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Black Mirror
- 301 statements
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Look at you. Glued to your chair, eyeballs helplessly fixated on your intoxicating, mesmerizing computer screen, the black mirror through which you view the world around you. You've spent countless hours assigning meaningless labels to places that aren't real and people you will never meet, and for what? Perhaps you'd be better off categorizing the tropes of your own life.Black Mirror is a UK science fiction horror anthology series produced (and primarily written) by Dead Set creator Charlie Brooker. The series is inspired by The Twilight Zone and is named for the reflection visible in a blackened digital screen. The episodes all explore techno-paranoia and general unease with the modern world. They are usually set in an alternative present or near-future dystopia and often have dark and satirical tones, although some episodes are more experimental and even lighter.Since its premiere on December 4, 2011, Black Mirror currently consists of 27 episodes across six series and one special, in addition to the interactive film Bandersnatch, released at the end of 2018. The first two series and the special were all aired on Channel 4 between 2011 and 2014 before the show moved to Netflix, where it remains to this day. While Brooker was initially unsure about the future of the show following its fifth series, a sixth series was announced in May 2022, and it was released on June 15, 2023.As each episode is set in its own continuity, only recurring tropes can be found on this page. There's a Recap page for the episodes; please put episode-specific examples on the appropriate page.Black Mirror has also extended into other forms of media. Black Mirror Labyrinth, a walkthrough maze at Thorpe Park Resort, opened in May 2021, having been delayed from 2020 by the COVID-19 Pandemic. A literary series of original Black Mirror stories edited by Brooker was also planned, but was postponed indefinitely in 2018 due to his lack of time to work on them.Trailers: Series 1, Series 2, the Christmas Special, Series 3, and Series 4, Series 5, Series 6. | |
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Pop-Cultural Osmosis | |
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Pop-Cultural Osmosis: A variety of this may be the reason why Netflix took interest in the show, as well as the effect the show underwent after being on Netflix (especially Black Mirror: San Junipero). | |
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Never Trust a Trailer | |
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Never Trust a Trailer: The series adverts, which are a cocktail of Chekhov's Guns and Red Herrings. It's worth watching them again post-series to see what was and wasn't foreshadowed for the plots. | |
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Inconsistent Episode Lengths | |
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Inconsistent Episode Lengths: Being an anthology series, Black Mirror has episodes of varying lengths, from 41 minutes at the shortest to 89 minutes at the longest. | |
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Pastiche | |
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Pastiche: Towards The Twilight Zone and Tales of the Unexpected, among others. | |
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Crappy Holidays | |
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Crappy Holidays: Advertising for the Series Four utilized its December 29th release date well, halfway between Christmas and New Year. | |
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Visual Title Drop | |
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Visual Title Drop: No one actually says the words "black mirror" in any of the episodes; it refers to the darkened digital screens of technology. However, some shots have characters looking at such screens, referring to the title. | |
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Humans Are Flawed | |
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Humans Are Flawed: One perspective is that the way humans treat each other in this show occurs simply because we've begun developing technology without first taking into account the potential ethical consequences they may cause. | |
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OnceAnEpisode | |
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Once an Episode: Characters looking into mirrors and/or darkened screens. Doubles as a Visual Title Drop for the series as a whole. | |
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Ludd Was Right | |
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Ludd Was Right: Deconstructed. While the series shows several horrors archived through technology, the critic is often target at the people using it (see Humans Are Flawed above), not the technology itself. | |
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Our Clones Are Different | |
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Our Clones Are Different: In a rare example of a Recurring Element, "White Christmas" introduces the Cookies, a type of digital copy of a person's consciousness. They are denied basic human rights and dismissed by humanity as a whole, to the point where all sorts of inhumane actions are fully permitted as long as it's a cookie. These include blatant slavery, creating a cookie to interrogate them for the original's crime, and forcing them to listen to the same song on repeat for 2 million years. A Continuity Nod in "Hated in the Nation" shows that they were eventually given more freedom by the European Court of Human Rights, though their abuse continues to be a plot point in several episodes. "USS Callister" shows that making a Cookie is really easy. The Villain Protagonist Robert Daly can recreate a person from even the tiniest DNA sample, complete with not only their exact likeness but also memories too. He uses them to get back at their original human counterparts without any public consequences. | |
