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The terrifying tales of Black Mirror aren’t pure fabrications—they are rooted in truths that are usually lost in the background noise of everyday life. The idea that advancing technology will create newer class distinctions has been around for a while now, especially in terms of how morality adapts and evolves with the times.
Each episode encapsulates a specific anxiety that most viewers are unaware of in the first place, and nearly all of them contain plot twists that underscore the gist of their respective narratives. In short, shocking the audience is one of the most effective ways of getting them to pay closer attention to the point.
10 Hated In The Nation — Unexpected Genocide By Drone
Online death threats abound in “Hated by the Nation,” an episode that deals with the darker side of the internet and the power exerted by its supposedly anonymous users. The trending #Deathto hashtag is a key element in the murder cases that keep piling up, which is when investigators uncover a macabre voting system used on Twitter.
Users can select those they hate the most, and an invisible character hacks into bee-sized drones and converts them into mini-assassins. None of this is as horrifying as the fact that the real targets are the voters: the episode ends with a mass culling of nearly 400,000 people.
9 Playtest — The Fraction Of A Second Between Life And Death
Cooper is thrown into a world of horror when he agrees to “Playtest” a new VR-esque game being developed, and he soon demands to be pulled out as fast as possible. Katie attempts to navigate for him, but his inexplicable memory loss impedes him from reaching “the access point,” and stopping the program.
Cooper rushes back to meet his mother, but then suddenly finds himself in the experiment chamber once again—instantly dying on the spot. Katie explains to Shou that Cooper received a phone call that short-circuited their game chip (and his brain). It seems that the entire episode takes place in the span of 0.04 seconds, something audiences were not expecting.
8 Black Museum — Nish Keeps Her Mother In Her Head
Nish tours the morbid Black Museum, with Rolo Haynes describing his collection of “authentic criminological artifacts” in the form of anthological snippets. One of the anecdotes narrated revolves around a toy monkey within which is a trapped woman’s consciousness, a foreshadowing that sharp viewers may have picked up on.
The final story is that of Clayton Leigh, a man whose innocence did not prevent him from going to the electric chair, not to mention being subsequently tortured via hologram for years. At this point, Nish reveals that she’s actually Leigh’s daughter, here to exact vengeance on Rolo for his unforgivable crime. The plot twist, though, is that her mother becomes a part of her consciousness after committing suicide.
7 Crocodile — The Guinea Pig Is The Real Witness
Mia Nolan kills her partner, Rob, simply because he wants to come clean about a murder he committed more than a decade ago. However, she is unfortunate enough to view an accident from a window, drawing the attention of Shazia Akhand, a private investigator who uses Recallers to extract memories from people.
This naturally exposes Mia completely, so the latter murders Shazia, her husband, and their blind toddler, hoping that her secret would finally be safe. She doesn’t realize, of course, that the Akhand family’s pet guinea pig counts as a reliable witness because its memories can be extracted through a Recaller.
6 Shut Up And Dance — Kenny’s Secret And Illegal Habit
An unknown hacker catches Kenny pleasuring himself through his laptop camera. They threaten him into performing a series of nested blackmails, one after the other, including a bank robbery with another ensnared man, Hector.
Later, Kenny kills an unnamed man in the middle of the forest after being ordered to do so by his blackmailers. However, he discovers that the hackers go ahead with their threat when his mother calls him, yelling that he’s “been looking at kids.” This event confirms the shocking details of Kenny’s internet habits that had remained under wraps for most of the episode.
5 Hang The DJ — The Simulated Reality Inside A Dating App
An AI known as “Coach” pairs Frank with Amy, claiming that they have twelve hours to get to know each other romantically. After this, each of them is set up on long-term relationships with different people, but eventually find themselves matched once again. Their new partnership ends on a technicality, but Coach permits Amy and Frank to bid their last goodbyes before she disappears forever.
Interestingly, the pair choose to revolt against “the System”, scaling a wall that gradually turns into a simulation. It looks like the real Amy and Frank have used a dating app to simulate their compatibility over a thousand times, and that the entire episode is a love story between algorithmic ghosts.
4 White Bear — Victoria Skillane’s Memory Punishment
Victoria Skillane awakens with no memories about herself, which is why she’s shocked to find strangers filming her on smartphones. She encounters a mysterious man trying to kill her but is saved by Damien and Jem, two seemingly helpful people.
They tell Victoria about society’s disintegration, a story that viewers fall for as hard as the protagonist. As such, the revelation that she’s part of a bizarre game show-style punishment is completely unexpected—as part of her sentencing for killing a child, Victoria is forced to forget her daily experiences, all so she can relive them over and over again in “White Bear Justice Park.”
3 San Junipero — The Cyberspace Illusion Ends On A Happy Note
“San Junipero” is arguably the most heartwarming episode of Black Mirror, but that doesn’t make its ending any less unpredictable. Yorkie and Kelly fall in love within a pocket of cyberspace named for the episode, and the story gradually explains that every inhabitant is either dead or dying.
Kelly refuses to permanently “pass over,” angering Yorkie, but finally decides to choose San Junipero over a permanent death (like her husband and daughter). Although the conclusion shows a massive glittering server system containing individual consciousnesses, the fact is that Kelly and Yorkie do get their happily-ever-after, a welcome change from Black Mirror‘s brand of morbid pessimism.
2 Men Against Fire — A Brain Implant Creates The Roaches
Stripe and Ray are soldiers who are trained to attack and kill creatures known as “roaches”, who are said to be dangerous and a threat against humanity.
However, a glitch in Stripe’s implant reverts his perception to normal, and he is horrified to observe his comrades ruthlessly murdering ordinary people (because they see them as pale-skinned monsters). The real surprise, however, is that a section of humanity is deemed eugenically inferior and exterminated.
1 White Christmas — Nothing Seems Real Anymore
Matthew Trent describes two anecdotes to his “coworker” Joe Potter, each revolving around AR devices and Cookie Consciousnesses, respectively. This convinces Joe to narrate his own story, telling Matthew about his partner, Beth, admitting his role in the deaths of her father and daughter.
At this point, Matthew reveals that Joe is a Cookie Consciousness, and the only purpose of his existence is to obtain a confession for the original version’s crime. It gets worse: Matthew is forced to register as a sex offender for a different offense and is perma-blocked by society; while Cookie Joe spends the next 3-or-so million years trapped in the scene of his crime. The whole episode is a series of stacked plot twists.
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