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Black Mirror S04E01 “USS Callister” discussion thread
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Black Mirror Season 4 Episode 1 - USS Callister
Capt. Robert Daly presides over his crew with wisdom and courage. But a new recruit will soon discover nothing on this spaceship is what it seems.
Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.
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- How does the title relate to the episode itself?
- Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
- Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?
Unlike everyone else here who seemed to either absolutely love it, or despise it enough to be turned off Black Mirror entirely, this was an incredibly "meh" episode for me. I absolutely loved the concept and set design, but the story execution was terrible, IMO.
The characters (especially the leads) were very poorly written cliches and the suspension of disbelief required to accept the DNA based virtual copies being such exact duplicates was too much for me... but worst of all, the episode didn't bother to really explore the concept of AI sentience/rights at all and instead simply presumed that you would agree with their perspective. A "revenge story" doesn't really work when you are still struggling with deciding whether or not those exacting the revenge really deserve your sympathy over their target and the blackmail victim they used to achieve it.
Loved this episode. Maybe it's just because I'm a trekkie, though. It's different from most of the other episodes in the show thanks to its relatively positive ending.
One thing that still gets me is that they pretended as though memories are stored in your DNA (with people simulated entirely from DNA retaining the original copy's identity). Given the premise, they could have just said that the VR system scanned people's brains or something to produce a model of their mind.
I assumed it was a black market version of the social media scraping tool from Be Right Back, at least that made my suspension of disbelief happy.
Either way, the strongest point of the show is how the lead warped his fandom and understanding of the show into his personal despot fantasy from an idealistic future setting. Kind of says a lot about how we deal with asthetics and power fantasies.
That issue stuck with me for the entire episode, and I was never quite able to get comfortable because of it. I kept waiting for an explanation of why their memories were being captured. It just seemed sloppy compared to the other scifi-heavy episodes.
Otherwise though, I enjoyed it. It had a lot of humour and character development, and offered some variety to the usual dark gritty tone of the show.
Probably my favourite episode from the season. Loved the colorful, eye-catching themes and over-the-top 80s CGI.
fucking hated this episode, and why I dropped the show. Shallow, thoughtless, self-righteous? No science fiction here, no procedure, just lurching around inane & moralistic blah blah I fucking hated it
I agree with your description. I was a huge fan of Black Mirror before this fourth season, and this episode definitely turned me off the show. I found the plot incredibly predictable, the science-fiction elements nonsensical, and every character a depth-less archetype.