Charlie Brooker's BLACK MIRROR

despite the fact that she fucked up this woman's life to an enormous degree

Well, actually, she didn't. And that too is the point. It's not like (spoilers) this is the technology misbehaving, or rebelling, or taking over the world. It's about grief. The central character's life ISN'T fucked up by the android, it's fucked up by her husband dying. And actually, the nosy friend's advice was helpful for a while, it was the main character's decision to push further that was the wrong decision.

in modern day storytelling she needs to be around to react, or to be affected in some way

Uh, why? This would be completely pointless and irrelevant to the story that's being told.

robot clones suddenly exist because facebook invented them

What?

the first round off the line is virtually indistinguishable from humans

I will give you that it's a relatively quick transition, but it's not meant to be set in the present day and then they suddenly appear magically. It's already the future when it starts. I actually thought the news report at the beginning was fairly heavy-handed foreshadowing, but clearly you and kinder both completely missed the set-ups here.

when robot man is still just a phone voice and he tells her how to prepare the realdoll, but he disappears into static

Okay, I'll give you this: there is no _practical_ reason for this to happen. Even though we're told it's still in beta, you'd think that they'd set up the data migration in a way that instructions could be given at the correct time. However, it fits the arc - the husband disappears suddenly, the first ripple also disappears suddenly, and gives way to a hollower echo. It's the narrative of grief, again.

this episode was littered with bombs that never went off.

It wasn't meant to be about bombs going off. It was a quiet reflection on grief and desire and 'you should be careful what you wish for', it wasn't a dystopian futureworld of killer robots.

Seriously, I have no problem with you guys not liking it or it not resonating with you or whatever, but a lot of your 'holes' simply aren't holes.

the leap from a robotic voice on the phone to a self-healing robotic person requires an enormous suspension of disbelief.

It's science fiction! Stories about spaceships require an enormous suspension of disbelief! And it was almost all borderline semi-plausible not too distant future tech. Main problem I had was that although the point of the story is that it wasn't an actual artificial intelligence, I don't think you could get even that level of interaction without genuine AI, but I was willing to give that a pass. Yeah I found this pretty moving, extremely well done in terms of the human details, and seriously when can I get one of those giant L shaped touch screen desktops?

Also anyone complaining this was over stretched and implausible has clearly never seen spielberg's AI.

Well, actually, she didn't.

debatable imo. rather than allow her friend to go through the normal grieving process, she actively harassed her into avoiding it. nosy friend changed her whole life for the worse.

Uh, why? This would be completely pointless and irrelevant to the story that's being told.

so why is she there at all? the widow could have reached that point all by herself (i.e. discovering the zombie social network), but brooker chose to drop in a character to enforce that plot device; that character, then, needs to factor into a later part of the story, especially when her influence leads directly to the devastating final scene. i can't imagine what 2001 would have been like if the monolith had just stopped being in it from the halfway mark.

What?

that's what we're asked to accept. i had already suspended a fair whack of disbelief by that point, but that leap was so enormous that i was really struggling to stay with the core theme from then on.

I actually thought the news report at the beginning was fairly heavy-handed foreshadowing, but clearly you and kinder both completely missed the set-ups here.

i did miss/forget that, yeah, but to be fair that's the sort of thing a storyteller might throw in at the last minute to check a box. by the time the realdoll stuff kicked in, i doubt many viewers remembered that five-second news grab.

It wasn't meant to be about bombs going off. It was a quiet reflection on grief and desire and 'you should be careful what you wish for', it wasn't a dystopian futureworld of killer robots.

i understand your point completely, so it's with extra emphasis that i make the point that those deviations shouldn't have been there in the first place. the only reason i can come up with is that brooker had 48 minutes to fill. this was a twilight zone-length story at best.

It's science fiction! Stories about spaceships require an enormous suspension of disbelief!

this wasn't on a spaceship, it was set on earth in the near future. i myself have made excuses for plenty of science fiction because it's set in a crazy anything-could-happen speculative universe, but this wasn't.

Why wasn't it? If you don't buy my "this is all semi-plausible tech" line (fair enough tbh) it still works as an alternate universe "what if" story. What if we did have Facebook robot clones?

a lot of 16 year-old boys wd be getting laid on the reg?

Why wasn't it? If you don't buy my "this is all semi-plausible tech" line (fair enough tbh) it still works as an alternate universe "what if" story.

self-healing robots? really? i mean maybe there was a roadside billboard that said 'HAPPY NEW NANOMILLENNIUM CITIZENS OF JUPITER' at some point

last year's story about the bloke earning credits on the bike could well have been set so distantly in space/time that pretty much anything is excusable, but we're talking about people dressing like they do now, being in buildings that look like they do now, driving cars that look like they do now &c. no way was this the great chinese kingdom of wales in 2168 or whatever.