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Techno Dystopia | |
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Techno Dystopia: An anthology series that has the main theme of nasty consequences caused by the use of technology, so most of the episodes set in the future would at least somewhat count, but the most notable example is in the episode Fifteen Million Merits, where people live underground, having to ride exercise bicycles to generate energy, while television literally rules the society. | |
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Humans Are Bastards | |
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Humans Are Bastards: A common interpretation of the series, as the characters are prone to horribly abuse each other. Interestingly, creator Charlie Brooker believes that most people are inherently good, they act in horrible ways simply because they're afraid, ignorant, short-sighted, or unable/unwilling to oppose the few characters that are evil. | |
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Take That, Critics! | |
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Take That, Critics!: A mild-mannered one — a journalist mocking the show's New Media Are Evil theme and its plots tweeted "what if phones, but too much". Brooker read it, thought it was funny, and used it as a plot point to "Playtest", one of the episodes in the third season. | |
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A.I. Is a Crapshoot | |
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A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Notably averted. The artificial intelligences depicted on the show always do their best to fulfil exactly the purpose they were made for; nothing more, nothing less. Any evil the artificial intelligences end up doing is either the result of their human operators deciding to use them for a sinister purpose or misapplying them out of ignorance. | |
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Downer Ending | |
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Downer Ending: Most of the endings of the episodes end on a bleak and depressing note, with some of the endings being bittersweet. | |
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Author Tract | |
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Author Tract: The entire point of the series, when you get down to it, is making a point on the effects of technological advancement on our humanity. Charlie Brooker was never a subtle man. | |
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Early-Installment Weirdness | |
| Black Mirror / int_4f4372e9 | comment |
Early-Installment Weirdness: Before technology became the central theme of the series, rather than "just" an important motif. The first two episodes, by contrast, featured dystopian scenarios where technology was an important element, but certainly not the central focus. The first season finale, "The Entire History of You," was the first story where technology actually had a central role, and the second season cemented and codified the "horror stories about technology" theme that has continued ever since. The first two seasons primarily use the United Kingdom as the main setting and UK citizens being the main characters in each story. Once Netflix got involved, American characters and locations begin to gain focus. | |
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Everything Is an iPod in the Future | |
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Everything Is an iPod in the Future: The futuristic technology seen is generally sleek (with intuitive touchpads and few external features like buttons), professional-looking, and aesthetically stark and minimalist. | |
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Creative Closing Credits | |
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Creative Closing Credits: Combined with The Stinger, the credits sometimes show the aftermath of each story. | |
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Pædo Hunt | |
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Pædo Hunt: In two separate episodes, vigilante justice goes after paedophiles. This is likely in reference to the ever-growing historical child abuse scandals (figures of authority raping and sexually abusing children beyond the statute of limitations) popping up around the time. | |
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Freeze-Frame Bonus | |
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"Smithereens" has a Freeze-Frame Bonus where we see Saito Geimu using the eponymous Twitter-like service. | |
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British Brevity | |
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British Brevity: The first two seasons total three hour-length episodes per season, and a Christmas Special. The first season was only meant to be a mini-series, but it proved to be so successful that the show was commissioned for another one. The Netflix run has longer seasons, but at six episodes each, they still fall well within this ballpark. | |
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The Power of Love | |
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The Power of Love: Two of the only three episodes with completely happy endings revolve around a relationship. Every other is either bittersweet or a downer episode. | |
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Christmas Episode | |
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Christmas Episode: Series Four, by release date, and enforced by "USS Callister". | |
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New Media Are Evil | |
