Photo: Netflix I haven’t been able to stop thinking about “Striking Vipers.” Black Mirror’s best episodes are about relationships, and how technology can facilitate forms previously impossible in a pre-digital era. That’s why “San Junipero” has remained such a classic entry of the show, not only for its uncharacteristically sunny conclusion but for its bold imagining of new spaces and times and capacities in which people might someday be able to love one another.
“Striking Vipers” is Black Mirror at full potential, potential it hasn’t always risen to, especially since coming under the Netflix umbrella. As an anthology show, Black Mirror is a mixed bag by design, and the sometimes dense amount of world-building and concept-introducing it has to do in an hour can verge on corny and/or blunt.
Thanks in part to a handful of bleaker episodes, Black Mirror now regularly invites a sneering backlash on social media, with a sample criticism reading something like “Cor blimey, the computers’ll fuck you up proper, mate!” The joke being that the show is alarmist, alarmist about things that smart people have already thought about and don’t think are worth discussing further, and British.
I’ve had a few IRL conversations about “Smithereens,” the second episode of the new season. It’s the one where Andrew Scott is an Uber driver named Chris, who takes a Smithereen intern hostage and demands to speak to CEO Billy Bauer . A common gripe with the episode seems to focus on the reveal that Chris’s life fell apart after he was tweeting and driving, and since that day he has held Bauer and the company responsible for how they’ve colonized our brains.