As we prepare to have our minds blown by six brand new episodes, we thought it would be a good opportunity to rank the original seven episodes.

 

4. ‘White Bear’

“How do you like it now?”

Baying mobs are a popular theme on Black Mirror and they’re cranked up to 11 in ‘White Bear’.  The incredible Lenora Crichlow (Being Human) wakes sat in a chair in a normal terraced house and no memory of who, where or when she is but with pills at her feet and bandages on her wrists.

Out of the window is an ordinary looking estate and on the mantelpiece sits a picture of her with a man and a school photo of a child she assumes to be her daughter. She has occasional glitched flashbacks and leaves the house, discovering people in the surrounding homes filming her on their mobile phones. A masked figure shoots at her but the bystanders just watch, glued to their devices. She meets Jem at a petrol station who aids her escape and tells her that a signal turned about 90% of people into spectators.

They meet Baxter, who tricks them into thinking he’s helping but threatens torture on them.  They escape and reach the White Bear transmitter compound in order to destroy it when suddenly the walls come up and an audience sits applauding as the star of the show is strapped into a chair.

It’s this point in which the rug is pulled from under us. I remember when I watched the episode in 2013 thinking that it had been an extreme immersive theatre experience but the truth is far worse – she is Victoria Skillane who filmed her now dead fiancé as he tortured and murdered a kidnapped child called Jemima, her cuddly white bear becoming the enduring symbol in the hunt for her.

Having been branded by the judge as being a “uniquely wicked and poisonous individual” it was deemed “punishment would be proportionate and considered” – with the White Bear Justice Park being the end result, an experience Victoria is forced to relive every day. It’s hard not to be affected by the scenes of people booing and jeering a character that just five minutes earlier we were supporting and willing on to survive and this is Brooker’s masterstroke – whilst some would argue for extreme vengeance such as the introduction of castration or the return of capital punishment, Brooker highlights the human cost of such measures and forces the viewer to rethink their beliefs.

Easter egg: UKN, the in-world 24-hour news channel, makes a return when news clips from her case are played to Victoria as the truth is revealed to her.

 

3. ‘White Christmas’

“It’s a job not a jail.”

In some ways, ‘White Christmas’ is like the conclusion of an essay – it takes in many ideas from earlier episodes and serves as an epilogue for the Channel 4 Years. The episode is littered with Easter eggs from the previous six episodes whilst also managing to be an anthology episode within an anthology series.

We open to Wizzard’s classic ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ playing in what looks like a cabin outpost, snow falling outside. Mad Men star Jon Hamm’s Trent complains that in five years he’s not heard more than three sentences from Rafe Spall’s Potter and in an effort to encourage him to talk, he offers tales from his previous jobs.

The first story is of socially awkward Harry (Rasmus Hardiker) gatecrashing an office Christmas party in order to hit on a girl whilst Trent provides “in the field assistance” through an eye-link (think in-built Google glasses) and advising him on what to say and wear. With their target acquired, Jennifer (Natalia Tena) spots him talking to himself and thinking she’s found a kindred spirit, takes him home. Harry had actually been talking to a group of guys watching Harry’s stream and although they think their luck is in it quickly transpires Jennifer is off her meds and given Harry a poisoned drink so that they can commit suicide together.

As Harry lays coughing up blood, Trent advises the group to “wipe everything”.  Trent’s wife discovers what he was doing and blocks him – a bit like a Facebook block but with the human form turning into a grey blob and muffled noise.

In the second part, Greta (Oona Chaplin) leads a busy life and has undergone a minor medical procedure whereby an implant lies near her brain for a week before the ‘cookie’ is extracted and placed into what resembles an egg-shaped egg timer. Greta believes she’s woken up in an all-white room and struggles to comprehend that she is merely a copy.

Trent gently tortures her into complying, forcing the Greta copy to live three weeks in the space of the real world’s thirty seconds. She’s a mess but still non-compliant so puts her through ‘six months’ of nothing by which time she is begging for something to do. The Greta copy becomes a drone, completing meaningless tasks, something that Potter sees as barbaric slavery whereas others, Trent points out, would see it as code – “you have empathy, you’re a good man”, Trent tells him.

With his resolve weakened, the final part is handed over to Potter.  It starts at his father-in-law’s cottage at Christmas, somewhere he and his wife Beth (Jane Montgomery) go every year.  We see short snaps of their relationship – from Potter getting wasted watching karaoke (during which Beth sings Abi’s song from ‘Fifteen Million Merits’) to sharing dinner with Beth’s work colleagues (“I think she’s into him more than he’s into her”). He discovers Beth is pregnant but she’s adamant she doesn’t want it and ‘blocks’ him.

But the block remains and she disappears from his life. Every year he goes to the cottage to see her grey muted form and discovers she has kept the baby but blocks cover offspring too – “seeing something was better than nothing”. It’s only when Beth is killed in a train crash that the block is lifted and he discovers the child is not his but her work colleague’s. He cracks a snowglobe on the head of his father in law and abandons the child, who eventually freezes to death outside the house.

And then another Brooker Rug is pulled – the outpost Trent and Potter have been in is the father-in-law’s cottage, a constructed reality to convince Potter’s cookie copy to confess to murder. The real Potter is locked away in a prison cell refusing to talk but the police have all they need to convict him. Like ‘White Bear’ before it, the notion of punishment ad infinitum is suggested when the cookie is made to live out a thousand years of listening to Wizzard. Trent doesn’t walk away scot-free though – by providing an illegal service for peeping toms, and failing to report a murder, he’s blocked by society and must walk the streets seeing everyone as a muted grey but to them he’s bright red, sticking out like a sore thumb and branded for the world to see.

We could write an entire piece on ‘White Christmas’ alone as it’s packed with Easter eggs and tons of ideas to deconstruct, from the rights of an AI clone to the real world prospects of streaming video from your eyeballs. It’s a heavy watch but very much worth it and although it sometimes plays like a Greatest Hits episode, it’s not quite the best one…

Easter egg: ‘White Christmas’ is one giant Easter egg (or should that be Christmas cracker?) of an episode and we’d recommend reading this summary of all the links to each of the preceding episodes here.

 

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