✦Elzary
Cinema·5 min read·👀 Watched 2023.06.19

Black Mirror S6

The familiar Black Mirror is back. Virtual worlds, no privacy, phones eavesdropping — have you ever actually read the terms of service?

2023 · Sci-fi · Charlie Brooker · Netflix

Virtual worlds, no more privacy, phones eavesdropping — have you ever actually read the terms of service?

The familiar Black Mirror is back — that's what I thought by the ending.

Do we really live in reality?

Like Lao Gao and many others have said, maybe we're living inside a giant program or a vat, and we inside it — just like everyone in the show — think we live in true reality.

At the 2016 Code Conference, Elon Musk said: "The chance that our world is not a simulation is less than one in a billion."

Why? One day we won't be able to tell which is the game and which is reality, and by then such games will number in the billions. If that day is bound to come, then working backwards, we might right now be one of those billion games — making the chance that our present world is real less than one in a billion.

It's a super-interesting inference, and it's not the only version — all sorts of ideas about virtual worlds existed even BC, which makes me believe even more that we're actually born into a virtual world without knowing it. Getting a bit off track — anyway, episode one really wowed me: phones and computers being tapped, the mountain of terms of service nobody ever reads seriously, audiences resonating more with tragedy than with positive content. All of it struck a chord. As the season-six opener, very nice XD.

❷ Loch Henry

Thriller. Unlike Black Mirror's usual style, with an American-horror feel; the plot is unexpectedly easy to guess. I wonder how the male lead felt making the documentary — he could just as well have not reopened his own wound?

❸ Beyond the Sea

Astronauts, replicas, consciousness transfer. An episode I quite liked — I thought, Black Mirror's tech elements are finally back. Black Mirror always uses extreme narrative to express humanity's dark side; this one shows the extreme of "if I can't have it, you can't either." But two people with only each other left in life — can they smoothly complete the mission, or destroy each other in mutual ruin? Here the director leaves an open ending, so let's imagine it ourselves.

❹ Mazey Day

A popular star turns into a werewolf?? I'm baffled 😵‍💫. It satirizes paparazzi who, for a big payout, break into homes and even snatch the camera from a colleague in danger — money they'll never live to spend, greedy to the last, consistent to the end I guess. After watching I was baffled, not getting what the writer meant 😅. One reading is that the star becoming a werewolf represents being fed up with bloodthirsty paparazzi clinging to their privacy — a form of resistance?

❺ Demon 79

Immigrant discrimination, political strife, a repressed inner world.

"Exiled to the boundless cosmic void, doomed to be forever trapped in an empty vacuum — no matter, no time, no space, no light, no sound. I must endure a profound, palpable, eternal non-existence, forever alone."

Isn't that a portrait of my own life? So says the lead.

The lead goes from habitually repressing himself to the moment he puts on the red leather jacket he'd longed for but was mocked by colleagues as unworthy of — you could fairly credit that change to the demon? In the end, because no one believes the demon's rules, as the world is ending they calmly plunge hand in hand into a cosmic void. Though it's nothingness, with the other's company, I think even a place with no eternity is a kind of fulfilling life-ending?

P.s. The demon's vibe is a bit like some popcorn-flick protagonist, a little comical 🤣. I don't know what 79 means — is it that the story is set in 1979??

Everyone has some darkness within. The lead is a British-Indian man who, in that era, suffered discrimination and unequal treatment, living a deeply repressed life — and once he triggered the demon's shard, with the demon egging him on beside him, he had his reason to start killing.

#series#scifi#netflix
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