The premise of the technology and its potential impact on society is fascinating, as it essentially turns everyone into living CCTV cameras, but the episode fails to explore the effects it would have on surveillance and privacy in any meaningful way. The third episode of Season 4 focuses on a piece of technology called a “recaller,” a forensic tool that grants police and insurance companies the ability to access witnesses’ memories in order to solve crimes or verify claims. If it weren’t for its terrible ending, which involved infanticide and a guinea pig, there’s a decent chance that “Crocodile” wouldn’t have fallen so low in this ranking. “Fifteen Million Merits” is mostly remembered for Bing’s epic speech-which helped put Kaluuya on Jordan Peele’s radar-but it’s always worth revisiting as we continue to get sucked into our own digital lives, inundated by ads that always seem to know a little too much about our interests. (In a terrifying sequence, Bing doesn’t have enough merits to skip ads, and instead of ignoring them, he’s forced to engage with them.) It’s like Club Penguin from hell.
The episode is, even for Black Mirror standards, quite bleak, as citizens fully embrace their digital avatars and the world’s consumerist-driven bylaws. In one of the show’s most ambitious sci-fi pivots, we follow Bing (a pre– Get Out–fame Daniel Kaluuya), one of many citizens in a dystopian future pedaling stationary bikes-the new world’s power generators-while earning enough “merits” to try to escape that life via an America’s Got Talent–esque show. The one with … the bikes and the reality showīlack Mirror is rarely subtle, so instead of imagining lower-class citizens cycling through an exploitative capitalist system, “Fifteen Million Merits” illustrates it quite literally. And by the time our protagonist, Stripe, starts glitching out, it’s obvious that the soldiers are being brainwashed by their implants-while the rest of the episode’s hourlong run time is spent waiting for Stripe to realize it too. By maybe the 10th instance of a soldier mentioning how excited they are to kill the so-called “roaches,” it’s clear that there’s more to the supposed monsters than we are initially led to believe. The narrative inches along to a twist that the audience has likely already figured out.
While the AR combat interface is a cool visual, reminiscent of shooter games like Halo or Call of Duty, and it’s an interesting idea that the military would create this technology, much of the discourse is familiar. As we come to find out, the technology is largely built with the intention of galvanizing soldiers into killing their enemies and eliminating any possibility that they’ll empathize with their targets on the battlefield. In a dystopian future, soldiers are implanted with neural “Mass” technology, which processes their senses and provides them instant data through an augmented-reality interface. “Men Against Fire” is one of the series’ prime examples of a compelling piece of potential technology being wasted by a flat narrative.
If we wanted to feel bad about pop culture’s influence on our body politic, we’d turn on the news. Still, without a more complicated protagonist to sympathize with, “The Waldo Moment” ends up about as ham-fisted as the malevolent dancing bear for which it’s named. This is an outing that gives ammunition to the critics that accuse Black Mirror of one-note technophobia it’s also a reminder of the early identity the show grew past as creator Charlie Brooker developed an interest in higher-concept, more experimental stuff. But just because “The Waldo Moment” is right doesn’t mean it’s particularly artful. It’s tempting to give this episode retroactive points for its prescient warnings about entertainment and politics, and its initially mocking, disturbingly successful attempts to combine the two. The one with … the political cartoon bear But before we get to the manic, Alexa-like doll voiced by Miley Cyrus or the latest cellphone-induced tirade, let’s look back on Black Mirror ’s first 20 episodes and decide how they stack up against one another. On June 5, Black Mirror will return with three new episodes to remind us, yet again, that technology is just about the scariest thing on earth.