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Black Mirror - Spoilers after the first post


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On 12/9/2016 at 9:17 AM, red snow said:

You should try and find Charlies brooker's "newswipe" shows. You'll see he's been calling these kinds of things for a very long time. He's incredibly gifted at pointing out all the scary tricks occurring in media and journalism - possibly because he works in both. I really hope we at least get his "newswipe year review" although I fear the netflix deal has kept him busy as we didn't even get the regular "newswipe" this year. Just checked and we will get his year round up which I'm sure will be great especially since he thought the previous year was awful. God knows what he'll make of this one.

 

So Brooker is a bit of a British Jon Stewart then? I'll have to see if I can dig any of his political stuff up on youtbe, although the way you put it there's nothing current.

I watched "Shut Up and Dance" and "Nosedive." Both seemed very Twilight Zonish to me, in a good way. I also like how both stories took our protagonists on journeys, one willing, one unwilling, and both got something unexpected int he end. This might've been my favorite performance by Bryce Dallas Howard. 

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5 hours ago, PetyrPunkinhead said:

So Brooker is a bit of a British Jon Stewart then? I'll have to see if I can dig any of his political stuff up on youtbe, although the way you put it there's nothing current.

He started with Screenwipe which was a late night dissection of recent TV, then did a one off Gameswipe I think, then Newswipe. Then he condensed it all into Weeklywipe, but even that hasn't been on for a while. It's mainly yearly wipes now (2016 wipe will be on some point this month), but I really miss Screenwipe most of all. He completely killed off Top Gear for me with a brilliant dissection of all the paperwork and red tape behind all the "spontaneous" stuff the presenters do and made me realise it was actually a kind of Jersey Shore / TOWIE / Made In Chelsea style program, in that it purports to be real stuff happening to dull people. Of course it's heavily scripted, but I'm not sure people realise quite how much the whole thing is 'acted'.

I once went for breakfast in my local village, hungover, and was told by someone from the BBC that I could meet Konnie Huq if I went on this big bus with him. I was too hungover and needed to eat, several months later I discovered it was for Screenwipe and was a brilliant take down of X Factor style 'euphoric moments' where a bunch of guys went and pissed on a hill. But it was to Coldplay's Fix You, so it was all uplifting and stuff. I was devastated.

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  • 2 weeks later...

@RedSnow & @DaveSumm  I watched Booker's 2015Wipe on youtube and it was pretty good. And as a full blooded Murican I even enjoyed it with all the UK references I had no clue about or little interest in. So, well done him.And here's a clip of Brooker talking about Waldo's similarities to Trump I found on youtube.
 

 

I finished watching S3E4, "San Junipero."

There was a lot in here you could throw stones at and call formulaic or pandering (generous doses of nostalgia, main characters that are inherently pitiable, etc.) , but the sum is greater than its parts, and as a self contained hour of drama, I'd say it's pretty damned good. I'm also not sure if this was a happy ending or not. I'd say it ends upbeat on the surface, but I feel like the more you think about it the more unsettling it becomes. Des anyone know if the TCKR  company a reference to another company or product in the series?

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I'm 4 episodes into season 3 and just finished San Juniperio and I thought it was beautiful. Throwing an ostensibly happy episode into the middle of a season of an unsettling show like Black Mirror is a pretty good George RR Martin-level "twist."

One stray observation I had is that the premise is remarkably similar to the season 8 finale of Doctor Who -- Death in Heaven. Death in Heaven features the Nethersphere, an afterlife where the Master/Missy, the Doctor's nemesis, has been uploading everyone after they die since the dawn of humanity, given civilizations their concept of an afterlife in the first place. Unfortunately Missy made it a pretty terrible place to the point where people retain the feelings of their physical bodies so things like cremation and mummification are especially horrendous. 

For a show that's supposed to be about optimism, Death in Heaven was an incredibly dark/disturbing/unsettling episode, whereas a typically twisted, pessimistic show like Black Mirror took a very similar concept but gave you optimism and a happy ending on a remarkably similar premise (minus the time travel, time lords, and cybermen obviously :P ). 

