An Ai-driven love story that will keep you guessing
It’s at the end of one of the most eventful, unpredictable and downright baffling years that Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror returns for its fourth series. It’s made up of six stand-alone dramas, each a cautionary parable, set in a dystopian, technology-driven future; all arrive on Netflix today. And, as is often the case with anthology series, the result is a mixed bag, both in subject matter and in quality – though none fall short of “good”.
The fourth, Hang the DJ, is the standout of the series. Georgina Campbell (Murdered By My Boyfriend) and Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders) star as our handsome guides into this world where the country’s singles hand over their dating decisions to an artificial intelligence known as “Coach”.
Coach is a talking white disc with a digital interface that lets its user know when it has found their next relationship and promptly arranges a meeting between the two. The pair can then both learn how long the relationship will last – but only when they request to do so simultaneously. Once the time is up, the coupling is over. Whether they want it to be or not.
Campbell and Cole play two such potential partners, matched at the beginning of the episode. Both are sweet, goofy, and make bad jokes. They hit it off but soon their relationship expires and they are thrown back into a seemingly endless dating cycle of short-lived, or far-too-long-lived, sexual relationships with others – endured so that the AI can learn their tastes and, eventually, provide them with their perfect match.
Is it appealing, to hand over our autonomy so as to avoid the endless slog of swiping, meeting and rejecting? Brooker, who has been married since 2010 but who has no doubt been bored and terrified by the stories of his friends in the online dating world, here wants us to question giving such a human, unscientific decision to an algorithm.
He manages it without being preachy, offering a story that is more than it first appears. It is hindered by a runtime of only 51 minutes; the ending feels all-too rushed. But what drives it along is the effervescent performances and chemistry of its two leads. They banter without being annoying, or collapsing into Richard Curtis-style schmaltz. Despite their perfect looks, they’re charmingly imperfect.
San Junipero was considered by most to be the strongest instalment of the third series – because unlike most of Black Mirror, it was ultimately uplifting. If there is a San Junipero of series four, in terms of subject matter and tone this is it. Without revealing whether this episode ends with all smiles (maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, maybe it’s not that straightforward), there is a greater sense of hope here than in most of Brooker’s work. Catherine Gee
Ants are not among the planet’s most appealing creatures. But add the name Attenborough to the title of any film about the natural world and it becomes a much more enticing prospect. Attenborough and the Empire of the Ants (BBC Two) was a case in point.
The reward was a surprisingly fascinating film, not so much a wildlife documentary as a philosophical discourse on the evolutionary advantages of making love rather than war. And, more controversially, on the socio-economic benefits of breaking down barriers and borders. The setting was high in the Jura mountains, on the border between Switzerland and France, where Attenborough had located the perfect test case.
On the one hand, there was a “sleeping giant”, a vast, underground super-colony of wood ants whose ability to defy their more aggressive instincts and cooperate went against many of the norms of ant nature. As a result, a vast underground “society” had developed in which upwards of half a billion ants were linked across a thousand individual nests in an ecstasy of food-sharing, farming, crossbreeding and general cooperation.
On the other side of the mountain, where each ant colony was a strictly separate fiefdom, things were not so rosy. Any ant that strayed into another camp’s territory was mobbed and armies were locked in territorial war. Breeding was controlled by a single queen in each nest, maintaining the purity of the genetic line but reducing opportunity and diversity.
Attenborough, understandably, was of the opinion that the super-colony wasn’t only a more peaceful and productive place, but a preferable one. And that the capacity for cooperation and diversity represented a big step in evolutionary progress – leaving us with the prescient message that we may have much to learn from the empire of the ants. Gerard O’donovan
Attenborough and the Empire of the Ants ★★★★
Black Mirror: Hang the DJ ★★★★