Black Mirror Series 1 (2011) - Review

Starring: Rory Kinnear, Daniel Kaluuya, Jessica Brown Findlay & Toby Kebbell

Written By: Charlie Brooker, Kanak Huq & Jesse Armstrong

Directed By: Otto Bathurst, Euros Lyn & Brian Welsh

Certificate: 15

 

Black Mirror could well be one of the ultimate TV success stories. Originally commissioned for three episodes by Channel 4, the show has since been recommissioned for many more instalments, made the leap onto Netflix, and seen increasing interest both in the UK and around the world. It's been an incredible accomplishment for writer and the show's creator, Charlie Brooker, and has now become one of the most talked about television shows currently on air. To make things even sweeter, Black Mirror has not only achieved success with audiences, but with critics too, and is consistently regarded as one of the most intelligent and effective dramas ever made. The show itself is an anthology series, with each episode featuring an entirely different cast, characters and settings, and while it is primarily science-fiction, different episodes can apply other genres so at times it can become a romance, a thriller, a horror or a comedy. The only really consistent feature of Black Mirror is its cynicism and ability to paint an uncomfortable picture of what our future relationship with technology may look like if we're not careful. As a result of each episode being so different, I'm going to structure this review in a slightly different way to my usual ones, and look at each episode of the first series as they come, their themes and what they present, and exactly how effective they are.

 

Our first episode of Black Mirror comes to us as a modern day political thriller, The National Anthem. In the episode, a much-loved member of the British Royal Family, Princess Susannah, is kidnapped, and her kidnapper makes just one demand for her safe return: Prime Minister Michael Callow must appear on all national television networks and have live sex with a pig. Interestingly, given that it's the show's very first episode, The National Anthem doesn't exactly provide a futuristic or sci-fi view of our relationship with technology, but instead bases itself strictly on the technology we have now. However, this isn't to say that the episode doesn't achieve what it sets out to, and it presents a vicious, worrying look at our own culture. One of the driving forces behind The National Anthem is the idea of technology being used to distract us from what really matters. In a scenario like the one this episode presents, you'd think that our main concern should be the princess (who admittedly is little more than a plot device) and her safe return. Yet it is the spectacle of the Prime Minister, who may be about to appear on TV and have sex with a pig, that captures everyone's attention, and very little concern is actually showed by anyone in this episode towards the princess. This itself could be read as a mockery of how viral video culture and publicity stunts distract so many of us (myself included) from the serious matters at hand. This idea gets summed up visually towards the end of the episode, with the image of the princess dazed and confused as she collapses completely alone on the Millennium Bridge, with everyone too busy watching the spectacle on screen.

 

To enrich the drama as well as the themes at play in The National Anthem, the performances from our main cast are spectacular, with Rory Kinnear doing an outstanding job as the Prime Minister. It's rare for a TV series to paint any politician, let alone the Prime Minister, as sympathetic, but for once it's not the government that are quite the bad guys. In some ways, they're painted almost as powerless to help when it comes to controlling things like the power and influence of the media. Originally, the government try to stop the story from getting out, but it inevitably does, highlighting the lack of privacy that comes with a digital age. While the story leaks in several ways, the press also make an active effort on their part to find out what's being kept from them, with one journalist putting herself in extreme danger just to get a story. And with the general disdain for press interference, many people have understandably pointed out that the moment where the journalist gets injured by the government's security forces and has her phone destroyed, is a satisfying one. The National Anthem is also our first look at how when it comes to the show openly tackling politics, writer Charlie Brooker, seems almost to have the ability to look into the future. Four years after the episode was first broadcast, real life Prime Minister David Cameron found himself at the centre of a controversy uncannily similar to this episode. It was alleged that Cameron had at some point in his past, had sex with a pig as part of some initiation ceremony. Whether or not this is true is debatable, but the reaction to the event was eerily similar to The National Anthem, and Charlie Brooker would go on to show this almost future-reading ability in subsequent series of the show.

 

Next up we have what is currently my favourite episode of Black Mirror (at least at the time of writing): Fifteen Million Merits. Taking a futuristic dystopian sci-fi spin this time, we are introduced to Bing, a man who lives in a world where people must use exercise bikes to power their surroundings and earn the futuristic currency “Merits”. One day at work, Bing meets and falls in love with Abi, and when he learns how good a singer she is, he convinces her to participate in a talent show to escape the life they're stuck in. Part of the reason this is my favourite Black Mirror episode is that is satirizes and shoots down in flames reality TV and talent show culture, and that's something I can really get my teeth into. Anyone who knows me will likely also know that I have a personal disdain for about 9/10 reality and talent shows, and to see Fifteen Million Merits expose shows like Britain's Got Talent for what the really are is something that's automatically right up my street. Heck, two of the talent show judges in this episode are basically direct copies of Simon Cowell and Amanda Holden, this is just brilliant! The “Hot Shots” talent show also gives us plenty of commentary on the sexualisation of entertainment culture, and how it can take something as pure and genuinely talented as the song Abi sings for them, and reduce it to sex based off her physical appearance. It's a great jab at personalities such as Kim Kardashian, who seem only to achieve stardom based off their physical attributes rather than any kind of talent. It's a crushing, devastating moment both for the audience and Bing, when Abi appears on the WraithBabes channel, and while it would still be effective on paper, without the fantastic performances from both Daniel Kaluuya and Jessica Brown Findlay, and the sweet, romantic connection they conveyed with their characters, it wouldn't be anywhere near as effective. Seeing that blossoming, really quite innocent romance torn down hits us like a ton of bricks, and is some of the finest drama TV has to offer.

