Praise before criticism: I like the Trek aesthetic, it's cool, and I feel - and this is something I'll come back to several times in writing this - that it had a lot of genuine potential had it gone a different way. The framework is great, but what's done with those technological and social aspects falls short. Especially towards the end, it arrives more at the level of rather indulgent standard television compared to the series' typical morality tale ideal. To me, an episode of Black Mirror should have a moral message relating to technology and society: that's the reason for the title, and what it started with, thematically.
"USS Callister" could have been both incredibly unnerving and incredibly relevant: you have a repressed, un-social man in a position of power, and he uses it to (in his fantasy) abuse his co-workers, with a particularly predatory interest in women. This is 2017, and we have a story about a man in a position of power abusing it in a clearly toxic workplace for his own gains while the truth is concealed. Does that seem at all familiar? Do you think maybe this episode could have delved into that? Apparently not, because it ends up being some kind of pseudo-nightmare about the weirdness of someone abusing a digital copy of you, and focusing on those digital copies and thus emphasizing the detachment from reality. The impact on real people - and for what the episode tries to make them "real," it in no way links the digital clones to their real-life counterparts - is simply ignored. A question can be asked of all Black Mirror episodes: why is this relevant? For most you can state its relevance quite easily, because the nature of morality tale storytelling requires that the moral/ethical message is fairly obvious, otherwise it loses potency and relevance.
"USS Callister" presents a fairly typical story: what if a nerd turned real people he disliked/desired into digital puppets for his fantasies? Then, in Black Mirror style, it gives the techno-social twist that these digital creations are fully self-aware and horrified at their predicament. They rebel against their creator/overlord and acquire their freedom, seemingly trapping their ex-tyrant to his righteous fate of being trapped forever in his own creation.
Firstly: what is the moral message of this Black Mirror fable? Is it that immersion in virtual reality will distort our view of actual reality? That was the plot to "Playtest" of last season, which succeeded not only in its clever twist ending, but also embodied the feeling of existential terror as one, immersed in virtual/augmented reality, fails to recognise what is real or fake anymore. It, like the best Black Mirror episodes, taps into our paranoia and engages it, exaggerating it but enough to make the point clear, and through theme, tone, and narrative, convinces the viewer of its moral message: irresponsibility with virtual reality is thoroughly dangerous; also, turn your bloody cellphone off when you're asked to, you reprobate.
In "USS Callister" there is a clear villain, a clear protagonist, and a clear struggle of person vs. person. Technology - and I'll note that this is probably the first episode of Black Mirror to so thoroughly explain the episode's tech - is, in this case, not part of the conflict. It is not a target of the conflict, and arguably it's not even an augmentation of the conflict: the episode can be summed up, in entirely contemporary analogue, to a repressed guy replicating himself and his co-workers as Sims and abusing them. That's not something that takes cutting-edge technology; I could do that messed up stuff exactly right now, the chief difference being I can be reasonably sure my digital "clones" won't try to kill me. This banality of technology - or perhaps an over-reliance on technology as narrative device - is something that I'll reference again in my review of the second episode of this season, because it's very relevant there, too.
This could have been a very good episode either about the broad dissociation caused by easily-available virtual reality, as an expansion to last season's "Playtest," or it could have been an examination of how near-future technology could exacerbate contemporary issues of toxic workplaces and relationships. Instead, it tells an almost comic, pseudo-horror story about a group of virtual prisoners who launch a daring escape attempt and succeed. There's no moral message to glean from this. The death/virtual imprisonment of Daly at the end offers no message in itself either, and is more indulgence of a victor-and-vanquished narrative that Black Mirror hasn't typically engaged with. Previous episodes have tended towards a look at broad social effects: this episode deals with a single, isolated incident centred around one person, which in all likelihood will not be repeated due to the explicitly mentioned particulars of Daly's creation. What does this episode say about society? What does it say about technology? What does it say about the interplay of each in the contemporary Western world?
Nothing. There's no moral message to the viewer from "USS Callister," other than to maybe watch where you leave your rubbish around the office. Instead, you get a relatively uplifting story of digital people who find freedom. These digital people are not us; they do not reflect us; their situation is entirely unique to them. In fact, most damningly, we don't actually see any of the fallout from the end of Daly's virtual reality prison: part of it is left to nothing, as the real life people don't and can't know what happened to their counterparts, and part of it is the lack of any reaction from anyone else. Does Cole tell anyone? Does anyone believe her? What happens to the company? Even as a narrative, completely ignoring it being Black Mirror, this is a poorly written short story. Despite being a fairly lengthy 73 minutes, there's little resolution and zero moral message.
Impressively disappointing Black Mirror episode; barely acceptable episode of anything else.
Originally Posted by lantzblades
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
