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It’s a victory, and an ending that defies the natural biology of the series-and in being so, it’s a form of reparation not everyone will understand. In doing so, she frees her father, a restitution that is infinitely compounded when you consider trials like the Tuskegee experiments, how the carceral state continues to irreparably fracture black families, and the gruesome modes by which the country profits off black pain. In a world short on karmic pittance, Nish gets retribution: She poisons Haynes, plants his consciousness inside her father’s virtual body, happily executes him, and sets fire to the museum. In the episode’s final twist, it’s revealed that Nish is no British tourist but the daughter of Clayton Leigh, whose hologram has become the main attraction of Haynes’s museum-imprisoned and tortured, ad infinitum, by visitors. The three stories are threaded together not just by Haynes’ nefarious puppeteering but by Brooker’s insistence on proximity: Each character-a down-on-his-luck doctor, a mother in a vegetative state, a man who maintains his innocence-desperately wants to remain connected to the world, and the people, around them. He’s sentenced to death but agrees to sign over his digital imprint, in hopes that the revenue from its use will provide for his family once he’s gone. The final arc details the story of Clayton Leigh, a black man accused of murdering a journalist. Haynes comes from a career recruiting people on behalf of a cutting-edge neuro-tech company, and his stories detail the use of devices that offer the ability to feel another person’s physical sensations, or even transfer one person’s consciousness into another’s mind. It’s a museum built on a mad dream, but also one imbued with a difficult truth: that all of us-the inventors, the thrill seekers, the intrigued, the “race-hating rich guy with a hard-on for power”-are in some way complicit in the society we create, and especially in its outcome.Īkin to the show’s haunting holiday special, “White Christmas,” “Black Museum” plays out in a nightmarish triptych, massaging three seemingly disparate stories into a single narrative. Delicately, Brooker positions the Black Mirror universe within a linear narrative, bookending his galaxy with a beginning and perhaps an even more terrifying, unforeseen end.
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It houses “authentic criminological artifacts,” many of which are from previous Black Mirror episodes-including tech (the cloning device from “USS Calister” an ADI from “Hated in the Nation”), sinister curios (the bathtub from “Crocodile”), and personal memorabilia (the tablet from “Arkangel”). The episode’s first flash of genius comes with the introduction of the museum itself. Humans get into trouble not when we make progress, but when we try to overcome humanity by treating emotion and spirit like science-the quest to articulate and optimize the ineffable. In some ways, this is Brooker’s central thesis. It’s not solely a matter of distance, but also of what one is willing to do to bridge that distance, that causes the series’ small, fertile tragedies. What at first feels like a twisted fairytale slowly unravels into a vision of the quotidian, as if Brooker is saying: our emerging reality is much more unnerving than pure fiction.įor all its technological sprawl, Black Mirror is a show about the flesh and bone of human suffering: the different ways individuals hurt and grieve, the way human innovation expands the distance between people, communities, and ideologies. His stories are of a world in the throes of madness-be it dread brought on by devices that govern human emotion (“Nosedive” “The Entire History of You”) or the mayhem that arises out of one’s inability to access, or sustain, a particular social standing (“The National Anthem” “Shut Up and Dance”). What one is willing to give up for it-either to create the gulf or to clear it-is the source of all the sad chaos that outlines his futurescape. In Brooker’s inverted paradise, proximity comes at a price. But what if we can’t? What if we’re stuck in a loop, slave to new innovations that only amplify hate, human flaw, and social fragility? In the techno-dystopian wheelhouse that is Charlie Brooker’s darkly imaginative anthology series, Black Mirror, that is often the case at hand. Utopianism rests upon a single, fundamental truth: that we can be better than we were before.