How's that for twisted? What's great here is Brooker's stance on war and how the military is brainwashed not just in the field of battle, but as they come home, too, as seen when Stripe (Kirby) returns home after being discharged and is met by the digital hallucination of his presumed girlfriend back home. Turns out the "roaches" are just regular people on the wrong end of an ethnic cleansing, and the military needed its soldiers to believe they were doing the right thing. Review: It's surprising it's taken Brooker this long to examine tech and its use in the military, but he finally goes hard at it here with an augmented-reality system that makes the enemy look like monsters.
Malachi Kirby, Black Mirror Laurie Sparham/Netflixīrief synopsis: A soldier outfitted with a military-grade AR implant is in his first deployment to help eradicate mutant humans known as "roaches." "Men Against Fire" starring Malachi Kirby, Madeline Brewer and Michael Kelly Possibility this can happen to you in real life: We're still a ways out from getting eBees buzzing around or inside our heads, but online threats turning to real violence is actually a thing and should be taken seriously.ĥ. Real-life tech and behavior that led to "Hated in the Nation": Anyone who has written something on the internet has become a victim of cyber bullying, and obviously we've all regretfully clicked on a headline that starts with "You'll Never Guess." The episode also touches on the scary thought of prevalent automation, government surveillance and its danger to privacy and a hacker getting control of it all. I'd love to give Black Mirror a mulligan and see Brooker tackle internet hate in another episode.
To be honest, I was rooting for the eBees. However, "Hated in the Nation" gets props for its clear attack on Buzzfeed (buzz, get it?) and the jerks who go online and spit out hateful things behind a keyboard.
The real juice is with the idea of internet hatred and clickbait stories, but when coupled with the bees, it falls a bit flat. However, it's not the best episode of Black Mirror because its storyline about automated drone bees terrorizing the population is a bit silly. I like the attempt to change up the genre here and go for a detective story, and as it turns out, it's the best episode of Minority Report that never happened. Review: BEES! At almost 90 minutes long, this is more like a feature film than an episode of an anthology. "Hated in the Nation" starring Kelly Macdonaldīrief synopsis: When victims of internet outrage are murdered, a detective (Macdonald) must solve the crime and stop it from happening again. Below, we've ranked and reviewed all six episodes from Season 3 - and examined how they relate to our increasingly tech-centric world today.Ħ. In Season 3 alone, there's horror, a police procedural, a war drama and more.įans of the first two seasons needn't worry because Season 3 is as good as if not better the originals, and with Netflix's fat wallet, looks better than ever. Black Mirror also never ties itself down to a genre.
It's essentially an excellent update on The Twilight Zone with each episode telling a self-contained story revolving around a few technological concepts - drones and mass internet hatred in "Hated in the Nation," for example - combined with Brooker's love for the bizarre, ironic and tragic. The best way to watch Black Mirror is to know as little about it as possible
Charlie Brooker's new Netflix series - which originally debuted two seasons on the U.K.'s Channel 4 before being scooped up exclusively by Netflix for Seasons 3 and 4 - examines our relationship with technology in (usually) bleak fashion, telling cautionary tales about tech going out of control, mankind's abuse of new technology and how advances in gadgets and gizmos can spell our doom.