Anyways, onto season 6! Spoilers ahead.
A relatively light-hearted episode with a few well-known faces. Notable as the most high-tech of this new season and does touch on the whole “are simulated lives as valuable as real ones?” quandary that we’ve seen done to death in previous seasons. I particularly enjoyed the jab at Netflix (as Streamberry) trying to branch out into other forms of entertainment, but otherwise a quite forgettable entry.
The first half has you wondering if you accidentally switched to watching another TV show, but by the end the classic Black Mirror feeling of shame and dread kicks in. There’s yet another dig at Netflix with its ever-expanding catalog of true crime content, but as the CEO of Streamberry says in the previous episode, it engages the viewers! So really it’s all our fault for demanding exploitative material. Beautiful drone shots of Scotland also help.
Anyone who’s watched Black Mirror in the past knew how this almost feature-length story was going to end by around the 20 minute mark, but powerhouse performances from the three leads in this episode helped keep it interesting. One does have to suspend disbelief for the premise to work (where the fuck was ground control in all this? Why aren’t there contingencies for this sort of thing?) but overall a solid episode somewhat let down by the predictability of a love triangle.
This episode is getting a lot of hate for straying into paranormal territory, but the people spouting that hate also seem to be labouring under the delusion that Black Mirror is necessarily about high-tech stuff. It never has been. It’s always been holding a mirror up to society and showing us how horrible we can be, oftentimes enabled by technology. The way the paps hover around Mazey recording her suffering bring to mind how Princess Diana died - sitting in the back of a wrecked car struggling to breathe while paparazzi around her just continued taking pictures.
As if to reinforce my point about technology not being the focus of Black Mirror, this episode doesn’t have any since it’s set in 1979! Nevertheless this episode is a lot of fun. It’s great to see depicted on screen how a person from a minority group would have experienced England in those days. I always approve of the inclusion of Boney M.
I enjoyed this season much more than I did season 5 (which admittedly is not saying much). The long 4 year wait was worth it for a batch of episodes that are much more social commentary and less “what if phones but too much?”. There’s only so many ways you can spin human consciousnesses trapped inside machines until it gets boring, and this season was definitely not that!
This little series is a bit of a marvel in that it gets a lot of bang for not a whole lot of buck. Everything takes place on the one set: a police interrogation room, the adjoining observation room and the hallway outside. This means the story is told entirely through dialogue (and the viewer’s imagination). That’s all well and good, assuming you have a compelling story to tell with engrossing performances… unfortunately this season was a bit lacking in both departments.
The twist came off as a bit contrived, and I was not convinced by the actress playing the suspect.
Probably the best one of the lot. My expectations were upended as it played out, developments weren’t limited to the four walls of the interrogation room, and the lead actor put on a good performance.
Second best, and a bit of fun. Its premise posed an intriguing question that was pretty satisfactorily answered at the conclusion of the episode.
They saved the worst for last. It was really difficult to get through this one, not because of the subject matter, but because the lead actor’s characterisation was a bit over the top. I also have a very fuzzy memory of the previous season so the significance of the additional character is lost on me.
It’s got Tatiana Maslany in it, speaking German! Is there anything she can’t do?
Sadly this film was a bit dull, which is a real disappointment given its star-studded cast and fascinating source material. It doesn’t do enough to highlight the injustices of the period, nor does it try hard enough to humanise any of the characters apart from Maria.
My impression of this film is that it’s a bit disjointed. While watching it, I had a vague feeling that there was a little too much carved out of it to achieve a reasonable running time. Yes, it’s subtle, but probably too subtle. The court scenes were enjoyable to watch but that’s all.
]]>It got a hodgepodge of genres just right:
The last thing I watched that tried to be this many things at once was Hunters, and it failed spectacularly.
Interestingly, the creators, Graeme Manson and John Fawcett, were previously involved in a couple of movies I hold in very high regard - The Cube and Ginger Snaps respectively.
I’m also compelled to call out the fantastic job Tatiana Maslany does in the lead role. It’s hard to believe the clones aren’t in fact played by multiple lookalike actresses.
