Yet I’ll admit to feeling a little upset when the episode ended with his mind wiped and forever trapped in a rogue universe of his own creation, one deleted by the endless possibility of a world open to everyone. Why would he want all of his creations to be sans genitals, other than the writers’ need to eliminate as much horrifying sexual content from an already horrifying scenario as possible? And as a slightly-less-cynical-but-still-pretty-cynical geek myself, I cringed a bit at Bob.īob’s sexlessness, for instance, felt a little strange.
Black mirror episode season 4 episode 1 tv#
Brooker often lays most heavily into the cynical geeks he could have been a member of, but for the fact that he created a massively popular TV show (or two). I should be clear here that the incredibly lacerating portrayal of Bob feels like a Brooker special.
The world, for Bob, isn’t one of infinite possibility. He wants to possess her, and the boss he feels humiliated by, and the receptionist who never greets him as effusively as he’d like, and the underling he never pays attention to. He doesn’t want to get to know Nanette, or even go out with her. Bob is stealing the DNA of his coworkers, feeding it into his computer, then introducing digital clones of all of them into the world of the USS Callister, the USS Enterprise of Space Fleet. Nanette loves Bob’s code, and it’s not hard to think, in the early going of “Callister,” that it might be about Bob coming out of his shell, or leaving behind his nerdy affection for the obvious Star Trek ripoff Space Fleet, into which he invests many hours each night, playing a hacked online virtual reality simulation of the cheesy ’60s series.Įxcept no, not really. Charlie Brooker is too much of a cynic to ever think there’s an easy solution to anything.īut there are very good reasons the episode paints the seemingly mild-mannered genius programmer Bob ( Jesse Plemons) as the very worst sort of human being, who literally desires to possess the people in his office, but especially his cute new coworker, Nanette ( Cristin Milioti).
To be fair, I don’t think the writers of “USS Callister” believe that society’s ills would be solved by the disappearance of all white men. “USS Callister” savages the limitations of nerd imagination Nanette finds herself in a very strange predicament. (I could not tell you the race of a co-writer, William Bridges, so I won’t speculate.) And I should mention that I, your humble critic, am also a white man.Īll I’m saying is 2017 is wild. What’s more, “USS Callister” was co-written by one powerful white guy (Charlie Brooker, who became well-known thanks to his writing about video games) and directed by another ( Toby Haynes). This is normally the point at which I get a bunch of emails taking me to task for reading themes of racial and gender representation into a work that didn’t require it, except everything I just described is the text of “USS Callister,” right down to the rage-filled white nerd whose mind is destroyed by a video game.
In Black Mirror season 4, humanism triumphs over nihilism - but only barely
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