![]() The cops are willing to subject Potter to a thousand years of misery just because they can with the click of a button. Matt mourns the loss of his marriage, but doesn’t mourn the geeky guy who was poisoned by a bad date. ![]() We’ve all read the studies about how easy it is to become a cyberbully: when the victim is at a distance, separated by a screen, it’s easier to be cruel than if we had to encounter their pain in person. That he must suffer twice, with his cookie-self living a thousands years of misery, and his real self in jail, made me feel horrible for him.īut that’s part of the point of Black Mirror, in general and this episode, in particular. Rafe Spall, on the other hand, made me sympathize with a stalker, which is a pretty phenomenal reach goal. Jon Hamm excels at smarmy charisma his fate-to live in a world in which he can have no human interaction, since everyone is blocked from him, and he from them-is poetically just, since manipulating people is both his job and his pleasure. I loved the way it all came together at the end: Matt’s stories about blocking and cookies, the foreshadowing (in the first vignette) about how you can never quite know what’s going on with a person, the sense that the cabin acts as a sort of island purgatory, in which the men tell stories about themselves to feel better about their actions.Ī huge part of the success of that cohesion comes from both actors. Throughout, there are hints that we’re not getting all of the information we need (Where are they? What are their jobs?) and that the world they live in might not make sense (Where did the clock come from?). Indeed, the “White” in “White Christmas” might refer to the heaping grains of salt we have to take with all three of the stories we see. As Potter tells it, her actions are unwarranted, but-especially in an episode in which the other two stories are about men lying to and manipulating women-it’s probably best to take his version with a grain of salt. One fight led to his girlfriend “blocking” him: using her “Z-eyes” chip, she fuzzed him out so she couldn’t see or hear him, and vice versa, just as Matt’s wife did to him. ![]() After years and years trapped in the same cabin, Matt finally gets Potter to open up. I could not imagine doing that to a digital version of myself, but Black Mirror, via Matt, tells us there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have the empathy to realize how miserable the human-cookie would be, and those who, like Matt, are stone-cold assholes.Īssholes who know exactly what to say in every given situation, that is. In addition to the above-mentioned hobby, Matt had a day job: forcing digital clones of real people to come to terms with the misery of their life trapped in a “cookie” that functions as a smarthome- cum-personal assistant. The second vignette is most evocative of previous Black Mirror episodes. The parallels between the young woman’s schizophrenia and the young man’s crowd-sourced Cyrano de Bergerac was classic Black Mirror: at what point does a connected life become the same thing as the loss of self and reality? (The little hints that Matt was lying-as when he claimed to hear about the death on the news, or that he was the only one watching-were fun, too.) The young man’s earnest efforts to win over a beautiful young woman were both sweet and creepy he didn’t deserve his brutal end. In the first of those vignettes, Matt uses a neural-ocular chip to coach a wannabe pick-up artist. At first, I thought “White Christmas” was functioning as a clip show: Jon Hamm’s Matt and Rafe Spall’s Potter might only be a storytelling device, and the little vignettes about technology were ideas, perhaps, that Brooker had not been able to make into a real plot. The Netflix logline for this episode explains that “Three interconnected tales of technology run amok during the Christmas season are told by two men at a remote outpost in a frozen wilderness.” Armed with only that knowledge and some certainty Jon Hamm was involved, it took me awhile to figure out what the episode was doing. “White Christmas,” the 2014 Christmas special now available on Netflix in the US, has misery aplenty, but the sympathetic characters make its grimness more compelling. Charlie Brooker’s bleak dystopias seemed possible, but the combination of awkward situations and unrelatable characters resulted in more cringes than tears. The first two seasons of Black Mirror are all misery, no catharsis.
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