It’s available on Prime Video (where my other sci-fi love The Expanse can also be seen). Back in the day it aired on SBS2, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be available via SBS On Demand.
]]>I took the opportunity to take some photos, albeit not at the most flattering angle.
]]>In the meantime, here are some photos.
]]>As part of the course assessments, we were asked to formulate a security-related technical challenge for ourselves, complete it before the end of semester and document it throughout. I ended up doing something I’ve always wanted to do: opening my garage door (without using its actual remote) by reverse engineering it.
The following blog post is basically all the blog posts I wrote documenting the project rolled into one. I wanted to give it a better home than the awful MOOC website it currently lives on, so now it’s here too.
This is my garage door opener:
It was installed way back in 2001, so it’s a pretty old model. It’s controlled by this remote:
Now, since I was born sometime in the last century, I knew that the remote used radio waves to communicate with the opener. This meant that to reverse engineer the opener, I’d have to tune into the remote’s frequency and figure out what gets sent to the opener.
First, to find the frequency. I read my garage door opener’s instruction manual to try and figure out which frequency it was transmitting on, since I can’t really sit there all day going through millions of frequencies. The manual said 433MHz. Apparently this is a pretty common frequency for this kind of application.
So I get my Ol’ Faithful RTL-SDR dongle out. (It’s called that because I’ve never used it for anything productive except listening to JJJ every once in a while, but it still works…) It’s just a USB dongle with a basic antenna attached to it.
I load up SDR#, which is an application that allows me to use the dongle to listen on the airwaves and visualise what’s going on. Here’s me listening to JJJ (it’s a bit noisy):
Enough about me listening to the radio though. I tune it to 433MHz and press my garage door opener remote a few times… voila!
It looks to be closer to 433.875MHz so I tune it closer:
I’ve hit paydirt! It’s a very well-defined signal that peaks in the vicinity of 433.875MHz (a little off, but I don’t get that much resolution when tuning the RTL-SDR).
I made an audio recording of it:
It’s a bit noisy, so my next step is to clean it up a bit and have a good long look at the signal in an audio editing application to see if I can make out the code being transmitted.
I attempted to reduce the noise in my recording of the remote signal by using Audacity’s noise reduction effect. Unfortunately, it didn’t help much as it reduced the amplitude of the signal too.
At this point I decided to try other things. I did some reading on noise reduction for RTL-SDR tuners, and found some very promising advice to use a ferrite core on the antenna cable, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a ferrite core anywhere at home. It’s frustrating because I KNOW I have one lying around!
It was time to get creative. Using a different USB port on my computer seemed to improve the signal somewhat, but what did it was holding my hand around the antenna. I’m not sure how it works, but I imagine it concentrates the signal. The result was a practically noiseless recording with a very distinct signal to use for analysis.
Pictured is the signal when I held the button down for 5.5s.
Next I wanted to see whether I could discern individual bits in the signal. In Audacity, I selected a sequence of packets 0.582s in length. I noticed there were 8 packets in each press.
Diving down into each packet, I found there were 2 distinct sequences, each repeated 4 times (you can see the pattern if you squint at the above picture hard enough):
This was clearly something in binary as there are only 2 different signal states (on and off). If this was binary information, then I would need to figure out what modulation was used. I went back through some old lecture slides from TELE3113 (which dealt extensively with modulation); lo and behold, on the 3rd slide from a lecture on digital bandpass modulation, we had this:
What I think I was seeing in Audacity was amplitude-shift keying (ASK). It’s particularly pronounced in the waveform as the sine wave appears to be cut off abruptly in the transitions between 0 and 1. Looking at the waveform, it appears the period of each bit was 1ms (measuring the period of each solitary 1).
So now to decode it into binary. I used Audacity to carefully select each sequence of bits to find the duration, and from there extrapolated how many bits were in the sequence (or stream).
From this, I get:
10001011100110001001100110011001100010011 (41 bits?)
1110001001100110011001100110111001101110001 (43 bits?)
