Quote:
Originally Posted by wazz
You may have missed the point of Black Mirror. The tech was always tangential - it was the way it enabled certain aspects of society, that are already present. The clue's in the name - Black Mirror. It is holding up a mirror to our sick society and using tech as a way to explore and magnify those sicknesses. That's when it's at its most compelling.
But that's the thing.
Episode one does exactly this: holds up the mirror to what people will do for money and what attracts people's attention, and how kind of sick it is. Episode is very much in the vein of Black Mirror.
Episode two doesn't hold up any mirror to anything. It's just some guy finding out his parents were rapists/murderers. How to improve it: eliminate the girlfriend aspect. Have the son find out the true nature of the crime. Show how struggles with the decision to cover it up or uses it to become famous. Essentially - the billionaire sub guy's stepson - does he use tragedy for clout?
Episode three doesn't hold up any mirror to anything. It's just showing that when some guy loses his family he goes kind of nuts. How to improve it: focus on the guy starting to go nuts, and how the people in charge of the mission deal with the ethical dilemma of "this guy needs help, but we also need the mission completed". Almost an examination of the current worker-employer relationship - how far do employers push you to your own detriment.
Episode four doesn't even begin to hold up a mirror. It starts off kind of promising with the examination of paparazzi culture, then just randomly veers off to she's a werewolf. How to improve it: focus on the celeb, but show the paparazzi losing interest as she gets older/less famous. Essentially, answer the statement true or false that the one guy makes: "these celebs would probably kill themselves if we stopped taking their picture". Examination of celebrity culture.
Episode five doesn't hold a mirror to anything other than some bizarrely exaggerated sense of the trolley problem. Adding the supernatural element and the racial/political element here just made it a confusing mess. How to improve it: use a regular freaking person trying to convince her to commit crimes "for the greater good". Show cultish behaviour and how a normal person can get their boundaries pushed until they're doing things that they'd never imagined.