viewer is completely confused.
The two have 12 hours together and they both claim that it’s kinda short. Like do they mean the date?!? It was so confusing because that sounds like a long date to me.
So it turns out it’s how long their relationship will last. So every person has this device in which they call Coach, and it pairs them with someone until they reach their perfect pairing.
The two main characters continue to get paired with different people for long or short durations, but none of them are their perfect match. The two can’t stop thinking about each other until one day Amy and Frank get paired together again! This was such a happy moment. They both agree not to look at the end date and they date happily. One day Frank can’t take it anymore and he looks. It goes from 5 years to 3, to 18 months until it’s down to 20 hours. I figured she was going to find out and break up with him, but you can’t break up with anyone in this world. But she finds out, gets mad and the two just ride out the last hours of their relationship.
They miss each other still, and then one day Amy gets a message that she’s matched with her perfect paring. But before that she can see one of her past relationships one last time and of course she chooses Frank, obviously.
The two meet and decide that they’re not going to follow the system anymore that they know they are meant to be together. So they try to run away, and time kinda stops around them. They climb this wall only to be in this digital place that ends up turning into the inside of a dating app! Holy smokes! This was such a clever idea. I throughly enjoyed every moment of this episode. You go from not knowing anything, to rooting for these two to be each other’s perfect match, to finding out that it was them matching in real life. Pretty brilliant.
Crocodile. What an episode. It starts off at a rave, and then we’re to assume that it’s after the rave and our main characters are driving home… only it’s not a good drive home as the guy, Rob runs over someone on a bicycle. The girl, Mia wants to call the cops and obviously Rob does not want to do that so they put the body in a bag and push it down the river.
Flash to 15 years later. Mia now has a family and is a respected woman in the developing market. She’s on a business trip when Rob shows up with all this remorse and wants to go to the police now. She obviously freaks because she’s held on to his secret for years and now has a very good life that could come crashing down. He tells her he won’t mention her, but she knows it’ll still come back to her, so what does she freaking do: she kills the guy! I was not prepared for that turn of events. Let’s just say I wasn’t prepared for any of the turns of events in this episode.
Aside from these two, there is a separate storyline going on with a woman who works for insurance, Shazia. She goes around with this weird machine that she can see people’s thoughts with to help get a better sense of their accidents and how they happened so to better judge them.
At first it really doesn’t make sense why she’s in this episode, she has nothing to do with the main plot, or so we think.
Shazia starts to investigate how this guy got hit by a self driving delivery truck and as she talks and uses their memories one by one, we find out that our main character, Mia was a witness to this accident.
Now Shazia wants to talk to Mia, plus use her mind reading machine. That can only mean bad news for Mia.
Surprisingly Mia lets Shazia inside, I didn’t think she was even going to do that, and she stalls for a long time and tries to get her memories in order, only when she gets set up her mind goes crazy and she starts to think of everything… including the dead guy from 15 years ago. This freaks Shazia out and she wants to leave, but her car stalls. So Mia ties her up in this shed, demanding to know if anyone else knew she was coming here. In the end she just uses the machine to find her husband knew. Well bang, Mia kills Shazia.
Then she gets in the car and she’s supposed to be going to her son’s recital and that’s where I thought she was going- nope! She’s gone to Shazia’s house with a hammer to kill her husband. Ugh! At first I didn’t think she was going to do it and of course she does. Then there’s the couple’s kid who is just a baby. I really didn’t think she would kill the baby, AND THEN SHE DID KILL THE BABY! HOW COULD YOU?! You can tell she’s feeling remorse over it because she’s freaking out at the recital that she does actually go to.
The episode ends with investigators trying to figure out who would do such a thing. We find out the baby was blind, so it wouldn’t have been able to use that mind machine to tell anyone who the killer was, but the best part they can use their mind machine on the pet hamster! Damn!!
So they start to close in on her.
