Black Mirror season 4

[Julius Seeker]

Anyone not familiar with this show, it's a Twilight Zone/Outer Limits-style series.

I quite liked the season - but it was more average than season 3's highs and lows. My favourite episodes were Metalhead and Hang the DJ. Metalhead is the least popular among other people though, but the same thing occurred with Shut Up and Dance at first, and now it's regarded as the #2 episode of season 3. I don't expect Metalhead to gain ground in the general audience because the episode revolves around one person, and has almost no dialogue. If I had one issue with this season, it was the amount of recycling. My second problem was that almost every episode explained itself too clearly in the opening; it took away that mystery of "what the fuck is going on?" that most of the previous Black Mirror episodes had.

My current overall ranking of the series, episode by episode. Based on how much I enjoyed the episode + how interesting I found it:

1. San Junipero
2. White Christmas
3. 15 Million Merits
4. Shut Up and Dance
5. Hang the DJ
6. The Entire History of You
7. Metalhead
8. Black Museum
9. USS Callister
10. Nosedive
11. White Bear
12. Arkangel
13. Playtest
14. Crocodile
15. Be Right Back
16. National Anthem
17. The Waldo Moment
18. Men Against Fire
19. Hated By the Nation

It's hard to make a list because I genuinely like every single episode of Black Mirror. But someone's got to be at the bottom.

[Shrinweck]

I liked it more than season three as a whole which I only enjoyed a couple episodes of. Metalhead was my least favorite by far and I honestly liked it less than my previous least favorite episode (The National Anthem). I didn't care for the ending's twist and just found next to no pay off in the moment-to-moment events. I didn't get invested in the characters as all. In fact, I actually found myself laughing during the beginning of the episode at their fear of this metallic thing.

White Christmas remains my favorite episode.

It's interesting that Hated by the Nation is your least favorite. I didn't care for it either, but I'm not sure it'd be among my least three favorite.

I didn't care for where the USS Callister story ended up, I wish they'd gone in a different direction with the premise. Arkangel I quite liked.. It'd probably be among some of my favorite episodes.

Crocodile's story I liked quite a lot but it lacked a lot of the poignancy that the series usually has. It just kind of felt shallow.

Hang the DJ was probably the strongest overall episode and I thought it was tied up with a nice little ribbon. I'm not sure how much I ended up liking it though. It felt too clean, I guess?

Black Museum was... fine. I really liked certain parts of it a lot. I liked how it felt like they had all these premises for entire episodes and thought "Yeah, but I don't think it could carry an entire episode" and then just put them all into one.

[Julius Seeker]

I think the first story of Black Museum was out of place. The rest of it fit together.
Black Museum was kind of like a remake of White Christmas with (as you said) weaker storytelling.

On my list, I almost want to put a space between Be Right Back and National Anthem because I liked Be Right Back quite a bit more, it feels like it should be 5-6 ranks ahead, but unfortunately, there are no episodes to fill the void.

Hang the DJ was an "As You Like" it type story. In that, it is a highly formulaic type story that covers an interesting concept and is created with the explicit purpose of pleasing everyone. It is enjoyable, but it feels like something that doesn't deserve to be enjoyed; at least that's how I found it.

As for Metalhead, for me the payoff wasn't significant; it was a joke about materialism. What I enjoyed about it was the experience of terror of a character being hunted down by uncaring robots. Also not quite knowing what the hell was going on. I understand why people hate it, though. It doesn't answer many of the questions it asked.

USS Callister - my rank on that may drop. It was by far the most star-studded episode of Black Mirror to date, and probably the highest budgeted one as well. It also was the most formulaic story of the season.

Hated By the Nation from season 3, it's my least favourite because I found it to be a little bloated and unengaging. The concept was appealing enough on its own (it's like a technological version of ancient Athenian ostracism), but a 90 minute about uncovering the mysteries of it didn't appeal to me.

As for Men Against Fire, I think it's because the story was unoriginal. Essentially recruits were being mind-altered into thinking they were killing zombies when in fact they were just killing poor Danish speaking people with Canadian accents. The same plot had been done with The 5th Wave and the Star Trek Voyager episode Nemesis. So the fact that the story was the most obvious one to date didn't leave me feeling very positive about the episode.

On the other hand, I loved the first 4 episodes of season 3.

[Shrinweck]

Men Against Fire and Hated By the Nation both felt like they'd been done before by other sci-fi series although I forget exactly where I'd felt I'd seen Hated By the Nation before.

[Julius Seeker]

Hated by the Nation takes ideas from Michael Chrichton's work, especially Prey (with the Xymos nanobots), and adds an ostracism element using social media.

I can't think of anything I know that does all of those elements, but it would surprise me if it didn't occur. The ostracism element became very popular with shows like Survivor.



From a historical perspective:
The Athenians did it in their democracy. Essentially the people got to vote by writing a name on a piece of pottery, tossing it into a pile, and whoever had their name on it the most would have to leave Attica for 10 years. This was their answer to demagoguery. It would prevent any person from gaining too much influence or power; even great leaders like Themistocles got ostracized from Athens - but it was usually from the family most closely related to the last Monarchal dynasty (the Alchmaeonids) and the former Tyrannical dynasty (the Peisistratids).

Pottery chips were like ancient Athenian twitter. It's also how we find out a lot about their society today.
I think it would be interesting if someone did an episode where no one knew anything from this era, and the only writing that remained were databases of twitter feeds. And archaeologists had to piece together why our society suffered an apocalypse in order to solve whatever main conflict the episode has.

[kali o.]

Second recommendation of this I heard in the last few days. Guess I need to check it out.

[Julius Seeker]

Kali,

If watching Black Mirror for the first time, it's an Outer Limits/Twilight Zone style show, so every episode is stand-alone. Although some of the technology is used in multiple episodes, so it can spoil some episodes. Season 1 is a bad place to begin. I recommend the following order:

1. Season 3
2. Season 1
3. Season 2
4. White Christmas (The Special)
5. Season 4

White Christmas is sometimes lumped into season 2 due to it coming out before season 3. It was done when they already had season 3 mapped out. It's the sort of episode that draws a lot of the themes and technologies together - including those covered in the third season. It's a great way to cap off the first three seasons. I'd definitely watch it before season 4 because there's an episode that tries to do something similar, but White Christmas does it so much better.

[Shrinweck]

You can also just watch it in order on Netflix. Just know that every episode is a one off so the quality and your enjoyment will potentially vary wildly with every episode. Season one episode one is a good example of the quality not really being there - it's an interesting premise but it loses something in the actual events of the episode. Episode two is one of the best episodes in the series.

Overall it's a good show and worth watching.

[kali o.]

I'll start with Season 3.