| Black Mirror / int_7a12aabf | comment |
New Media Are Evil: A recurring theme, as technological advancement often causes more harm than good to the human characters. But is it more the technology or the people who use it, and/or how they're choosing to use it? | |
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Breather Episode | |
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Breather Episode: A few of the episodes have the endings be more bittersweet so that the viewer can't constantly assume the worst possible thing will happen every time. "San Junipero" straight up ends on an unambiguously happy note, and also features an incredibly optimistic and sweet romance with virtually no hints of malice or cynicism (and is fittingly sandwiched between two rather bleak episodes). "Nosedive" is also considerably less far-fetched, dire, and depressing than other episodes. "USS Callister" has a dark premise, but ends with the protagonists victorious and the villain earning a well-deserved Karmic Death, on top of its numerous homages and shout outs to Star Trek: The Original Series. "Hang the DJ" is a straight-up love story, with the catch that every relationship has a pre-determined expiry date. The world of the episode turns out to be a simulation inside a dating app, where the main characters defy that limit, fall in love and escape 998 times out of a 1000. Said app is the only tech used in the episode, neither real or virtual people are hurt, and our main characters find each other in the real world, standing a few feet away from one another. "Black Museum" most certainly isn't this trope initially, Featuring the most horrific examples of And I Must Scream in the entire series, and the most depraved villain the series, but it ends on an unambiguously positive note, with Haynes being dead and those harmed by him set free. "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too", despite a dark subplot involving popstar Ashley O being drugged into a coma by her aunt/manager, who then uses brain-scanning technology to pluck songs out of her comatose brain, is actually quite humourous and light-hearted throughout much of its runtime, largely due to the adorable Ashley Too robot, and has a definite happy ending where the real Ashley successfully exposes her aunt's plot, and later, is free to make the music she truly wants, with Jack playing guitar with her on stage during the episode's musical coda. | |
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Villain Protagonist | |
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Villain Protagonist: As a result of the series' You Bastard! attitude toward humanity, several episodes feature this sort of protagonist. | |
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Existential Horror | |
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Existential Horror: Very often plays on this, especially in episodes with plots concerning the possibility of digital simulations of human minds, asking, amongst other things, the classic questions such as "It is even possible to perfectly simulate the intricate workings of a human mind?", "What if the simulated human mind discovers that it is a simulation?", "Do the feelings and thoughts of a simulated human matter?", and of course "For what purpose would someone go through all the trouble of simulating a human mind?" The answer to that last one is rarely ever very pleasant. | |
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Asshole Victim | |
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Asshole Victim: Occasionally played straight, but deconstructed more often than not, particularly in "White Bear", "Shut Up and Dance", "Hated in the Nation", "White Christmas", and "USS Callister". The assholes often do things that make them seem unsympathetic such as being rude overall to engaging in child murder or pornography, but the events they go through are so utterly horrific that any sense of schadenfreude is drained right out. Meanwhile, their tormentors, those that have designated them assholes, are very clearly little better than those they attack and humiliate, often using pretensions of vigilante justice to engage in being assholes themselves. | |
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Karmic Death | |
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"USS Callister" has a dark premise, but ends with the protagonists victorious and the villain earning a well-deserved Karmic Death, on top of its numerous homages and shout outs to Star Trek: The Original Series. | |
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Wacky Americans Have Wacky Names | |
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Wacky Americans Have Wacky Names: Inverted in that all the character names are pretty normal for the UK, but, when exported, Americans had some trouble with some like "Susannah" and especially "Ffion". | |
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Social Media Is Bad | |
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Social Media Is Bad: Since social networks are widely-used new media, they tend to feature in the storylines. Some episodes are more overt and include it in the episode's gimmick (for example, "Be Right Back" is about the hollowness of online personas; "Nosedive" is about a society that has taken social media ratings too far); others are more subtle (eg. "Hated in the Nation" features online mob mentality as part of its plot). | |
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Mundanger | |
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Mundanger: Surprisingly prevalent. There are only a few episodes with more outlandish threats. Mostly, Black Mirror deals with things like the fear of losing a child or a spouse, the fear of heartbreak and infidelity, the fear of losing your social standing, etc. and how human reaction to these things is twisted by new technology. | |
