Summary: In 1969, Nida is a sales assistant who is frustrated by the racist, awful people around her. When she is forced to eat lunch in the basement one day, she accidentally releases a demon named Gaap. Gaap tells Nida that she has three days to make three sacrifices or the world will end. Nida is initially terrified and thinks she is insane but Gaap talks sense into her. After trying to run away, she ends up in a back alley with an abusive man walking his dog and she kills him with a brick for the first sacrifice. Nida goes to kill Keith, a known murderer, the next day. She follows him home and murders him, but his brother suddenly returns and notices her. Nida is forced to kill him too, distraught that he was a good man. Gaap is happy that the sacrifices are done, but learns that they don't count if the individual is a murderer, so Keith did not count. Nida decides to kill her xenophobic co-worker Vicky, but changes her mind and targets Michael upon realizing that he will become Prime Minister and instill a totalitarian regime. Nida chases him down and tries to kill him, but she's apprehended by cops before she can. Nida explains the reasoning behind her killings but she is thought to be insane. The time limit is reached and the world enters nuclear war. Gaap is going to be sent to oblivion for failing and invites Nida to go with him, and she agrees.
The Good: Anjana Vasan's portrayal of Nida practically carries this episode. The character is relatable and endearing, and seeing her embrace her darker side fostered by all the xenophobia she endures is compelling stuff. I enjoyed seeing Nida get darker and darker throughout the episode as she becomes obsessed with the idea of killing the worst possible people to save the world. Her dynamic with Gaap is also a lot of fun. I have to commend the idea behind Gaap. I like that despite him being a demon, he's actually kind of charming and likeable in a dark sort of way. He bounces off of Nida pretty well, and his antics are consistently amusing. I thought that the setting was very good in this episode. Considering that racism was a huge aspect of this episode, it made sense to set the episode in the 60s when this infuriating behaviour was much more normal and typically went unpunished. Plus, the episode visually looked great and unique because of the time period, and it helped the episode stand out compared to everything else. The Bad: Again, did this need to be so long? The ideas tackled in this episode are fairly simple and I feel like they could have been addressed in half the time with a much more streamlined narrative. Nida having to deal with her conscience while trying to kill, and her bond with Gaap are decent ideas, but not explored in a particularly emotional or impactful way. I feel like we could have accomplished the same thing in half the time. The story itself somewhat disappointed me. Even more than any other episode this season, "Demon 79" didn't have any connection with technology. It's a strange choice to take away one of the best aspects of "Black Mirror" (its commentary on technology), and it's even stranger because the episode didn't offer anything to replace the commentary on technology. Without that, this felt like a pretty simplistic horror/thriller with no real reason for me to analyze the episode or think about what I had watched. The experience felt shallow and I wish that there had been more substance to the story outside of basic entertainment. The detective storyline was an afterthought and I was bored any time we switched to them. The entertaining aspect of the episode is the dynamic between Nida and Gaap, so any time spent away from them is bland and uninteresting. I wish that this side story had been cut out entirely. The Unknown: What happened to Nida's mother? Did she die of natural causes or is there more to that story? What is oblivion, and how will Gaap and Nida tolerate eternity together? Best Moment: Nida and Gaap bonding over how lonely they feel after the murders of Keith and his brother. Character of the Episode: Nida. Conclusion: A fittingly weird and atypical episode of "Black Mirror" to end season 6. Not all of this worked, in fact a lot didn't, but it was an enjoyable enough experience for what it was. Season 6 was ultimately quite disappointing and it did not succeed in changing my mind that Charlie Brooker has run out of ideas and is not able to hit the same quality that he had in earlier "Black Mirror" seasons. Season 6 took more risks and there are plenty of episodes that don't feel like typical "Black Mirror" episodes, suggesting that the show is taking risks and heading in new directions to address the idea drought. However it hasn't worked yet. Risky episodes like "Mazey Day" and "Demon 79" weren't particularly successful, and it's clear that the writing in this show needs to get much better if we are to get a season that is as good as the first three. I'm not sure how long it will be until we get a season 7, but I will be watching. The one nice thing about this show is that every season is short and every episode unique, making it tremendously easy to watch even if it is sometimes disappointing. Score: 56
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Summary: Bo is a paparazzi and takes a photo of an actor having a gay affair, and he later kills himself. Bo feels guilty and quits her job, but struggles to make a living. After famous actress Mazey Day flees the country following a hit and run unknown to the public, Bo returns to her job to collect an enormous $50,000 reward for photos. She and fellow photographer Hector track down Mazey to a rehab center and they are followed by other photographers. They break in to get their pictures but find that Mazey has become a werewolf that starts killing everyone. Bo and Hector escape to a nearby diner where the werewolf kills everyone, but Bo is able to defeat her with a gun. Reverted to her human form, Mazey takes the gun and kills herself as Bo takes a picture.