I was a bit put off by this, because who lumps 41 bits into a stream? That’s 5 bytes and a bit! My experience tells me that they’re usually nice round numbers. I needed to verify this somehow, as I couldn’t determine where the start and end points of the packets were – for all I knew, there were a couple of zeros in the beginning of packet 1, or that the radio silence between the packets were all zeros. I did notice that 11001100110011000 occurs twice in both streams, but that was it.
At this point I got a bit stuck, and decided to do some research.
A bit of Googling came up with this blog post.
In it, the author uses rtl_433
to decode a raw bitstream from various devices. While rtl_433
doesn’t have a preset for a garage door opener, I thought it would be perfect nonetheless because I wasn’t aware of any other program that did the same thing.
I fired up a Debian VM and fruitlessly tried getting my RTL-SDR dongle connected to it. No luck. In the end, I was able to find a Windows binary for rtl_433
that a kind soul made available to the world here.
Using that, I could finally see the raw bitstream from my remote. Happy days!
bitbuffer:: Number of rows: 8
[00] {11} 37 a0 : 00110111 101
[01] {11} bf c0 : 10111111 110
[02] {11} 37 a0 : 00110111 101
[03] {11} bf c0 : 10111111 110
[04] {11} 37 a0 : 00110111 101
[05] {11} bf c0 : 10111111 110
[06] {11} 37 a0 : 00110111 101
[07] {11} bf c0 : 10111111 110
It’s a nice round 10 bytes! But wait a minute. This is totally different from what I expected. I kept pressing the button, and rarely, I’ll get a different sequence altogether:
bitbuffer:: Number of rows: 8
[00] {10} bf c0 : 10111111 11
[01] {10} fd 40 : 11111101 01
[02] {10} bf c0 : 10111111 11
[03] {10} fd 40 : 11111101 01
[04] {10} bf c0 : 10111111 11
[05] {10} fd 40 : 11111101 01
[06] {10} bf c0 : 10111111 11
[07] {10} fd 40 : 11111101 01
I went back to look at the waveforms to see if I could reconcile what I was seeing with what rtl_433 returned. If I interpreted long pulses as 1s and short pulses as 0s, then they would match the results from rtl_433:
So how was the signal encoded? It seems that it’s using on-off keying (OOK), which is a form of ASK, alongside pulse width modulation (PWM). I’ve never heard of OOK/PWM used in tandem, but apparently this is quite common with keyfobs such as my opener remote – Google brought up this LabVIEW experiment decoding the signal transmitted from a keyfob operating on 315MHz, as well as a blog post on hacking similar 433MHz devices using this encoding.
From all of this bit-squinting, I learnt that the wireless security on my garage door opener is a sack of crap! (Excuse my French.) The signal transmitted does not (or rarely) changes, so all an attacker needs to do is listen in on the transmission from my remote, analyse it like I’ve done here, and simply replay it while in range of the garage.
I went out to my local electronics store (Altronics) and bought an RF transmitter module with an operating frequency in the region of 433MHz. Taking a look at the datasheet, it does ASK modulation and has a wide input voltage range (no need to level shift!)
Here’s the relevant bit of the datasheet:
You’ll remember that I found my remote to be transmitting in the vicinity of 433.875MHz, but this module only transmits at 433.92MHz, which was a worry since I didn’t know how sensitive my garage door opener would be. I was even more worried when I got to the part that says CIRCUIT SHAPE: SAW. What?
I decided to have a look at what it was outputting. I loaded up SDR# and wrote a short and sweet sketch in Arduino to output HIGH to the pin attached to the module’s data pin periodically. Here’s what I saw:
As far as I know, plain Jane sine waves don’t have harmonics like that, and I wanted a sine wave to replicate the signal from my remote as closely as possible. I made a baseband recording just to be sure:
I had no freaking idea what I was looking at, so in an act of desperation I put a basic RC low pass filter on it to try and coax it into a more familiar waveform. I used this calculator to come up with the component values, given a cutoff frequency as close as possible to 433.875MHz.