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Gut Punch | |
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Gut Punch: When it comes to Black Mirror, the episodes' dark tones are almost always cemented by either Plot Twists or horrifying reveals. | |
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Cute Machines | |
| Black Mirror / int_a31c7ef4 | comment |
"Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too", despite a dark subplot involving popstar Ashley O being drugged into a coma by her aunt/manager, who then uses brain-scanning technology to pluck songs out of her comatose brain, is actually quite humourous and light-hearted throughout much of its runtime, largely due to the adorable Ashley Too robot, and has a definite happy ending where the real Ashley successfully exposes her aunt's plot, and later, is free to make the music she truly wants, with Jack playing guitar with her on stage during the episode's musical coda. | |
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Double-Meaning Title | |
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Double-Meaning Title: Black Mirror is at once a reference to the cold, shiny screens of the devices we are so attached to, and a statement of how advanced technology can reflect the darkest aspects of human nature back at us. | |
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And I Must Scream | |
| Black Mirror / int_a8a04f6f | comment |
"Black Museum" most certainly isn't this trope initially, Featuring the most horrific examples of And I Must Scream in the entire series, and the most depraved villain the series, but it ends on an unambiguously positive note, with Haynes being dead and those harmed by him set free. | |
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Idiosyncratic Episode Naming | |
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Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Possibly by complete accident, but one episode every series (except series 5) is named after a song: "The National Anthem" in series 1, "White Bear" in series 2, the special "White Christmas", "Shut Up and Dance" in series 3, "Hang the DJ" in series 4 and "Beyond the Sea" in series 6. | |
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Alphabet News Network | |
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Alphabet News Network: UKN, the fictional news channel which reports on stories throughout the series. In 'The National Anthem' it is said to exist alongside the BBC, ITV and Sky in the Black Mirror universe. | |
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Take That! | |
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Take That!: Far too many. The main target is humanity's propensity to uncritically adopt new technology without taking into account the ethical and societal consequences, but other favorite targets are harsh justice systems and vigilantism, consumerism and mass entertainment, over-controlling parents and jealous spouses, our declining faith in politics, and general apathy in the face of other people's suffering. | |
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Extra-Long Episode | |
| Black Mirror / int_b96fdd94 | comment |
Extra-Long Episode: Consider that the "episodes" are more like shows and aren't episodic, nor regular outside of the particular series. Most of the episodes of the first two series, broadcast with ad breaks on Channel 4, are 45 minutes long, but the second one, "Black Mirror: Fifteen Million Merits" is over 60. The 2014 Christmas movie, "Black Mirror: White Christmas", coming in at 75 minutes (internally split into three parts that depict related story lines). The third series "series finale", "Black Mirror: Hated in the Nation", was just short of full feature film at 89 minutes, compared to the about 60 minute average of series three shows. "Black Mirror: Black Museum" at 70 minutes, and "Black Mirror: USS Callister" at 75 minutes, are run as feature-length, compared to the standard for the fourth series shows (between 40 minutes and an hour). | |
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Preserve Your Gays | |
| Black Mirror / int_bacf8e98 | comment |
Preserve Your Gays: Gets special mention for being a show that's utterly miserable, except for the happy relationships of Kelly & Yorkie and Frank & Amy. Yorkie is a lesbian, Kelly and Amy are bisexual. | |
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Thematic Series | |
| Black Mirror / int_bc5ddda5 | comment |
Thematic Series: The episodes are stand-alone films with technology and society as central themes. "How dangerous is Twitter?" posed in three different ways during Second Series: It is possible to use the personal nature of social media uploads to effectively recreate the humour and mind of a deceased person., It distracts you from having humanity for the sake of recording popular moments, ending up with a herd of sheeples terrorizing people., A political joke gains twitter notoriety that translates into real-world popularity, despite being the worst person for the job. | |
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Who Names Their Kid "Dude"? | |
| Black Mirror / int_c1d1d6ad | comment |
Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Who Names Their Kid Yorkie, or Blue!? Mentioned by Kelly and Karin: | |
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Finagle's Law | |
| Black Mirror / int_c26ebed4 | comment |
Finagle's Law: A feature of Charlie Brooker's writing. He often says that he likes to imagine what is the worst thing that could happen, given some hypothetical new technology or societal trend. However, some episodes in later seasons defy this. | |
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Shout-Out | |
| Black Mirror / int_c75df49a | comment |