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Just finished it...holy fuck what a fantastic show. Despite it being extremely bleak I didn't really have a problem binging it (watched all 3 seasons in 3 nights). My favorite episodes were 15 Million Merits and San Junipero. The latter might be the best episode, which was a nice suprise as it started out really slowly and I even debated turning it off. Glad I didn't.

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7 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

I just can't see any cause for optimism in San Junipero. I'd far rather simply cease to exist.

Why? Just because it's a simulation doesn't make it any less real. If you cease to exist, you can't really do anything. But if you're uploaded to a pretty hassle-free after life in the cloud, I can't see why anyone would refuse that other than on the grounds of religious beliefs (in which case, that's none of my business, but I feel like you'd be cheating yourself.) Thinking about it more, I'm assuming you'd have access to the internet so you could keep up with the news/what's going on in the "real" world without having to deal with any of the crap -- and you and your living loved ones can still interact with each other after you die (at least once a week, depending on the regulations).

I'd assume you would also have access to books, music, and film once it's uploaded into the cloud -- including stuff that's made after you die. Hell, if a writer dies before finishing a series a la Robert Jordan, they could just upload themselves to the cloud and finish it in there. (And you could a decent sense of how the world has progressed by visiting future decades in San Junipero.) Plus they establish that you can delete yourself whenever you want -- so it solves the issue of being forced to live forever (which does sound tiring, but our current life spans are far too short imo.) Also, I know San Junipero is portrayed as a "party city" but I'm sure they would have other things to do as well (hiking, skiing, etc.)

Though the day before I saw San Junipero, I was reading about how some scientists think we all might be living in a simulation anyway and I came to the conclusion that it doesn't matter regardless so that may have made me more comfortable with the premise of the episode. (I mean, after all, even if we're in a simulation, it's still our reality and it doesn't make it any less "real.") 

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160901-we-might-live-in-a-computer-program-but-it-may-not-matter

Quote

I watched "Shut Up and Dance" the other day again. The kid who plays Kenny(Alex Lawther) is absolutely phenomenal in it. The part where he gives the toy to the little girl in the beginning obviously plays much differently on a rewatch.

 

Shut Up and Dance was a really good suspense story and the lead was great, but a few things bothered me. Most of all, it really irked me that the hackers/blackmailers were going after a man who cheated on his wife. So what? They're targeting pedophiles and a racist CEO (not sure what the black guy did, I only made out the word "pervert at the end)....and then a man who cheats on his wife? Why? One, people's private lives really aren't any of the hackers' business (or anyone's beyond the people they actually affect) and two, how is forcing the man to commit a serious felony and rob a bank (then destroy a random person's car) at all a proportional punishment to cheating on your wife? 

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2 hours ago, All-for-Joffrey said:

Why? Just because it's a simulation doesn't make it any less real. If you cease to exist, you can't really do anything. But if you're uploaded to a pretty hassle-free after life in the cloud, I can't see why anyone would refuse that other than on the grounds of religious beliefs (in which case, that's none of my business, but I feel like you'd be cheating yourself.) Thinking about it more, I'm assuming you'd have access to the internet so you could keep up with the news/what's going on in the "real" world without having to deal with any of the crap -- and you and your living loved ones can still interact with each other after you die (at least once a week, depending on the regulations).

I'd assume you would also have access to books, music, and film once it's uploaded into the cloud -- including stuff that's made after you die. Hell, if a writer dies before finishing a series a la Robert Jordan, they could just upload themselves to the cloud and finish it in there. (And you could a decent sense of how the world has progressed by visiting future decades in San Junipero.) Plus they establish that you can delete yourself whenever you want -- so it solves the issue of being forced to live forever (which does sound tiring, but our current life spans are far too short imo.) Also, I know San Junipero is portrayed as a "party city" but I'm sure they would have other things to do as well (hiking, skiing, etc.)

Though the day before I saw San Junipero, I was reading about how some scientists think we all might be living in a simulation anyway and I came to the conclusion that it doesn't matter regardless so that may have made me more comfortable with the premise of the episode. (I mean, after all, even if we're in a simulation, it's still our reality and it doesn't make it any less "real.") 