With the RC circuit in place on the ANT (antenna) output of the module, I made another recording:
I overcooked the cutoff frequency a little but it’s a lot closer now at around 433.85MHz. In Audacity…
Much better!
So now I needed to get my Arduino to write the correct bits, with the correct timings, to the transmitter data input.
I needed 00110111101 and 10111111110, with 0 being transmitted as a short bit and 1 as a slightly longer bit. However the Arduino outputs 0 as 0 volts and 1 as 5 volts. What to do?
Thankfully it didn’t take me too long to figure it out. I could simply use the analysis I did earlier, where I thought the modulation used was simple ASK and painstakingly split the sequences into millisecond increments. Using that, I could get the timing as close to correct as I possibly can. Using Audacity, I also found that the dead air gap between the first and second bit sequences was 36ms, and between the second sequence and the next cycle of the first bit sequence to be 38ms.
Here’s the super simple sketch with all this information packed into it:
#include <SPI.h>
int outputPin = 12;
int buttonPin = 2;
int buttonState = 0;
int sequence1[41] = { 1,0,0,0,1,0,1,1,1,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,1 };
int sequence2[43] = { 1,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0,1,1,1,0,0,1,1,0,1,1,1,0,0,0,1 };
void setup() {
pinMode(outputPin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop() {
buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
if (buttonState == LOW) {
for (int j = 0; j < 4; j++) {
Serial.print("begin sequence 1\n");
int data;
for (int i = 0; i < 41; i++) {
data = sequence1[i];
digitalWrite(outputPin, data);
delay(1);
}
digitalWrite(outputPin, LOW);
delay(36);
Serial.print("begin sequence 2\n");
int data2;
for (int i = 0; i < 43; i++) {
data2 = sequence2[i];
digitalWrite(outputPin, data2);
delay(1);
}
digitalWrite(outputPin, LOW);
delay(38);
}
digitalWrite(outputPin, LOW);
delay(1000);
}
}
Quick explanation of what it’s doing (if you’re not interested you can skip this bit):
Digital pin 12 is used to output data to the transmitter. Pin 2 is used to input the button state. The way I’ve set up the button on the breadboard is with a pull-up resistor (so it reads HIGH, or 5V, when the button isn’t pushed and LOW, or 0V when the button is pushed and completes the circuit, thus pulling the pin to ground).
In the loop function, the conditional will check whether the button has been pressed (i.e. LOW). Inside the conditional, we have a loop that repeats its inside loops 4 times (remember that the bit sequences occurred in pairs 4 times). The inside loops simply loop through the array, outputting what’s in the array for a millisecond then moving on to the next bit until it gets to the end. Then there’s a dead air section of the required length where 0 is written to the pin.
Here’s the transmission in Audacity:
To check that it’ll be interpreted correctly, I go back to rtl_433
:
That second transmission looks a little odd but it’s probably due to noise or interference. Otherwise, looking good!
Comparing the signal from the remote with the signal from my Uno:
The timing is a little off, but at this point I was hoping that the opener had a little tolerance toward these things.
In SDR#:
And here’s a video of it in action:
]]>As some of you know, I am a huge fan of Black Mirror. High production values – which have only gotten higher since it became a Netflix Original – and prescient, biting social commentary make it a masochistic escape from the light entertainment that I usually gravitate towards.
Here are my thoughts on the new episodes. Spoilers ahead.
Having watched all the trailers during the 13 Days of Black Mirror, I went into this episode expecting it to follow some happy-go-lucky gamers in an immersive VR world who somehow get stuck in there (or something similarly terrifying) and have to find some way to get out of the game. I was so off-track I resolved never to expect anything from a Black Mirror episode ever again.1
What I got instead was a full-blown modernisation of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream with a dash of Galaxy Quest.
A lot of Black Mirror episodes feature a protagonist who initially start off with the full sympathy of the viewer but later lose it spectacularly when they turn out to be an asshole. In this episode, Bob Daly (Fat Damon/Jesse Plemons) is it – the pushover CTO of a VR game company turns out to be a sadistic, tyrannical prick who lords over digital clones of everyone who’s ever wronged him in real life. It didn’t really sink in until the episode actually invoked I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and the heroine had her fucking face removed - after that I was rearing to watch Daly being undone.