Shout-Out: Ashley O's hit song is a cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like A Hole", with the lyrics slightly changed. She later covers the song itself at the end of the episode. The eponymous game in "Striking Vipers" is reminiscent of the biggest Fighting Games. "Smithereens" may as well be a crossover with Silicon Valley. | |
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SlidingScaleOfCynicismVersusIdealism | |
| Black Mirror / int_ca1417c5 | comment |
Sliding Scale of Cynicism Versus Idealism: Tends to be more cynical. Technological advancement paves the way for humans mistreating and taking advantage of each other, to great consequence. "San Junipero" and "Hang the DJ" are exceptions, falling somewhere on the idealist side of the scale. | |
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Lighter and Softer | |
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Lighter and Softer: Series Four is, looking at it broadly, more upbeat than the first three. It seems like "Hang the DJ" is the only unambiguously positive episode of the whole show. | |
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Transparent Tech | |
| Black Mirror / int_d248a283 | comment |
Transparent Tech: Some episodes set in near-future dystopias make use of transparent screens to demonstrate that it's the future, but one we're not that far away from. | |
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Continuity Creep | |
| Black Mirror / int_de7891ec | comment |
Continuity Creep: Originally, each episode was completely standalone, their settings often being mutually incompatible. Later however, episodes started having direct references to each other, with much of the technology being similar, suggesting that many, if not all, do share the setting after all. | |
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Decoy Protagonist | |
| Black Mirror / int_df410b77 | comment |
Decoy Protagonist: Most notably showcased in "USS Callister," as Robert Daly, while initially appearing to be the protagonist, is actually the antagonist that his newest employee, Nanette, has to overcome with the help of her real-life coworkers' virtual equivalents. Later on, in "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too," Rachel is a Decoy Protagonist for Ashley Too when the latter (a "smart" doll based on the pop singer Ashley O) has her limiter removed, thus turning her into an unfiltered, profanity-spewing version (not unlike her real-life equivalent) that convinces Rachel and her sister Jack to save the day and prevent Ashley's evil aunt from killing her. | |
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Biting-the-Hand Humor | |
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Biting-the-Hand Humor: Season 6 introduces Streamberry, a reskinned version of the home streamer Netflix, with a red logo, a similar "tu-dumm" startup noise, and nigh-identical UI...to take potshots at Netflix. In "Joan is Awful" the characters complain about subpar offerings ("it blows", "can't really do another true crime"). In addition to the obvious themes about how one views themselves from the perspectives of subject and audience member, it is also about how the titular streamer-produced show glamorizes and bastardizes its subjects while prioritizing low-effort stories (to the tune of just using CG and AI to dramatize a subscriber's life). In "Loch Henry" Streamberry blithely accepts acclaim for producing Davis's documentary, even though the things he learned to gain their large true crime fandom ruined his personal life and destroyed him emotionally. | |
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Rousseau Was Right | |
| Black Mirror / int_eb2195d9 | comment |
Rousseau Was Right: The series overall shows this quite often, though rendered through a heavily cynical lens. Humans are generally portrayed as more or less decent or well-intentioned, but the presence of technology brings out the worst in them. Charlie Brooker once described this in an interview: | |
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Crossover | |
| Black Mirror / int_eb7c34cf | comment |
"Smithereens" may as well be a crossover with Silicon Valley. | |
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20 Minutes into the Future | |
| Black Mirror / int_f32d85ab | comment |
20 Minutes into the Future: Most episodes are set just far enough in the future to allow the advanced technology to exist. "The National Anthem", "The Waldo Moment", and "Shut Up and Dance" are exceptions as, due to no visible tech advancement, they are presumably set around present day. Indeed, a Freeze-Frame Bonus shows they take place at about the same time — Carlton Bloom's "agitation exhibit" is mentioned during a broadcast during the Waldo Moment. Inverted with "Beyond the Sea", which features some advanced technology – realistic androids that can be remotely operated with the mind – despite being set in the 1960s. | |
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You Bastard! | |
| Black Mirror / int_f642b1f9 | comment |
You Bastard!: As observed in numerous reviews of the series, Black Mirror's stories take many digs at the selfishness and pettiness of contemporary humans as amplified by technology. | |
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Cyberpunk | |
| Black Mirror / int_fb01ee16 | comment |
Cyberpunk: Played with. The show features many of the Cyberpunk genre's signature elements (dystopian near-future settings, sinister technology that crushes human souls, a general cynicism about humanity's motivations). However, it almost totally lacks the stylish exaggerations and film noir trappings that are also very typical of Cyberpunk, and the protagonists are usually everymen, not the romanticized outcasts of Cyberpunk lore. | |
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Black Mirror |
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