The Good: Paparazzi is a good concept to tackle, especially with how willing these people are to invade people's privacy to expose online. This fits perfectly with the themes of "Black Mirror", and I was excited to see what the show's take on paparazzi would be. The Bad: Except the message of this episode is completely confused, and the story is pretty awful. The idea of paparazzi is wasted because I'm left confused if "Black Mirror" is condemning or supporting paparazzi. Sometimes I feel like this episode is about how awful paparazzi are, like with Bo feeling guilty about indirectly causing a suicide, and the other photographers getting killed by Mazey because they stuck around to take pictures. But then at other points it seems like paparazzi are justified, especially since Mazey Day actually is hiding a deadly secret that needs to be exposed to the world. The end of the episode suggests that it's so valuable that werewolves have been exposed to the world, justifying paparazzi. So ultimately, I'm confused what the episode's message is. It's jumbled and confused between the pros and cons, leading to a less satisfying and clear story overall. Furthermore, Bo is one of the weirdest main characters we have had because she doesn't have any clear arc in this episode, and her conclusion offers no emotional closure or any interesting conflict. The writing is all so strangely unclear and messy. The werewolf twist is one of the worst things I've seen from "Black Mirror". Sure, it subverted my expectations, but to what end? What benefits did the werewolf twist provide this episode? Absolutely nothing. The idea is given the most shallow exploration, and it shifted the attention away from the main idea about paparazzi, diluting the episode's main message and making the whole experience more convoluted. I have very little to say about this episode, because it feels like there's hardly anything to talk about. This went from an interesting story to a random horror/thriller for no real reason, and the climactic sequence as Bo is chased by Mazey's werewolf form feels entirely out of place compared to the rest of the episode. I found the episode's setting to be pretty bad. This season played around with time a lot, and this episode is set in the early 2000s. The problem is that this is hardly noticed by the story and it doesn't create as unique of a setting compared to episodes like "Demon 79" and "Beyond the Sea" which are set much more significantly in the past. The early 2000s setting doesn't have much to offer the episode, and is another wasted idea. The Unknown: What happens when the werewolves get exposed? Is there a backlash? Is it explained away somehow? How prevalent are these werewolves? Why is this such a big secret? Best Moment: The opening scene of Bo taking pictures of the celebrity is the most interesting because this is when it still felt like "Black Mirror" was going to explore an interesting idea. Character of the Episode: Bo. Conclusion: What a weird, confused, ridiculous episode. I didn't see much of a point to this episode and didn't get much out of it. A dull, overly ambitious episode that doesn't have much that's worth your time. Score: 43 Summary: Cliff and David are two astronauts working in space while robotic replicas live their lives down on Earth. Cliff stays in the country with his wife Lana while David is more sociable with his family in public. A cult attacks David at night, murdering his family and destroying his replica before turning themselves in. David is deeply depressed and Cliff offers to let him use his replica. David does and finds some peace in doing this, and continues to use the replica occasionally to paint a picture for Cliff to keep in his house. As he does this, David becomes obsessed with Lana and makes a pass at her. Lana tells Cliff and doesn't want David to come back, while Cliff is suspicious that they had an affair. Cliff refuses to let David use his replica again so David fakes an emergency and goes back to murder Cliff's family. Cliff goes back and sees what happened before returning horrified to David.