Unfortunately, a bit of technobabble and handwaving does make it into the episode, but it’s not obnoxiously inaccurate so I let it slide.
The supporting characters could have done with more development, but overall this was a very enjoyable episode. A solid 8.5/10.
This was an exciting one because it’s directed by Jodie Foster of Silence of the Lambs and Contact fame.
Arkangel is an all-in-one helicopter parenting device that allows said parent to monitor their child and see whatever the child sees, with the incredulous option to filter things that are deemed stressful by the system. It’s like a great big box of NOPE all contained into a brain implant linked to a remarkably durable tablet device.
Overbearing mother Marie gets her poor daughter Sara put onto the Arkangel system. After Sara fails to develop empathy as a child, the penny finally drops for Marie and she packs the monitoring tablet away, leaving Sara all alone to grow up into a functioning, normal teenager. Who would have thought?
A knee-jerk reaction to teenaged Sara failing to come home earlier than promised sees Marie kick back into full helicopter mode, retrieving the Arkangel, scaring off Sara’s drug dealing boyfriend, and spiking Sara’s morning smoothie with a contraceptive pill when she finds out via the tablet that Sara is pregnant. I’m just amazed that Marie made the same damn smoothie seemingly every day for at least 10 years.
It comes to a head when an enraged Sara beats her mother nearly to death – ironically thanks to the content filter – and destroys the tablet in the process. With that out of the way, Sara is finally free to hitchhike far away from her mother, who is left bloodied and screaming in the street.
This was an unsettling episode. It’s technology I could easily see becoming available in the near future, and I have no doubt that people will adopt it in a misguided attempt to protect their children from the world. I also expect that those same people will vigorously defend their choice and refuse to see what’s wrong with the system (which is to say everything). I’m not even addressing the possibility of malevolent parties gaining access to the system because it just hurts to think about. It’s like a golden ticket to child porn.
For fun, I showed my mum this episode and asked her whether she thought Marie was justified in using Arkangel. Unsurprisingly, she said yes, because “her daughter was taking drugs, and she was a pregnant at the age of 15!” I’m not sure what I expected.
This felt like one of the more grounded episodes, but as a consequence I felt it progressed rather predictably. It also felt like one of the rarer instances of an episode of Black Mirror beating you around the head (methaphorically) with the moral of the story. A 7/10 from me.
I didn’t really know what to expect from this one (or Metalhead for that matter).
If I had to sum up this episode in a single sentence, it would go something like this:
Ellen Degenerate gets undone by a cavy after going on a panicked killing spree across Iceland.
It sounds funny, but when you see it unfolding on screen it’s actually pathetic. This is one of the more straightforward episodes of Black Mirror wherein the protagonist is a horrible human being with no redeeming features from the outset, so you’re not left furiously backpedaling and rewatching the episode searching for hints as to their true nature after the fact.
Arguably the only Black Mirror-esque feature of this story is the electronic doodad that Shazia uses to glean recollections from witnesses in insurance cases, and is later used by police on a guinea pig. The same story could have easily featured in any other TV show without the doodad, leaving the impression of technology taking a back seat in this episode. It’s not necessarily bad, just different.
There is the question of how the guinea pig was interrogated using the recollection doodad, but then I remind myself that I’d rather just see the protagonist getting her just desserts rather than puzzling over it all day.
The sweeping panoramic shots of Iceland were the highlight of this episode; the performances by Andrea Riseborough (as Mia) and Kiran Sonia Sawar (as Shazia) were also fantastic, with the former really carrying her weight throughout. Otherwise, I felt the story was rather generic and the pacing of the episode meandered a bit. This one gets 7/10 from me.
This episode is undoubtedly the San Junipero of this season, with the happiest ending of any Black Mirror episode to date.