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160901-we-might-live-in-a-computer-program-but-it-may-not-matter

 

Shut Up and Dance was a really good suspense story and the lead was great, but a few things bothered me. Most of all, it really irked me that the hackers/blackmailers were going after a man who cheated on his wife. So what? They're targeting pedophiles and a racist CEO (not sure what the black guy did, I only made out the word "pervert at the end)....and then a man who cheats on his wife? Why? One, people's private lives really aren't any of the hackers' business (or anyone's beyond the people they actually affect) and two, how is forcing the man to commit a serious felony and rob a bank (then destroy a random person's car) at all a proportional punishment to cheating on your wife? 

The point is that the hackers are trolls, rather than vigilantes. They get a kick out of doing this. The only reason they target these people in particular is because they need some leverage to play out their game.

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I thought it was interesting that both Black Mirror's Shut Up and Dance and Westworld used Radiohead's Exit Music for a closer.  Wonder how closely together they were filmed.

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24 minutes ago, Triskan said:

I thought it was interesting that both Black Mirror's Shut Up and Dance and Westworld used Radiohead's Exit Music for a closer.  Wonder how closely together they were filmed.

Great minds think alike. Both brilliant scenes too.

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  • 4 months later...

Men Against Fire really bothered me. The moment you're introduced to "Roaches", it's clear that they're living, conscious, intelligent beings who are capable of fear and pain. And the ones we see at the beginning are clearly trying to get away to protect their lives. They behave exactly the same way human victims would. The moral dilemma is already there, before the "big reveal". Yet the show is played off as if it's perfectly fine to kill them because they're ugly and don't speak like we do.

So what sways the main character, and makes him realize the horrible things he did? The fact that they look and talk like us. Not that they're conscious, intelligent, aware of their own existence and desiring of a future, capable of moral agency, etc. All that was already pretty clear, but because they were ugly and don't talk like us, it was fine. Even when we see the flashback at the end, to see how the humans were really reacting, it's clear that the "roaches" at the beginning were basically expressing and feeling the same things. 

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On 1/1/2017 at 8:26 AM, Triskan said:

I thought it was interesting that both Black Mirror's Shut Up and Dance and Westworld used Radiohead's Exit Music for a closer.  Wonder how closely together they were filmed.

The finale (I think) of the first season of The 100 used it as well, it's a fantastic piece of music so the only surprising thing to me is that it went that long without getting used more. I put it as my favourite Radiohead track and while I'm not the most diehard fan I still think that's saying something.

20 minutes ago, Bridgeburners said:

Men Against Fire really bothered me. The moment you're introduced to "Roaches", it's clear that they're living, conscious, intelligent beings who are capable of fear and pain. And the ones we see at the beginning are clearly trying to get away to protect their lives. They behave exactly the same way human victims would. The moral dilemma is already there, before the "big reveal". Yet the show is played off as if it's perfectly fine to kill them because they're ugly and don't speak like we do.

So what sways the main character, and makes him realize the horrible things he did? The fact that they look and talk like us. Not that they're conscious, intelligent, aware of their own existence and desiring of a future, capable of moral agency, etc. All that was already pretty clear, but because they were ugly and don't talk like us, it was fine. Even when we see the flashback at the end, to see how the humans were really reacting, it's clear that the "roaches" at the beginning were basically expressing and feeling the same things. 

I think all of that is part of the point though. We aren't morally consistent like this, we just need that little thing to other a being and then we are capable of horrible treatment of them. Its a dark and cynical take, but I think its a reasonable argument.

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5 hours ago, karaddin said:

The finale (I think) of the first season of The 100 used it as well, it's a fantastic piece of music so the only surprising thing to me is that it went that long without getting used more. I put it as my favourite Radiohead track and while I'm not the most diehard fan I still think that's saying something.

 

Probably the earliest, and funniest use, of the song was in the 90s with Father Ted.

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  • 2 months later...

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