The black mirror imdb
In London, he spends a night with the technology journalist Sonja ( Hannah John-Kamen). The episode was nominated for a British Academy Television Craft Award and a Visual Effects Society Award.Īfter his father dies from Alzheimer's disease, Cooper ( Wyatt Russell) travels the world, ignoring phone calls from his mother. The episode received mixed critical reception, with criticisms of the storyline and ending but praise given to Trachtenberg's directing and Russell's acting.
After considering Tokyo, the crew decided to shoot in London.Ī work of psychological horror, the episode features numerous video game references and many instances of foreshadowing. The episode was inspired by an idea Brooker had for an augmented reality Whac-A-Mole game which increased in speed until the subject went crazy. Hannah John-Kamen co-stars as a video game journalist Cooper meets. It is a horror game which accesses his brain and targets his fears. The episode follows Cooper ( Wyatt Russell), an American who playtests an upcoming augmented reality game in London while travelling.
#THE BLACK MIRROR IMDB SERIES#
Written by series creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker and directed by Dan Trachtenberg, it premiered on Netflix on 21 October 2016, with the rest of series three. " Playtest" is the second episode in the third series of the British science fiction anthology television series Black Mirror. An augmented Whac-A-Mole game was the initial inspiration for the episode. A writer ought to treat their characters like they’re real people, and this episode puts that concept into practice along literal terms in turns hilarious and chilling.Cooper ( Wyatt Russell) experiences SaitoGemu's augmented reality technology. And as the challenger mounting a last-ditch attempt to overthrow his control, Cristin Milioti delivers a superb performance. Jesse Plemons is dynamite as a loser who playacts a winner in a virtual-reality simulation called Space Fleet, where he uses his coding omnipotence to take revenge on everyone in the office who’s ever wronged him.
#THE BLACK MIRROR IMDB TV#
(Though it does reverently reproduce the warm, worn look of a vintage TV program before smash-cutting into the cold light of the real world.) Brooker prefers deconstruction to straight homage, and here he uses the Trekkie stuff to pick apart the darker side of fanfic along with the distinctly male entitlement that often informs it. The second story in particular ranks among the most conceptually flimsy in the series.įorever destined to be known as “the Star Trek one,” Brooker’s brilliant meta-critique of shoddy fiction drops the act after the first scene. There’s a self-reflexive statement on the voyeuristic sadism to Black Mirror’s darker hours in here somewhere, but it only begins to rear its head in the final third after the first two fail to cohere into anything of substance. Each one involves the vicarious sharing of experience or sensation: A doctor taps into his patients’ pain before he starts using them for twisted pleasure a man agrees to share his mind with his vegetative wife’s consciousness, who turns out to be one annoying mental roomie and one unusual exhibit invites visitors to electrocute the hologram of a wrongfully convicted black man for sick kicks. Read on for Vulture’s definitive ranking of all 23 episodes of Black Mirror, from the worst to the best.Ī young woman ( Letitia Wright) pops into an abandoned roadside attraction that collects memorabilia from techno-crimes, and hangs around for three disturbing yarns from the intense, unsettling proprietor (Douglas Hodge). It delivers far more hits than misses, but hashing out which episode hits hardest can be helpful for a newbie who wants to customize their viewing order. Such a varied palette of styles and stories means that the series is naturally hit or miss. Political satires and future dystopias, cop procedurals and war dramas, soulless nihilism and life-affirming humanism: If you dislike Black Mirror, perhaps you just haven’t found the right episode.
A newfangled, potentially disastrous technology pops up in each installment, giving the series a healthy sense of cohesion, but the four seasons aired so far could not be more all over the map. Yet no program has taken advantage of the elasticity of anthology storytelling quite like Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, trading pet themes, genres, creative personnel, and tones from one episode to the next. Fionn Whitehead in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.Īnthologies are all the rage these days, from Ryan Murphy’s ever-expanding empire of mini-series to Joe Swanberg’s collection of romance shorts.