Ok there are plenty of details that make this seem like a plausible near future world (slightly sexier phones and desktops) but that doesn't mean it's an actual possible world. It's an SF fairy story. SF can be good without being 100% technologically plausible.

also i don't understand why they have the technology to build near-perfect humanoid robots that self-heal, and yet they post her a dormant android covered in vaseline and she has to tip powder into the bath like it's a sea monkey

Ok there are plenty of details that make this seem like a plausible near future world (slightly sexier phones and desktops) but that doesn't mean it's an actual possible world. It's an SF fairy story. SF can be good without being 100% technologically plausible.

when the plausibility is unprecedented by anything else in the story, it gets in the way. emil.y mentioned that news clip right at the start, which was fairly obviously chucked in during post production, and which i and (presumably) kinder didn't even notice. that's not enough. maybe, i dunno, the protagonists could have had a chat about 'those creepy robots', or a proto-humanoid could have served vol-au-vents at the funeral or something.

I guess my problem is that I don't see why your suggestions make *anything* more plausible. They just clutter up a story with rubbish to hammer home a point. I mean, it is far more plausible to me that the nosy friend is never heard of again, because they weren't close in the first place and that's what happens when you're grieving, but you would relinquish plausibility in this case for plot device to make sure that everything is tied up neatly. Guess what? Life isn't tied up neatly. It's not plausible for all the loose ends to be tied.

And, you know, *why* is it more plausible to have a robot butler be the first instantiation rather than medical uses followed by a weirdo start-up company that preys on grief? I'm not at all sure that it is.

(Also, I assume you were eliding/joking with your interpretation that 'facebook invented it', right? It utilises data from all digital interactions and records in a future where even more interactions are online than they are now, it isn't just 'I have made you out of facebook'.)

It's an SF fairy story. SF can be good without being 100% technologically plausible.

yeah, you basically have to give them this and then judge everything else on its own merits. It's not like it's particularly likely that someone would survive a nuclear apocalypse by being trapped in a a bank vault etc. etc.

(I'm going to stop now... these arguments in a nutshell boil down to 'your plausibility isn't the same as mine', and it's impossible to go anywhere from there.)

They just clutter up a story with rubbish to hammer home a point.

haha, that's the exact point i'm making about this episode, so i'm lost now.

Guess what? Life isn't tied up neatly. It's not plausible for all the loose ends to be tied.

life is also full of really long boring bits. i mean brooker could have made an episode of black mirror with people sitting on a sofa using a transparent ipad for 45 minutes. it's plausible, it could happen, but it wouldn't work as a piece of viewing. that's my point. those loose ends shouldn't have been there, and they arguably wouldn't have been if the episode were half as long.

And, you know, *why* is it more plausible to have a robot butler be the first instantiation rather than medical uses followed by a weirdo start-up company that preys on grief? I'm not at all sure that it is.

as a prelude to a near-perfect humanoid robot? of course it is.

(Also, I assume you were eliding/joking with your interpretation that 'facebook invented it', right? It utilises data from all digital interactions and records in a future where even more interactions are online than they are now, it isn't just 'I have made you out of facebook'.)

i meant the first appearance of these robots was through beta deployment by a social media firm, not as a sex toy for rich blokes or anything (of course i had forgotten about the opening news clip when i wrote that)

(I'm going to stop now... these arguments in a nutshell boil down to 'your plausibility isn't the same as mine', and it's impossible to go anywhere from there.)

it's about more than that. it's about chucking in a load of peripheral elements to pad an hour-long time slot. it's about setting up events, or plot twists, or comeuppances that don't ever happen.

Except that they're not set up to happen to anyone except you!

i think i might resent these films for the crappily portentous series title as much as anything (unless it's a deliberate lol nod to Blue Jam) and the ham-fisted "do you see?"ness of his targets but i've got to agree that arguing plausibility of fantasy/satire plotting always seems like a massive missing of the point to me.

Except that they're not set up to happen to anyone except you!

based on the sample size of this ilx thread? 'er indoors had exactly the same concerns, and we weren't even discussing them as they happened.

