Decisions: it’s what’s for breakfast. (Screencap via Netflix)
Much of what we’ve seen in previous releases of Black Mirror, an anthology series offered by Netflix, is supposed to make us uncomfortable and does. In “Nosedive,” the eagerness of the central character to participate in a social-ranking system that seems destined to slap her down becomes more and more distressing to watch. In “Metalhead,” our anxiety grows as we watch a woman trying to evade what seems at first to be a very persistent robotic guard dog, which eventually seems more like one of the bringers of an apocalypse. We tune in to these episodes to see what fresh horror—or, far less often, what fresh delight—creator Charlie Brooker and his executive producer, Annabel Jones, can envision for our technological future. In the show’s latest iteration, an interactive movie called Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (I’ll call it BM:B for short), we get a lot of the discomfort we expect, but this time the story takes place in the past, and some of our uneasiness may be unintentional—though I doubt it. Continue reading
Je Suis, Ergo Sum 