Black Mirror

I hope you guys and gals are watching this Netflix series. It's very dark, and very well done.

It's a little too close to home too.

I've watched it. Not bad most of the time, but a little uneven.

I thoroughly enjoyed most of it. Some of it was positively haunting.

Best episode: The woman whose social status depends on how many "like"s she gets on her phone.

Worst episode: The one where the Prime Minister is forced to have sex with a pig on live TV.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Worst episode: The one where the Prime Minister is forced to have sex with a pig on live TV.

Ha! The very first episode. I found it shocking myself, though far from the best episode. I think the most disturbing eps for me were "White Christmas", "Men Against Fire" and "Hated in the Nation"

Most moving episode: "San Junipero"

New season was just posted. I guess I'll have to give it a view.

Eh, maybe not. Season Five doesn't come out until December 28.

Oh cool. The latest Black Mirror is a five-hour branching choose-your-own-path adventure that changes according to what you choose. Can't wait to try it..

I don't do Netflix but this really tempts me. Those choose-your-own adventures are nearly always fun, whether they're a book or what.

OMG this is incredible.  The implementation is masterful.  And seamless.

The protagonist is a 19-year old videogame programmer named Stefan Butler.  It's 1984.  Stefan is trying to program a branching game called "Bandersnatch," after a branching novel of the same name.  The original author of the book went crazy and beheaded his wife.

Stefan keeps coming up with choices, some mundane -- which cereal to have for breakfast -- and some profound -- whether to kill his dad or not.  You, as the television viewer, get to make the choices for him.  At some point Stefan begins to feel he's not in control of his own life, as if somebody else is making all the choices for him.  He becomes paranoid.  He reaches a point where he thinks he needs to kill his dad because his dad isn't who he pretends to be.

Or is he?

Choose another path, don't kill the dad, see what happens.

Choose another cereal, see what happens.

The choices are dozens, and each one leads into dozens of different forked paths.  Some lead back to the same place, but playing the same choices a second time DOESN'T get you the same pathway.  Things are altered subtly, different choices are presented.

Characters keep saying "We've met before" when they haven't -- in THIS path.  Some characters inhabit more than one path at a time, apparently.

When you make a choice that radically alters a character's life, you get a flashback of what has happened so far.  That flashback, just a couple of seconds from a dozen scenes to refresh your memory of how you got there, that flashback INCLUDES all of the choices you've made before.  I'm sure if you made different choices previously, you'd get a different flashback.  How the hell do they do that?  Is there a separate server at Netflix for each viewer watching "Bandersnatch"?

The mind boggles.

Lots of period music. Lots of period fashions. Period computers of course (humorously spoofed later on). It all seems properly researched and spot on the money (except maybe a TV video game review program (did they have those?) which looks more 1974 than 1984.). But in general very impressive, as I'd expect with Black Mirror.

Okay, I went through it a second time, making different choices. Most led to the same points, some were rather sudden dead ends, and I'd actually seen most of the options the first time through.

So maybe 3-4 hours rather than a week's entertainment. Still, first time through was amazing.

Three new episode of Black Mirror were posted recently. Watched the first one.

Haunting. Two guys play video games against each other, but one of them uses a female avatar. Eventually they start doing more than fighting, if you know what I mean. Is it gay to fuck another man if you're doing it as a woman????

That's not very creative. For the simple reason that it's actually been happening for realz, in games like Second Life.

#2 was about a guy who kidnapped another guy, an employee of Smithereen (Facebook) because he wants to talk to Mark Zuckerberg.  Tense, but not particularly intriguing.

#3 was about a pop star whose manager refuses to let her expand her repertoire.  I thought it was the best episode of Black Mirror I'd ever seen.  Others disagree.

Incidentally, "Bandersnatch" is no longer posted. Presumably it took too much processing power to leave it available?

Might be because of the lawsuit.

Season six just dropped, after, what, four years? Still incredible stuff.

The first episode, "Joan Is Awful," is about a Netflix-like company (same logo & everything) called Streamberry. A woman, named Joan, is thumbing across the Streamberry offerings and comes across a new show about a woman who looks a lot like her. Played by Salma Hayek. Salma goes through a day exactly like Joan just had, doing the exact same things. Including, at the end of her day, tuning into Streamberry and finding a show, starring Kate Blanchett, who had a day EXACTLY like Salma's.

It gets weirder and funnier from there, sort of like "Russian Doll" which just kept getting stranger and stranger.

The second episode is called "Loch Henry." It was one of the shows Joan scrolled past in episode one.

Bedtime now, but you can bet I'll be sucking up the remaining episodes as fast as I can. I love this "meta" shit.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Incidentally, "Bandersnatch" is no longer posted.  Presumably it took too much processing power to leave it available?

It's the only other season of Black Mirror on Netflix right now.
https://www.netflix.com/search?q=black%20mirror&suggestionId=Collection%3A81136571

Episode 6.3 is about two astronauts who are on some sort of six year space mission, and for mental heath they can "teleport" back to Earth and inhabit a mechanical replica of themselves on Earth.

Then one of the astronaut's replicas (and his human family) get killed by a religious cult. That leaves that particular astronaut stranded aboard the spaceship, unable to "take a breather" on Earth. He's stuck in space with his grief.

The other astronaut takes pity on him and allows him to use his link, and return to Earth as the other astronaut. He warns his wife (played by Kate Mara), and it's awkward for her because the replica looks like her husband, but acts differently. The astronaut in her husband's body breaks down crying, out of relief and due to his grief, and she comforts him, as any normal human would.

Unfortunately he finds himself attracted to his partner's wife. And she finds him more compassionate and caring than her real husband...

Really interesting episode.

Ooooh, the final episode 5 is super creepy.  I won't say more.

Played a couple hours of Bandersnatch, choosing different pathways to see where they go. This program is still mind blowing.