I like the title! I mean all these smartphones are literally black mirrors, the double meaning just comes for free so it's not really trying too hard to be clever.

the whole series is called that tho innit? it may've been kinda apposite for that particular ep but y'know

i admit i watch v. sporadically, Brooker's more Partridge than Swift imo

i think all the eps are some variation on technology - specifically the black mirrors/glowing screens consuming 90% of our waking hours - taken TOO FAR.

where does rod serling lie on the partridge/swift axis?

yeah, p sure he said that in an interview last year xp

xp

never really felt that when Shatner was being trolled by that dude in the gorilla suit that Rod Serling was making a telling comment about life in 60s USA

Episodes such as; "The Shelter","He's Alive" or "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" offered specific commentary on current events and social issues

i know, i know, but let's be honest everybody likes the "To Serve Man" stuff better

Burgess Meredith fascist book burning episode = best of both worlds

i think there's something about the aesthetic of the Brooker thing i don't dig, it does remind me of that Adam and Joe pisstake of Blue Jam

CB obviously went to great pains to avoid having people like us go 'but society would be completely different if we had adapted to clones because the whole concepts of mortality and employment and ethics and humanity and law would be unrecognisable compared to today', by way of: Ash no longer had any other family to complicate things, she lived alone in the middle of nowhere so we see nothing of the rest of society (I mean, assuming half the people at the funeral weren't clones? No way of knowing that), also her job is ART which we all know robots can't do.
So I like that he deliberately removed all that stuff so he could focus on what this was about which was grief and how what tech we already have leaves bits of people after they've gone and what would happen if etc etc. I'm not going OH WE DIDN'T SEE ROBOT BUTLERS FAIIILLL.

Robots and clone news stories have been around my entire life, I guess my point is that I couldn't work out whether this was actually supposed to be a very near-future world where surprise! We suddenly have clones, or whether it was actually supposed to reflect a world where, by the time Joe Public could phone-order something that is technologically basically amounts to magic, the concepts of humanity and death etc etc would already have changed. I just couldn't get which it was SUPPOSED to be. And I really don't think it matters much, but both me and my partner were like oh, right, they had magic all along in the world she lives in.

As everyone says, it still works as a what-if story, I just was a bit thrown by which 'what-if'.

he was warning her that she must do something to prepare the realdoll, but she never heard what it was, and again (just like nosy friend) there was no consequence. so why do it? this episode was littered with bombs that never went of

huh yeah, forgot about that, wonder what that was meant to be. Maybe he was trying to say 'there's always money in the banana stand'

swear it was "dont turn on the bathroom light"

Yeah, that's what I thought it was.

Black Mirror works for me as a title because it calls to the mind 'The Haunted Mirror' sequence of Dead of Night, which is obv the ur-text for this kind of thing

"bombs that never go off", like - hot coffee in the car; "don't turn on the light"; etc - these are brilliant ways of making the drama feel sinister and ominous without actually requiring BIG BAD THINGS to happen. love that this Evil Zombie story didn't actually contain an evil zombie.

Thinking about it more, I'm convinced that was what he said when the phone went weird. Why else would have I felt EXTREMELY anxious when she DID the turn the bathroom light on? I thought it was going to lead to some mutation with the eventual clone that emerged.

http://site.mycybertwin.com/

watching it again today, the attic thing is referenced very early on.

tech stuff obviously a pointer that this was near future. and all the AI stuff and real doll stuff was 'in beta'. what gibson said about the future not being well distributed.

and friend only introduced the Eliza-like AI thing, which wasn't even realtime, everything else was suggested by the chatbot itself (as it became available?)

the one thing that did stand out to me as a glaring error was the police car with its lights going when delivering the bad news. why? it wasn't urgent. plus place was isolated, there'd be no traffic.

i find it odd / good that this is about the only non-serial 1hr drama on tv at the moment. are there any others?

48 mins, but who's torrenting

CB obviously went to great pains to avoid having people like us go 'but society would be completely different if we had adapted to clones because the whole concepts of mortality and employment and ethics and humanity and law would be unrecognisable compared to today', by way of: Ash no longer had any other family to complicate things, she lived alone in the middle of nowhere so we see nothing of the rest of society (I mean, assuming half the people at the funeral weren't clones? No way of knowing that), also her job is ART which we all know robots can't do.

i didn't go into this earlier but the pains to which he went jumped out at me like a <thing that jumps out of stuff>. ymmv but to me that feels like a copout, when it would have been more efficient in exposition terms to integrate cues properly. maybe he ran out of time, i dunno.

yes there's no way of knowing half the people at the funeral weren't clones, but again no storytelling device was employed to convey that. it's only the worst and most cynical science fiction writer who suddenly plugs flying cars into book three of lord of the rings and then says 'oh but in book one they all got to rivendell in a flying car, i just didn't tell you about it'

So I like that he deliberately removed all that stuff so he could focus on what this was about which was grief and how what tech we already have leaves bits of people after they've gone and what would happen if etc etc.

