![]() "Millicent Barnes, age twenty-five, young woman waiting for a bus on a rainy November night. This was done during the Summer of 1961 as to help the season one shows fit in with the new look the show had taken during the following season. In the future of Black Mirror, technology has set us, which is to say we have set ourselves, a perfect trap.This is one of several episodes from season one with its opening title sequence plastered over with the opening for season two. ![]() What they reveal of human nature is not new but newly captured. The stories set archetypal human dilemmas-death, identity, fidelity-within an entirely new context, which is exactly how we are living them. There are high-handed moments and a schematic quality basic to its project, but overall the show is earnestly and intelligently, imaginatively engaged with its times, which makes it-ironically, given the central indictment of spectatorship-hard to look away. What’s caught in its dark reflection might look a lot like you. Which can make Black Mirror pretty tough to watch. Instead he shows it already at work in ordinary lives rather than extraneous, the details are treated as lesser points of something inevitable. He does so without going into background or functional detail about the conceit itself-who developed the technology, and why or how it really works. Elsewhere, Brooker takes current technological and social media trends to eerie and occasionally sickening extremes. “The National Anthem” and another politically flavored episode, “The Waldo Moment,” about a blue, animated, gremlin-like pundit’s role as both product of and participant in a debased political process, take place in what could be the present, and are even more caustic than the rest. The public, wondering if this is, in fact, the new reality, fills pubs and gathers around workplace televisions to find out. Leaks, polls, and online chaos conspire against the PM, as does a bitter sense of national passivity. In the most outrageous example, “The National Anthem,” the British Prime Minister is coerced into having sex with a pig on live television. Is the technology to blame? Is omniscience really the goal of human endeavor? If we can know, does that mean we should?īeneath each episode runs a critique of the unquestioning ease with which we have incorporated information-based technologies into our lives, and into social, cultural, and political infrastructures. What might have quieted and died becomes inescapable and undoes the marriage. I found the story’s necessary quality, and its message of the future, too much to face.įor one couple, the grain empowers a common enough gremlin: jealousy over a suspected affair. The nerves it twanged in me were not yet fully formed, and the news felt too grim. After “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” I was done with The Twilight Zone. There was exponential dread in the setting as well: An icon of the future, the airplane is also a perfect trap. Everyone on the plane thinks he’s crazy, but we see it, too.Īt the time, Lithgow’s agony frightened me even more than the gremlin mugging in his window adults aren’t supposed to see the monsters that haunt a child’s dreams. I came across the film on television, as a kid, some time after its 1983 release, and stuck around long enough only to watch John Lithgow lose his mind in **George Miller’**s take on the William Shatner classic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” On a long flight, Lithgow becomes convinced that there is a gremlin on the airplane’s wing. The only _Twilight Zon_e episode I can recall isn’t from Rod Serling’s original television show, which ran from 1959 to 1964, but an episode remake found in the omnibus tribute Twilight Zone: The Movie.
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