The dark side
Black Mirror’s bleak dystopias may be unsettling but, says Steve Kilgallon, their old-fashioned approach to storytelling is compelling.
I’ve arrived a little late – definitely after the canapes have circulated and the best booze been drunk – to the Black Mirror party. It’s on to season four now, but given the nudge Netflix is giving Charlie Brooker’s drama series, expect plenty more gatecrashers.
For cool British viewers, Black Mirror has been a thing for a long time. I’ve been a fan of its creator, Brooker, since he wrote a scorching television review column called Screen Burn, which ran buried in The Guardian’s Saturday arts liftout and filleted shows for fun. He had a hand in some of the television works of the comic genius Chris Morris (of The Day Today and Brass Eye), then produced a brilliant spoof television listings website called TV Go Home (it’s NSFW, but is well worth Googling) from which the idea for a show all about Simply Red singer Mick Hucknall’s nether regions was particularly inspired.
The progression from simply writing list lines for skewed, dark television to actually making it was logical. So when I finally heard about Black Mirror, I did watch the very first episode, wide-eyed and rather stunned. I was treated to an hour’s drama which considered a world in which a terrorist compelled the prime minister to have carnal relations with a pig. I got halfway through the second programme, about a man locked in a future entirely involved in collecting digital game credits, and became so bleakly depressed I could no longer watch.
That’s Black Mirror’s schtick: in each standalone episode, we’re shown a world in which technology has usually advanced more than in ours – but has inadvertently brought out the very worst in humanity as a result. It’s like the early settlers blithely introducing a supposedly harmless species and watching it consume all the wildlife.
Season four of the show, newly arrived on Netflix, opened with life aboard the USS Callister, where the crew of a spaceship in an old-fashioned television show called Space Trek went about their business. Swiftly, it became apparent that this was no TV show, but an immersive multi-player computer game, controlled by Robert Daley: here, the ship’s captain, but by day, chief tech officer of the game’s parent company. By stealing the DNA of co-workers who annoyed him, he had imprisoned clone versions of them inside the game to exact some unreal-world revenge.
Written down this premise sounds rather daft, but Brooker and co-creator Annabel Jones make it entirely believable. The crew stay trapped in this waking nightmare until along comes a new recruit – played by Cristin Milioti – who engages in a mental war with Daley (Jesse Plemons) for their very freedom. The USS Callister has plenty to say about everyday sexism, about the fanaticism of some sci-fi fans (who haven’t all taken it super well), and about the dark potential of future technology. Usually, reviews of Black Mirror focus on that bleak dystopian theme, but actually I think there’s something old-fashioned about it: a string of well-plotted, crisply-shot, standalone full-length dramas where the story is king.
In my last column, I mentioned planning (but failing) to review the documentary Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web. This rather annoyed the film’s maker, Annie Goldson, who let me know. So I did watch it when it was screened on TVNZ. It’s a great record of a very strange time in New Zealand politics that now seems so distant, and yet only happened three years ago. The moment of Kim Dotcom’s “big reveal” in the Auckland Town Hall that turned out to be anything but had a strange poignancy that for the first time made me feel sort-of sorry for the bloke. It’s still on OnDemand, and worth watching.