duchessofkeys replied to your post “Has anyone watched the new season of Black Mirror? I’m really sad, to...”
I came to this tag to see if other people felt this way. It was pretty underwhelming. I kept waiting for that gutpunch moment in episodes and it never came. Black Museum came closest.
Exactly! The gutpunch moment never came, and neither did all the discussions and reflections that are so characteristic of the show. The whole premise of the show is about the worst of human behavior and how technology can interact with it, but this felt so thin in this season? It’s even as if the show has been dumbed down? I don’t know. All I know is that I kept waiting to be wretched and fucked up, like I was in all other seasons, that I was expecting to be thinking for days about the episodes and how real they are, but that didn’t happen.
nerdgal-dorkski replied to your post “Has anyone watched the new season of Black Mirror? I’m really sad, to...”
I mean I've only watched the first 2 episodes but I thought USS Callister was fantastic
Tbh I would have liked USS Callister if it weren’t a Black Mirror episode. Let me explain: one really strong element about this show is how real everything is, how possible and near the realities it shows can be. It’s basically watching it and saying “wow, that kind of shit could happen right fucking now”. But in this episode I have to overuse my temporary suspension of disbelief. Like, from mere DNA you can’t clone a person’s personality and memories the way it was done there. And how did the hell did they survive that worm-hole? Didn’t it erase their code, thus erasing their existence? How come they could still exist in the online version of the game?
And there’s also the overly hopeful and happy feeling here. This was really unlike Black Mirror and its actual premise. Even San Junipero, which had a happy ending, had still this sadness, this melancholy, behind it. Now here it was the basic, typical scenario “everyone wins and the villain is fucked and everyone lives happily ever after hurray” (and even the means for such felt cliché for me, at least to the standards of this show). Like, can you imagine the guy indeed revolutionizing the whole system in Fifteen Million Merits? Can you imagine the woman breaking free and running away from that park in White Bear? Or the soldier overthrowing the army and its tactics in Men Against Fire? That would have all completely gone against the premise and the ideas the show wanted to bring forth, wouldn’t it? But it was how I felt in USS Callister.
So yea, were USS Callister an episode of anything else, I think I could’ve liked it. But given the expectations of quality and thoughtfulness and grim feeling I hold with Black Mirror, yea, I’m afraid I didn’t, I’m afraid it only felt like generic scifi to me =(