 

Fifteen Million Merits further presents Black Mirror's first look at where technology may end up taking us in the future, as opposed to the previous episode which examined our relationship with the technology of today. Fifteen Million Merits takes us to such a point in our potential future, where hardly anything remotely natural exists anymore. Over the course of the episode, not a single window or source of natural light is seen, and the only natural materials shown to exist are in things such as cups. Abi is shown regularly making little paper figures out of the cups, even at one point making a little paper penguin for Bing (and if you really want to get deep into this, then consider that the penguin is a flightless bird – a situation rather like many of the people we see in this episode?). Yet the paper from the cups, the only natural material around, is at one point referred to as “detritus”. In this future, there's no escaping technology's presence, with every single person waking up literally surrounded by screens – they're boxed in their own pretty cages. You can't escape the technology, and you also can't escape the advertising, with adverts for things like the talent show or the WraithBabes channel incurring a penalty if you skip them. In a way, there's signs of this already happening for us: just look at something like ITV's catch-up service – it contains adverts you can't skip unless you pay to upgrade. This future world has developed a poor office culture, with everyone shown lumbering to work and registering barely any emotion. Take Bing before he first encounters Abi – he barely speaks a word or is shown to feel anything as a result of the world he lives in and the overabundance of the technology surrounding him. There's so much to read and unpack from Fifteen Million Merits that I've barely begun to scratch the surface. You could seriously get a decent-sized essay out of this, and I'd highly recommend taking a look at what people far more skilled at this than me have picked up on from this episode.

 

The last episode of the series is titled The Entire History Of You. In the episode, which appears to be set in an alternative present day reality, we see a population installed with “grains”. These are devices that record everything that they do over their lives, and allows memories to be replayed in front of their eyes or on a screen. However, this technology starts to create problems for a man called Liam, who begins to suspect his wife Ffion may have had an affair. The idea of being able to literally replay memories is certainly an interesting one. I know I personally have some memories that I'd absolutely love to see on screen again, but also have others that I hate having in my head, let alone seeing replayed in front of me. That's the problem with technology like the “grains”, the cons outweigh the pros, and they trap us in the past. The “grains” are perfectly represented from a visual standpoint too, as whenever anyone's viewing past memories, their eyes become an almost demonic colour, and just look at the scene where Liam and Ffion are having sex: the colour of their eyes and their movements are completely unnatural, as they both just replay the memory of when they were having better sex. If real, the “grains” are a technology that could reduce us all to paranoid messes which is exactly what happens with Liam. He's seen replaying the memory of a work appraisal that he thinks went poorly again and again. Later he does the exact same with a memory of Ffion talking to another man, which is where he first gets the suspicion that she's having an affair. You may think this is a good thing as the technology allows him to discover the truth, but does knowing that his wife's having an affair really make things any better? He can't live with this knowledge by the end of the episode, and has to resort to cutting the “grain” out – rather than improving his life, the technology has done the exact opposite.

 

Compared to the two episodes that preceded it, The Entire History Of You is more of a personal story focusing on one couple, as opposed to examining the wider implications of the technology it features. On the one hand, this does allow for more development and investment in the characters of Liam and Ffion, thus making the conclusion to the episode all the more devastating. On the other hand, it does feel like a missed opportunity to not look at the wider implications this technology could have, and we could've had a more George Orwell 1984-esque story. We get some brief glimpses of this, such as when Liam has to show the security at an airport what he's recently been doing, and we can draw a lot from this such as the lack of any privacy it gives someone, and this society's rather scary “guilty before proven innocent” mindset. However, I feel the episode could've done with a bit more of this, and it isn't until Black Mirror's Christmas special, White Christmas, which features a similar technology, that we get any of that. However, Liam and Ffion's story does go some way in making up for this, as it's once again some incredibly moving television. Its ending is left very open to interpretation as to what exactly has happened to the two and their baby, and there's no single way of explaining everything. Personally, I think that Liam certainly did something to Ffion and the baby that may or may not be his, and that this is his reason for removing his “grain”. His memories of their previously happy life became torment, as shown through the contrasting shots of Liam walking through his empty, colourless and soulless house, to when he was living a happier life. He's lost everything as a result of the technology, and has to eventually cut it out because the memories of what he once had became a form of torture.

 

Overall, Black Mirror does what good television should be doing all the time, and that's getting you to think and to question aspects of our own lives. It's the kind of show that sticks in your mind and has you going over the things you've seen long after watching. Such a cynical series wouldn't usually be my thing, but it achieves what it sets out to with style and great thought, and should really serve as a warning to what the future may hold if we're not careful. It masters every genre from sci-fi, to comedy, to drama, to romance and satire, and undoubtedly deserves its success and popularity. If you haven't yet watched Black Mirror, I can't recommend the show enough and you should definitely check it out.

The National Anthem



9/10

Fifteen Million Merits



10/10

The Entire History Of You



8/10