Frank and Amy are participants in a dating system (aptly named the System) wherein they are paired with other singles, with the end goal of finding their ultimate match. Each pairing is given a time limit, which can range from twelve hours to multiple years, and failure to comply with the time limit will see participants booted out of the gated community they reside in with other couples. After a night with each other, Frank and Amy find that they’ve fallen in love, and together they rebel against the limitations of the System.
This episode is littered with light-hearted comedy as only a story about people looking for love can provide – I’ll happily admit to laughing out loud more than a few times. It’s a welcome change after Crocodile, but also a valuable look at how the cookie technology that’s often explored in the Black Mirror universe can be harnessed for something that doesn’t amount to cruel and inhumane treatment. I never knew I needed something like this, but now that I’ve got it I will make no complaints.
The chemistry between the two leads is palpable and really helps sell its conclusion, where it’s revealed that our protagonists were actually one of a thousand simulations, and an inclination to rebel against the System is taken as compatibility. I feel that it would speak to people who have been through the wringer of dating apps – I’ve so far avoided that timesink – so I’m probably not the target audience of this episode, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. A well-deserved 8/10.
Like Crocodile, a bit of an unknown coming into this season.
The episode takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, where the common folk are left to scavenge whatever they can from the dregs of civilisation, akin to The Walking Dead. By the end of the episode, the comparison to TWD becomes particularly apt when we’re shown what our scavengers were trying to retrieve. It’s bad decision making all round.
The episode takes a rather unorthodox approach to its setting, in that no world-building is done so the viewer is left to fill in the blanks. I’m not a huge fan of this approach to storytelling as it doesn’t contextualise the struggle of the protagonists. However, one could guess that military technology went completely awry and resulted in what appears to be a genocide of humanity. In the place of humans, highly capable robotic dogs (think Boston Dynamics) roam the barren landscape, killing with impunity and leaving a trail of gore in their wake.
Bella (Maxine Peake) is basically a one-woman show in this episode, as the other two(!) characters are killed off in the first five minutes. After alerting a robotic dog in a warehouse, Bella spends the rest of the episode fleeing from it, first by throwing it off her proverbial scent by digging out a tracking device from under her skin with a knife, and then hiding in a tree while waiting for her pursuer’s battery to run down.
Eventually Bella is able to break into a fancy house, and promptly finds the mummified remains of its previous occupants, who had the foresight to blow their brains out before they found themselves in Bella’s sorry situation. Nonetheless, she fights on, and almost gets away with it – she cripples the dog’s sensing capabilities by throwing a bucket of paint over it, but in her hubris (or poor decision making?) she sticks around for far too long after finally putting it down.
I often find post-apocalyptic stories frustrating because of the tendency of their characters to make ridiculous decisions and ultimately going back to square one.2 Metalhead isn’t immune from this trope, and at the conclusion of the episode I was wondering what the point of it all was. All we got to learn about the grim future Charlie Brooker has imagined for us is that there are savage robot dogs roaming around killing indiscriminately. We learned nothing of what led up to this, nor gain any insight into how to prevent it (save from defunding everyone making military robots). Maxine Peake’s performance was fantastic, but not good enough to carry the otherwise weak episode. This one gets a 6/10 from me.
Of the six new episodes in the new season, Black Museum was my most anticipated.
This episode truly is fanservice galore, but not in the cringey, time-wasting way that shows like Sherlock do fanservice – key technologies from past Black Mirror episodes feature, but they’re merely throwaway lines, a quick wink to followers of the series.
A British girl named Nish stops on a desert roadtrip to charge up her car’s batteries. With three hours to kill, she heads to the Black Museum, a small attraction conveniently situated next to her service station. It’s obvious the museum has seen better days (she’s the only one there), and the proprietor, a cheerful carny named Rolo Haynes, is all too eager to give her a personal tour.
In many ways, this episode is a lot like the Christmas special White Christmas, with three smaller stories chained together to form a rather wobbly whole. I felt the former did this better, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The three stories are introduced as artifacts in the museum. Our first artifact is a thingymajig that allows the recipient of a brain implant to feel the pain of another person. Said device is clearly a forerunner of the sleeker cookies that appear in other episodes, giving us a vague timeline of how the technology developed. Rolo Haynes is revealed to be a former snake oil salesman for TCKR Systems (remember San Junipero?) working at the Saint Juniper’s Hospital (remember San Junipero?), and he manages to rope a hapless emergency room doctor into being a guinea pig for the pain device.