The Good: This episode does a lot of things right, and it has its heart in the right place emotionally. David's story is genuinely disturbing and upsetting. We establish a great, sociable family, and seeing them get slaughtered ruthlessly by a cult group is absolutely horrifying. David's grief is realistically portrayed and it's tough not to feel for him as he suffers alone in space. Him finding some peace in using Cliff's replica makes sense, and the story told between them is good as David goes from grateful to entitled and dependent on Cliff's life. Aaron Paul is the glue that makes this work. He does a tremendous job playing two different characters, and the quality of his performance sells the story being told magnificently. What we get is a pretty standard domestic conflict for much of the episode (with a technology twist of course), but the strength of the performance makes it much better. The Bad: This episode has no business being 80 minutes long. The story is enough for a 40-50 minute episode, but the pacing is screwed up when the story is extended to be almost twice that length. Scenes go longer than they should, there are scenes that should have been significantly trimmed or cut out entirely, and the episode doesn't have an additional layer of complex storytelling to justify being so long. I'm usually not too bothered by methodical pacing, but this story drags and bores me at times because it is needlessly slow, and it doesn't even capitalize on any of the strengths that come from slow-paced storytelling. One of the biggest strengths of slow storytelling is that you can dive deep into character. Yet as slow as the episode is, somehow it still failed to emotionally sell me on the choices the characters made at various points in the story. We had so many scenes of David using Cliff's replica, and yet I still couldn't buy into his decision to advance on her and try to hook up, which seemingly came out of nowhere. The show failed to effectively convey David's over-dependence and entitlement to the degree where I could buy into him hitting on Lana. This is unforgivable when the episode is so slow-paced. I also was baffled by David's decision to kill Cliff's family. Was he really so far gone that he felt like he had to do this? I couldn't believe that David was so willing to blow up Cliff's life, especially considering that David was technically living a significant part of his life as well. These are key emotional moments in David's character arc, and I felt like they were unearned and difficult to connect with. The premise of this episode is marred by one enormous plot hole. If repairs on the space shuttle are only required once in a while, why wouldn't the replicas be sent to space instead of the humans? Surely it would be much cheaper and more feasible to send robots to space and let the humans remain back with their families. I can't find any answer to explain this plot hole, and it unfortunately destroys the entire premise because this situation is no longer feasible. The Unknown: What's next for David and Cliff? Will they attack each other or will they somehow keep things civil? It's hard to see a world where they get through their job together, but you never know. Best Moment: David crying out in the woods was incredibly well acted by Aaron Paul and devastating. Character of the Episode: David. Conclusion: This episode was the most emotionally heavy and horrific of this season, but unfortunately it is too slow paced, inconsistently written, and it has an enormous plot hole. The result is a disappointing episode that should have been much better. Score: 57 Summary: Davis and Pia are dating and making a film together. They visit Davis' hometown Loch Henry and from Davis' friend Stuart, Pia learns about Davis' troubled past involving a kidnapper and killer Iain Adair who turned Loch Henry from a tourist hub into a ghost town and indirectly killed his father Kenneth. Pia convinces David to make their movie about this story. Davis and Pia explore around and make their film. While driving home at night, Davis gets into an accident and stays at the hospital. Pia stays with Janet, Davis' mom, and finds on one of her VCR tapes that she and Kenneth participated in the kidnappings with Iain. At the same time, Stuart's father tells Davis the truth. Pia is terrified of Janet and runs away, but dies in the wilderness. Janet thinks her secret is out and commits suicide. Much later, Davis' film is a smashing success and tourism returns to Loch Henry, but Davis is still traumatized by the entire ordeal.
The Good: I've seen a lot of people dismiss this episode as "not true Black Mirror" because it does not focus on technology. I don't believe that this is true. This episode does focus on the impacts of technology in our lives, and what's special about it this episode is that it focuses on what is happening right now in the world instead of focusing on what may happen in the future. This episode focuses on real-life stories being somewhat fetishized by the entertainment industry through the creation of documentaries and other media products for entertainment purposes. I think that the episode explores this idea beautifully and perfectly highlights how this fetishization affects the victims of these incidents. Davis was a compelling character because we got to see how his personal life was destroyed by his movie-making endeavour. The episode drew emotional impact in seeing what happened to him, and it led to this being one of the most emotionally impactful episodes in the season. This episode had a far more realistic tone than "Joan is Awful", and that resulted in a more engaging and grounded atmosphere to tell this story. The pacing is fairly slow, but it's helped along with imaginative filmmaking, a beautiful and unique setting in Scotland, realistic characters, and brilliant utilization of suspense to keep uneventful scenes interesting by making us constantly think that something is going to happen. So many little things were done right. Side characters were kept mysterious to get us interested in learning the truth, Iain Adair's story is told beautifully to create an interesting horror piece, and the eerie and empty setting of Loch Henry gives the episode a spooky and unsettling tone. I also connected with the characters because they all had simple and clearly defined drives. Pia represents the entertainment industry perfectly because she seems to stop at nothing in order to get the best possible film. This sets her up perfectly to be the one to die as punishment for her ambitious nature. Davis is compelling because he is clearly traumatized and reluctant to dive into his history, and his actions reflect this at every turn, making it even more brutal when he uncovers the truth. Stuart is a lot of fun and brings in a lot of comedy, but even he is consistently written as someone who yearns for Loch Henry to be a tourist hub once more, with his every move being done in the hopes of achieving