Black Mirror has become a colloquial shorthand for technological dystopia, but the second episode of season five bucks the trend somewhat in presenting a more personal, nuanced take on our relationship with technology – in this case, social media. A Black Mirror episode where tech is not really to blame – can it be? WIRED's Matt Reynolds and Victoria Turk discuss.
This article contains spoilers
Victoria Turk: So that was an interesting episode of The Bill, I mean Black Mirror. The second episode, 'Smithereens', is set in London and the surrounding countryside in 2018 – a rare glimpse of a recent past rather than future speculation. The plot unfolds like a police drama more than anything, with the tech angle much more understated than you might expect from the series. How did you find it?
Matt Reynolds: The one thing you can reliably expect from Black Mirror is plenty of playing with different genres, so in that respect this episode didn't disappoint. It reminded me a of season three's 'Hated in the Nation', which played out like an episode of CSI.
I don't think 'Smithereens' quite worked as a police drama or a Black Mirror episode though. For me, Andrew Scott's amazingly tense performance just about held it all together, but the plot seemed to plod rather than twist and turn. It felt like you could see where it was going after the first 15 minutes. Or am I being a bit harsh?
VT: No, the episode was definitely carried by Andrew Scott, who is just a brilliant actor and played the role of Chris, a slightly-mentally-unbalanced grieving fiancé, very well. Kudos too to Damson Idris, who played Jaden, the social media intern taken hostage by Chris in his misguided quest to get closure around his partner's death. Without their engaging performances, I think it would have floundered – the script just felt a bit thin, and the scope a bit narrow.
Let's talk about the theme here. We meet Chris, a car-hail driver, who clearly has something against social media, and particularly a company called Smithereen. We have some indication that he feels the company is implicated in his fiancée's death. I have to say, after this set up, I had alarm bells ringing that this was going to be the old "what if phones but too much" Black Mirror cliché...
MR: Right. And Chris is holding Jaden at gunpoint until he can get to speak to Billy Bauer – Smithereen's CEO who looks like he's walked straight from Burning Man into a ten-day silent meditation retreat. I wonder if there's a serendipitous case of life imitating art here: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey spent his birthday on a ten-day silent retreat in Myanmar last December.
But surface similarities aside, Bauer isn't your usual weasel-worded tech CEO. Once he actually gets through to Chris, Bauer is actually quite human, he shares Chris' rage at the world and can't quite believe how the company he started ended up such a cultural megolith. This is the first time we've seen Black Mirror get so close to the real world of Californian tech firms, and it was a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal. Is this what you expected?
VT: Oh I felt for sure that was a direct reference to Dorsey's silent retreat. And no, that is not what I expected from Black Mirror - we're used to the show portraying tech companies as heartless evil entities, but Bauer, despite his annoying Burning Man-esque character, seemed eminently reasonable and basically a normal-ish hipster guy. And it was made very clear that, really, the technology here was really not to blame. Chris's partner died because of his own mistake, not really anything to do with social media – and even he seems to know this. He's talking to Bauer out of sheer desperation, because he can't handle the guilt and the grief.
That said, the rest of the Smithereen company was presented in a bit more of a classic Black Mirror style – corporate, selfish, take-no-prisoners. There was a bit of a subplot about how much these companies know about us, and their interaction with the police and security services. I have to say, I wasn't too convinced by this. In reality, tech companies seem to constantly distance themselves from getting involved in police matters as they don't want that responsibility – yet here, Smithereen immediately inserted itself into the operation, almost as if it were competing with the police and FBI to solve the case.
MR: And then there was the other sub-plot about Hayley – a mother who is trying to access her daughter's social media account to find answers about her suicide. Both Hayley and Chris are filled with this need for closure about the grief they've suffered, and in each it ends up being directed at a social media company, which I think really drives home how these companies have ended up shaping so many facets of our lives.
That, admittedly, is not a particularly insightful bit of commentary on the tech industry. But, as was the case with the previous episode 'Striking Vipers', it meant that the story remained centered on the humans and not the technology, which has always been one of Black Mirror's true strengths. I just wish that in this episode there was more there to surprise us.
VT: Yes, the treatment of the social media did seem a bit two-dimensional, and while some of the real issues with these companies – privacy and data collection, for example, and the amount of power they wield – were alluded to, they weren't very satisfactorily explored. I did appreciate that it turned the Black Mirror conceit on its head, though, and essentially hammered home the point that sometimes we're too eager to blame things on technology that really aren't so easily explained. Chris's fiancée isn't dead because of social media, and you feel that Hayley would really be so much better off not looking at her daughter's inbox – she's not going to find an "answer" there about her daughter's suicide, because suicide is more complicated than that. It reflected the way that social media has become a bit of a scapegoat, especially when it comes to things we struggle to explain or don't want to take responsibility for.
MR: Exactly. It's a great subversion of what people often mistype Black Mirror as: a series wining that technology is evil and we'd all be much better off running around in the park like in the good old days.
The ending of the episode is deliberately ambiguous. Chris and Jaden are fighting in the back of the car when the police sniper shoots at them, and instead of finding out what happened we instead see people all over the world watching the news unravel in real time, presumably on Smithereen or Persona. Do you think it matters what happened in the end?
VT: To be honest, not really? I think I missed whatever the point of that was supposed to be. Are we supposed to think it's bad that people are watching that news in real time? Again, it seemed to hint at a big, real ethical question around social media – livestreaming violent acts – but didn't give us enough to get into it.
All in all, as with 'Striking Vipers', I felt this episode was a bit limited in scope for Black Mirror. There wasn't really any big moral conundrum or any consideration of how technology is really shaping society. It was focused in on one man's personal tragedy, which didn't really extrapolate too far out to make a point about the times we live in.
On the one hand, I liked the more realistic approach as a change to some of the more stylised Black Mirror takes, but it made it harder to believe some of the less realistic moments. Like there's no way Billy Bauer would have spoken to him. I'm hoping that the final episode in this season shows us something a bit more big-picture – something that sticks with you and makes you think.
MR: Agreed. We've had two okay-but-not-thrilling episodes so far. Here's hoping the last episode will deliver a little more!
Need more dystopia? These are the best Black Mirror episodes, ranked for you to disagree with
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