The doctor uses the device to give accurate diagnoses of his patients’ ailments, as well as making good use of it in the bedroom after he figures out he can experience pleasure through the device as well (so he gets two orgasms!). Unfortunately, after an out-of-body experience with the device on a patient who died of poisoning, the good doctor now finds himself addicted to pain, and he goes to increasingly risky (and gory) methods of feeling it. His addiction comes to a head when he murders a homeless man with a drill, putting himself into a vegetative state after a moment of ecstasy. Legend says he still has a boner.3
Haynes barely misses a beat when he moves on to the next exhibit, an innocent-looking teddy bear. What follows is probably the bleakest story in the entire series.
Jack and Cassie are new parents to curiously-named Parker. When an accident puts Cassie into a coma, Haynes approaches Jack with an offer: your wife can feel the embrace of her baby boy again, if you let us implant her consciousness in your brain. For anyone who’s had a backseat driver, this is probably the absolute worst idea in the history of the world, but for some reason both parties actually agree. Unsurprisingly it turns out badly, and Jack, now pursued by his attractive neighbour, decides to take Haynes up on TCKR’s latest offer of transferring Carrie’s consciousness into a stuffed toy monkey, ostensibly so Parker can be closer to his mother.
If you thought being stuck inside someone else’s body with no control over their actions was bad, think again! Carrie is reduced to two expressions as a toy monkey: ‘Monkey loves you :)’ and ‘Monkey needs a hug :(‘. Parker grows tired of the monkey (as kids are wont to do), and eventually the monkey ends up in the purgatory of the museum, Carrie’s consciousness still trapped within it.
And for his final trick, Haynes gleefully leads Nish over to the crowning jewel of his museum: the downtrodden digital consciousness of convicted murderer Clayton Leigh. Haynes had convinced Leigh to sign over the rights to his consciousness while on death row, but neglected to tell Leigh that his hologram self would be used for visitors to flip the switch on the electric chair. Worse still, a hologram souvenir of Leigh in agony is dispensed after each pull; why anyone would want something like that lying around is beyond me.
As business dried up for Haynes, his clientele became ever shadier. When a rich scumbag shows up with an envelope full of cash, Haynes allows him to electrocute Leigh’s holographic self to the edge of insanity (assuming there was any sanity left). The result is a Leigh-shaped husk which greets Nish with a drool and a blank expression.
In one of the sillier twists in the entire Black Mirror series, Nish reveals herself to be Leigh’s daughter, here to get revenge on Haynes for what he did to her father. It turns out she’s sabotaged the museum’s air conditioning system, and poisoned the drink she gave to a thirsty Haynes. Justice pornography ensues where Haynes’ consciousness is implanted as a passenger of Leigh’s and subjected to the electric chair. This time, Nish keeps the switch engaged until her father’s consciousness is no more – but she keeps a souvenir of Haynes screaming in agony, just because.
To top off the silliness, it transpires that Nish has had her mother’s consciousness as a passenger, presumably to witness their family’s revenge. Nish picks up the monkey and drives away to a bleak future, the museum in flames behind her.
This episode felt like a variation on the White Christmas structure, where you have three closely connected stories in one. Sadly it doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor, but it’s still a lot of fun to watch and pretty fanservice-y. The first two stories could’ve been given more emphasis, as the last one felt quite weak, but all three are quintessential Black Mirror stories and I can appreciate that. Douglas Hodge is excellent. This one gets a 7.5/10.
This season of Black Mirror definitely felt like one of the weakest. It relied on the concept of cookies a little too much, and the episodes that did not use them as a plot device (Crocodile and Metalhead) were rather generic by comparison. Nonetheless, it’s worth your time to watch for the fun factor and low time commitment.
This guy is really enjoying himself.
]]>It’s no longer on WordPress because I can’t be arsed about it anymore.
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