this goal. The story being told was really good and had a good twist at the end revealing the truth about what happened. The mystery aspect of discovering the truth of what happened with Iain Adair had me interested the entire episode, and the incorporation of horror/thriller aspects made for a uniquely entertaining experience. The twist caught me off guard and it worked well in terms of explaining some of the weirdness in Davis' past, providing a satisfying climax and conclusion to the story. The Bad: Pia makes so many poor decisions upon leaning the truth about Janet. I do get that she would be terrified and her judgement would be compromised, but the way she consistently makes the worst possible decision at every turn until she literally gets herself killed is almost unbelievable, and it's a level of incompetence that takes me out of the story being told. To be clear, I do like that she died by going into the wilderness alone (this was foreshadowed and set up earlier in the episode), but I found the choices that she made to get into that situation to be baffling. Pia immediately panicking about Janet, not taking any evidence when she left, acting incredibly suspicious, running away alone in the night, and staying on the road knowing that Janet would come after her was incredibly stupid. The Unknown: Was Richard involved in the crime too? He was so perturbed by Davis' investigation, and it makes me wonder if he was also in on the crimes alongside Davis' parents. It would make sense that he scapegoated Davis' parents to mask his own involvement in the case. Best Moment: Davis sitting in silence after everything that happened, emphasizing the episode's message on the damage that these kinds of documentaries can have on the victims directly involved. Though Davis was successful and achieved everything he could have wanted with his film, it doesn't help him handle the grief and pain of what happened. Character of the Episode: Davis. Conclusion: Not everything about this worked, but overall this was a very well told and engaging story with a powerful message and plenty of suspense. Score: 67 Summary: Joan lays off one of her employees with no spine and goes to therapy where she confides in being disappointed in her relationship with her fiance Krish. She is texted by Mac, her ex, and agrees to meet with him where they kiss before she returns home. At home, she watches Streamberry with Krish and watch a new show "Joan is Awful", but the show is actually just showing Joan's daily life acted by Salma Hayek. Joan is horrified and Krish leaves her after seeing what happened with Mac. Joan tries to take legal action but realizes that it's impossible. Joan then defecates in a church in protest. Salma learns that a digital version of her is doing this and is upset, but is also unable to take legal action. She teams up with Joan and they decide to destroy Streamberry's quantum computer or quamputer that gathers data and creates these TV shows. Joan and Salma break into Streamberry and Joan is about to break it, but she learns that she's not even the original Joan she's one of the AIs produced within the quamputer. She realizes original Joan did it anyways and breaks the computer. The original Joan is placed under house arrest but has more control in her life.
The Good: The title of this episode is definitely accurate because Joan is awful and it's amusing to watch her stumble from situation to situation making everything worse and worse. There is some good comedy throughout the episode that elevates this, and while the lighthearted tone fails to create a realistic atmosphere (see: The Bad), it does provide some quality comedy that I enjoyed. Joan and Salma Hayek are fun to watch and their jokes are elevated by some spirited performances. I like the ideas being explored here. This episode is reminiscent of "Inception" with there being layers of AI within other AI, creating a complex and difficult to comprehend realm of existences all within a computer. This episode is essentially taking the idea of us all living in a simulation and running several miles with the concept. I found this to be interesting and compelling. I also liked the exploration of the control a streaming service can have over the world, and this is a clever idea for a "Black Mirror" episode. The Bad: I can't stand the lightheartedness that "Black Mirror" has used in this episode and the previous episode in season 5. This show tackles serious ideas and disturbs viewers because of how realistic its characters and world feels in each episode. When we see characters behaving like comic book characters with no realistic aspects at all. The actors get lots of comedy out of it, but they never feel like real people with real problems, and I spent the entirety of the episode being unable to take the ideas seriously because of the strange tone. By far the most immersion-breaking aspect of this episode is how nobody ever seems concerned by how the "Joan is Awful" TV show is a total disruption of personal privacy and what it could mean about corporations surveilling people's personal lives. The existence of this show should result in total paranoia, distrust, fear, and genuine anger towards people in power for allowing this to happen. Instead, the characters only care about how other people perceive them in the TV show, which is entirely unrealistic and it makes these characters feel fake at every turn. Nothing feels real because nobody acts like a real person would. I deeply dislike the terms and conditions idea. Instead of exploring realistic consequences of terms and conditions allowing for unfair surveillance of everyone living in the world, the idea is treated like a gimmick. It's implied that all legal power would be moot because of a single signature, which is laughably unrealistic, and it's a cop-out from genuinely exploring the impact that terms and conditions has on our daily lives. Most of the time "Black Mirror" handles exaggerations of real life fairly well because the concept feels like a natural extension of what currently exists in our world. The terms and conditions idea fails at this because corporations creating a TV show targeted towards individuals feels like an idea that would never even be considered, never mind implemented. The Unknown: What happened to all of the AI? Did they all just die, or were they recovered somehow? Did Joan actually stop Streamberry, or would they simply build a new quamputer? What allows Streamberry to take such control through terms and conditions? What happened in this world to make this the norm and to make this level of surveillance legal? Best Moment: I'll go with the sheer comic shock of Joan pooping in the church. Character of the Episode: Joan. Conclusion: This was a disappointing episode. It had good ideas, but the writing and execution was terrible and ruined the episode. Score: 47 |
Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
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