1 week Ago By Sarah Carson
Black Mirror’s new series opens by asking: what price would you pay to keep your loved ones alive?In “Common People”, Rashida Jones plays a teacher who one day collapses on the classroom floor and falls into a coma from which she will not recover. There is nothing doctors can do. But an experimental biotech company may be able to save her using servers and clouds and streaming – if her husband, played by Chris O’Dowd, can afford the monthly subscription.
It is a miracle – the couple has cheated death. Except there’s a catch. The payments are crippling, as her husband is forced to go to ever greater extremes to cover them and as the terms and limitations of the “package” change.
if(window.adverts) { window.adverts.
addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }“Coverage” limits where she can travel; she begins to spout adverts for erectile dysfunction or Christianity; she needs longer and longer to sleep – all of which she can forego by paying more for newly introduced ad-free premium tiers. As the years pass and the “benefits” expand further, the sacrifices render this subscriber life not worth living.This devastating twist on a Faustian pact is ambitious in scope: in only 57 minutes, Charlie Brooker condemns health insurance, big pharma, OnlyFans, streaming services (including the one his programme is on), and subliminal advertising.
All without distracting from the inarguable simplicity of his message: conquering our mortality cannot be consequence-free.Chris O’Dowd and Rashida Jones in Black Mirror (Photo: Netflix/Robert Falconer)It is this idea that has always elevated Black Mirror above other speculative dramas. It isn’t just the staggering scale of imagination and production that these “what ifs” take to create (with a new story, cast and new set for seven seasons).
It isn’t really the real-world parallels either – the evils of tech and the immorality of those who hijack it; the ease with which we will surrender control in favour of convenience; the society that is corrupted and divided by it all.Away from all the shocks, the satire, the uncomfortable number of times Brooker’s once-absurd plots have come true (from robot bees to AI actors to social media credit scores to, erm, “piggate”), what makes it such original television is its exploration of how mortality, and how we spend the limited time we have, defines human behaviour.if(window.
adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_mobile_l1"}); }if(window.
adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }The idea that life is finite dictates everything.
Our ambitions, our dreams, our decisions, how we treat other people, the risks we take, how much we seek approval and acceptance, the shortcuts we take, how we forgive others, how true we are to ourselves, the mark we leave on the world. Each of us feels the pressure to get it right, to strive to avoid regret. Black Mirror’s most resonant episodes – the best being 2016’s resplendent “San Junipero”, about two elderly women who fall in love in a simulated reality beach town – take our emotions about mortality and push it to extremes.
#color-context-related-article-3628377 {--inews-color-primary: #b9244c;--inews-color-secondary: #f0f0f0;--inews-color-tertiary: #b9244c;} Read Next square BLACK MIRROR Seven times Black Mirror predicted the futureRead MoreAs with all anthology series, it is not consistently brilliant. Season seven retreads old ground with episodes on surveillance culture, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and gaming. But along with “Common People” there is another standout that examines our relationship with death.
In “Eulogy”, Paul Giamatti learns that a long-lost ex-girlfriend has died via a company compiling memories ahead of her funeral. He is invited to upload his by a guide – played by Patsy Ferran – who allows him to step into his old photos to help recall them. But decades ago, he excised her face from every image in a heartbroken rage; blamed her for the bad path his life took; absorbed himself in his pain.
Travelling into the photos forces him to remember his mistakes and accept responsibility for the lonely life he lived and the hurt he caused others. It is heartbreaking – and confronting – as Brooker reminds us how we prefer to lie to ourselves rather than acknowledge all that we do wrong. Where “Common People” uses tech to engineer the future, “Eulogy” uses it to revisit the past – and both prove unbearable.
It is tempting to say that what makes Black Mirror so confronting is its plausibility – that we might only be a few years or a few Silicon Valley start-ups away from this dystopia. What makes it alarming is that it reveals that humans are powerless. And time, not tech, is our greatest tormentor.
‘Black Mirror’ is streaming on Netflix.