the core concept is fantastic, so it's great that he removed some stuff so he could focus on it. what threw both of us off is that he didn't remove more stuff—again, it felt like padding to fill the running time. also i get that the realdoll awakening is supposed to be a stomach-dropping moment for the viewer, but for us it was the moment we gave up suspending our disbelief.

i've focused wholly on the aspects that killed the experience for us, but there were a lot of really lovely and well-executed moment right the way through this.

guys what he said before the phone went weird was don't forget to leave me some clothes, innit.

it was a shit episode by the way.

at least there was shagging in it though. i was worried that there was going to be one episode in which there's no shagging

http://thetweethereafter.com/

aye well. still not fussed about the 'it could never happen' aspect, but that seemed needlessly cruel. are we meant to take home some kind of "retributive justice is bad mmmkay" messsage?

that sucked.

Yeah, that was... muddy.

Shut Up And Dance though...God. I never thought I'd feel physically sick after watching something, and this was after guessing the twist and the outcome. Incredibly well done, but if I could pay for my memory of the episode to be wiped, I would.

Came here just now after watching this one, to see if I wasn't the only one who felt like this. yep, need to chew on something mediocre to get this one out my brain.

although i did not see the twist, i think they used a clever bit of misdirection to throw most of us off that.

The rare show where I kinda never want to watch any of it again

*rare show I admire that*

Though I still haven’t seen this latest season and might never watch it

“Hated in the Nation” is a masterpiece that I must have watched as many times as some of my favourite movies.

Just watched that one, it's great.

San Junipero was one i watched on repeat during Trump's first term. Routinely brought the waterworks

Smithereens - "Can't take the shot, hostage is right behind target".
Erm, move then?

But been enjoying most of these on my binge - goddam need to take break from it tho.

I did watch both the star trek themed ones back to back, really enjoyed those ones.

San Junipero is probably the one I’ve watched most (maybe three times) if you don’t count Bandersnatch

This all started with me wanting to watch Bandersnatch again, but's not available?
So I watched that one with the Thongsroms, or whatever they are called, instead, then the star trek ones, and then just started again from ep1

If you find yourself caught up with Black Mirror, or find it A Bit Much, you might find Love, Death + Robots useful. It scratches some of the same itches (each one a world in itself with its own logic) while being more bite-sized and digestible.

Yeah they took Bandersnatch off Netflix completely, as well as all other interactive video content (like the Kimmy Schmidt movie). Probably too much trouble to support across myriad devices

xp cool, I will have a look at that

"Smithereens" seemed to only get a middling response checking Wikipedia (and here), but I thought it was pretty gripping, and also incredibly accurate on three counts: 1) the easy part, people staring at their phones all day; 2) the timeliness of watching the episode now, after last week's Facebook loss in court over addictiveness; 3) the part I really related to, the nightmare of trying to get a problem resolved with one of these mega-platforms. I've experienced it with FB, Amazon, Google, and others (closer to home, Rogers). Kafkaesque doesn't even begin to describe it. In the episode, you had the woman wanting access to her dead daughter's email account, and of course the dramatically over-the-top lengths Christopher has to go through to speak to Billy Bauer.

Salma Hayek was funny, and clearly having a great time, but "Rose Is Awful" seemed slight, and very far way from the mood that got me interested in this series initially. (The idea felt like a sideways Being John Malkovich.) Thought "Loch Henry" was much better; was surprised at the middling response described on its Wikipedia page. Found it very creepy, especially the twist (maybe I should have seen it coming; I didn't), and loved the way the Melanie song was used.

I liked the mood of "Beyond the Sea," but the Manson connection was puzzling--seemed rather arbitrary.

I've just finished s7. i think Bete Noir was my favourite, although they could've had more fun with it. likewise the Thronglets one... stopped just as it was getting going and didn't really have any surprises.

Eulogy reminded me of a Ted Chiang short story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling

"Despite interviewing a couple who welcome the device as a way to settle arguments and a spokesperson for the maker of Remem, the journalist remains adamant that forgetfulness is essential for forgiving and making personal narratives. For example, he is grateful to have forgotten most arguments with his daughter Nicole when she was a teenager. In particular, he holds in high regard a memory in which Nicole blamed him for her mother's divorce, which prompted him to work on their relationship.

The journalist tries out Remem, but as he seldom lifelogs, he is permitted to access other people's records. Scouting Nicole's lifelog, he is shocked to discover that it was he who blamed Nicole for the divorce. He meets up with her to apologize, but she is amused that he misremembered so badly and annoyed about his self-centeredness and victimism"

in fact, the Thronglets one overlaps slightly with The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the same collection.