This next episode really shows that some people shouldn’t become parents. The episode starts when this woman gives birth to her daughter; flash forward a few years and she’s taking her daughter, Sarah to the park and Sarah decides to follow a cat and gets lost. Her mother freaks out and decides that maybe she should get this chip planted into her mind. The chip allows her mother to see everything she sees and puts a blur on the bad/or scary things, and lets her mother know when Sarah is in danger or feels pain.
I get it, you want to protect your children, but this is too much.
Although, I have to admit it was good in the sense that it helped when her father had a heart attack, she was able to see it through her daughter.
The episode flashes forward a few more years and Sarah is now in school and she meets a boy named Trick who watches all this bad stuff, but because she has this parental blur on she just sees pixels. He asks her if she’s ever seen blood before and apparently she hasn’t and this has her curious, she she tries to cut herself, which doesn’t do anything because all she sees is pixels and she gets mad. That’s when her mother decides it’s time to turn the blur off. Now it’s Trick who shows her all sorts of bad things.
The show flashes again to her teenage years and it looks like they don’t use her chip anymore, even though it’s still there. Sarah and Trick reunite and he asks her to come with them to some lake. So she lies to her mom about where she’s going, which every teenager does. I also have to preface this by saying I think the two have a good relationship, or what looks like a good relationship, but it’s clear her mother doesn’t trust her daughter.
When Sarah doesn’t return home when she says she will, her mother starts to call around to her friends houses’ to see if she can find out where she is. When no one has seen her, she freaks and gets the tablet that works the chip and she locates her by the lake and when she uses the camera to see what she sees, she sees Sarah having sex with Trick. This devastates her, and who wants to see or know that.
Sarah obviously pretends like nothing happened because she doesn’t know her mom was watching her. She gets together with Trick again and she wants to try cocaine and you can tell Trick is hesitant about it, but he lets her. Of course her mother is watching her again and sees this so she looks up the kid using his face, because apparently they have a way to drag a picture of a face to look someone up. And she finds out where he works and tells him to stay away from her daughter, like it’s all his fault. She doesn’t even put any blame on her daughter.
The two continue to act like nothing is happening. We get this scene where she’s sick during class and obviously our first instinct is she’s pregnant, but the nurse tells her the morning after pill she took (which she really didn’t take) worked and she’s no longer pregnant. That’s when Sarah starts to put the pieces together, why Trick all of a sudden left. She rushes home to check the garbage and there’s the evidence, her mother blended it into her smoothie. She even checks to see if she can find the tablet and she does.
That’s when she completely freaks out and starts bashing her mother in the head with the tablet. She packs a bag and leaves… when her mother wakes up blood all over her head she runs out calling her her daughter, mirroring the beginning of the episode, but showing that all her efforts to protect her daughter were for nothing.
It was a good, yet kinda creepy and definitely an invasion of privacy, but still a good solid episode.
Lastly, I watched USS Callister. This was a very weird episode. It’s about this guy named Robert who is a video game programmer and he’s very good at what he does… just not with people. He’s a loner, and when someone upsets him, or he just doesn’t like the way they do something well their punishment is to end up as a character in the game. Only that’s not meant figuratively, it’s meant literally. He traps them in his Star Trek like game by taking some of their DNA and cloning them so the clone lives in the ‘real world’ while the actual person is in the game. What a weirdo. It gets better because in the game they are forced to obey his every command as he’s their captain who abuses them.
So when this new girl comes to work for the team and she ends up in the game, she revolts and makes all the characters fight against Robert. I’s a race against the clock because Robert isn’t always in the game, but with a little blackmail they manage to overtake him.
It was definitely a strange episode to end on, but the season as a whole was pretty good.
I’m pretty sure there is going to be a season 5, and I can’t wait (or maybe I can, some of this stuff is scary) for it!
Bony's Whimsical Explorations & Reviews
I love Black Mirror! Currently rewatching season 4 with my boyfriend (secretly hoping to make him addicted to it) 😂
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Ha! Good luck with it! I hope he enjoys it 🙂 It’s a great show that really makes you think!
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