Black Mirror: Favorite episodes

That's a deep and revealing take on that episode. To me, I see her losing everything she was chasing at the start of the episode; didn't even occur to me that she is now she's free of those constraints.
I'll have to rewatch that one too with those thoughts.

USS Callister didn't have a dark ending?

In the episode, Daly is definitely a guy who likes to play rough with his toys. He's engaging in a sadistic power fantasy. But that's just it. What he's doing is in a fantasy. He wasn't doing it to real people. They're digital simulacrums. (We can just skip past how DNA apparently brings all the thoughts and memories of the digital copy in along with the body, since the episode did too.)

Obviously people disagree. I'm not a Black Mirror fan anyway, because it's all super fucking dark. The only episode I like is San Junipero, because not only is it more of a feel good episode, but it does have a happy ending. Just one that's dressed up with Booker's trademark grim despair.

But on Callister, I'd like to know where the line is? In the episode, Daly is a genius programmer who has created a digital fantasy world as his main hobby. Rather than just populating it with AI generated fake people, he puts "real" people in.

From the audience perspective, they're the same actors we're watching in the episode's real world, which is a storytelling technique guaranteed to generate attachment and empathy for the simulacra characters. After all, it looks like Milioti's Cole in the sim world the same as it looks like her in the "real" world, so we'll just attach to both like they're the same person right?

If he went home and wrote stories about his coworkers, is that "over the line?" They're just stories. What about if he painted or drew pictures, is that the line crossed? What if he sat in his recliner and thought up stuff involving the people in his life, built a rich fantasy world that never left the confines of his brain without using any technology (pencil and paper are technology) to lift it out of his neurons? What if the episode showed him going home to his simulation full of AI people (characters played by completely different actors from the actors playing the "real" people in the episode; so there's no real-sim connection)?

There's a line somewhere. Where is it? BDSM players do sadistic shit to each other a lot. With consent, but vanillas (non BDSM people) often find it shockingly sadistic and confusing. And further, again, in the episode the targets of Daly's sadism don't exist except in the fantasy. No real people are harmed in the creation of Daly's fantasies. How do you get consent from imaginary people who don't exist? Who asks their fantasies for permission to use them for your benefit? Where's the line?

Because, unless I misremember something (and it's been a few years since I watched it), the episode doesn't show Daly doing anything to real people. He doesn't plant cameras or stalk them, he doesn't build a rape or murder kit, he doesn't do violence or anything like that to actual people. He just goes to work, gets talked down to and shit on by them for his social awkwardness, then goes home to lose himself in his self-built computer generated playland.

And because he treats the fake people in his sim shitty, he deserved to be in a coma and is probably dead because of it? That's an ending worth cheering? An ending where the audience is like "yeah, fuck that guy for having the nerve to do shitty things to imaginary people."

I want to be clear. I'm not arguing about the morality of how he treated his sim-crew. He's kind of a shitty power hungry sadist. But it's imaginary. Where is the line, when no real people are harmed, that's worthy of death? In fact, IIRC, Daly doesn't even sexually abuse (a surefire hot button topic in today's world) his simulacra. They're created without genitals, and I don't recall any mention of Daly sexually misusing them. He's sadistic, but not sexually sadistic.

Further, the simulacra are the ones who seem to cross lines. They hack the real world Cole's (Miloti) phone and blackmail the real Cole with her own stolen nudes into helping them. Yet the audience for this episode seems to feel like what real-Cole went through, thinking she was going to be sexually doxxed, was justified; the same as the audience seems to think Daly being in a coma is justified.

I hadn't come across Black Mirror. Then USS Callister came out and was getting a lot of chatter, so I looked at it after a quick glance at the wiki (oooh, a Star Trek takeoff, I'll have a look). And I was just shocked at how dark it was. (and then found out the rest of Black Mirror is at least that dark, usually moreso.) Then I went online and was just perplexed by how vehement most people seem to be that Daly deserves death.

Daly has a lot of dark thoughts. But they're just thoughts. He's not acting on them in a way that impacts or involves anyone else. He's not doing any of his sadism to real people. He's simply someone talented enough to build a living, breathing simulation to practice his sadism in. And then he goes to bed, wakes up the next morning, and heads off to work where he doesn't do sadistic shit to anyone. He just goes about his day, then returns home to fire up his simulation. But because his fantasy world is sadistic he deserves death?

I don't get it. I didn't when I first watched it and checked threads to find out I was apparently in the minority, and I still don't now either.

Good point. I may have remembered it wrong... Sounds like time for a rewatch.