Season 4 of "Black Mirror" starts off with this episode, which seems to be a spiritual sister of sorts to the heralded and acclaimed "San Junipero" episode from season 3.
Incorporating a lot of humor into it's dark subject matter, "USS Callister" focuses on a man who is the CTO of a gaming company. A quiet nerd type, he's generally ignored or maligned by coworkers even though he is essentially the top of the food chain at his company. He has created a virtual reality game in which one is completely immersed in a space travel galaxy.
To compensate for this indignity at work, he has created a mod for the game that turns it into a simulation of his favorite classic sci-fi TV show (essentially a parody of classic Star Trek.) He has found a way to take the DNA of unwitting real life people - in this case the coworkers he has felt slighted by - and put them into the game as avatars. He gets this DNA from coffee cups around the office, or similar sources.
When a new, attractive young woman begins interning at the office, the two seem to spark a connection. This is quickly thwarted when another co-worker warns her away from him. Angry at this rejection, he quickly swipes her DNA and puts her into the game too.
The catch? All of these avatars in the game are completely self-aware. They know who they were out in the real world and retain those complete personalities, and they know they are digital copies of themselves. Yet they seem to retain emotion, feel pain, and are essentially slaves to this role playing scenario. If they don't cooperate? Their captor, when he himself is present in the game, will psychologically and physically torture them into submission.
The result is our newcomer guiding her in-game "crew" into a plan to delete themselves completely from the game, a better option than being held captive to the whimsy of the man who brought them there. It's a compelling idea, because in reality what we're watching is nothing more than raw data simulating real people, but we feel for these digital copies as they negotiate their way through a hostage situation.
The "Black Mirror" spin on this is that we're forced to question whether or not our CTO is, in fact, a bad guy. After all, although he has stolen the DNA that allowed him to create these digital copies in his fantasy universe, the copies are, in fact, not real people. By using them to work out his anger and frustrations, isn't he really allowing himself to be a healthier emotional person in the real world?
In the end he is played as the villain and our digital heroes the victims, but though he may seem like the real creep, his actions were truly reactions to the way the very real people in his workplace were cruel to him... so who's the bad guy?
"USS Callister" really starts off season 4 of "Black Mirror" with a phenomenal moral dilemma. The entire cast is superb in their roles, notably Michaela Coel as Shania, the co-worker whose only real offense was rejecting her boss' romantic interest. Set up to seem like a superficial bitch in the real world, her digital version proves that human beings (and their copies I suppose) have far more layers than anyone gives them credit, and Coel manages to take something that could have been trite and make it both tangibly deep and horrific as it unfolds.
Here's hoping "Black Mirror" continues to push these boundaries!
Incorporating a lot of humor into it's dark subject matter, "USS Callister" focuses on a man who is the CTO of a gaming company. A quiet nerd type, he's generally ignored or maligned by coworkers even though he is essentially the top of the food chain at his company. He has created a virtual reality game in which one is completely immersed in a space travel galaxy.
To compensate for this indignity at work, he has created a mod for the game that turns it into a simulation of his favorite classic sci-fi TV show (essentially a parody of classic Star Trek.) He has found a way to take the DNA of unwitting real life people - in this case the coworkers he has felt slighted by - and put them into the game as avatars. He gets this DNA from coffee cups around the office, or similar sources.
When a new, attractive young woman begins interning at the office, the two seem to spark a connection. This is quickly thwarted when another co-worker warns her away from him. Angry at this rejection, he quickly swipes her DNA and puts her into the game too.
The catch? All of these avatars in the game are completely self-aware. They know who they were out in the real world and retain those complete personalities, and they know they are digital copies of themselves. Yet they seem to retain emotion, feel pain, and are essentially slaves to this role playing scenario. If they don't cooperate? Their captor, when he himself is present in the game, will psychologically and physically torture them into submission.
The result is our newcomer guiding her in-game "crew" into a plan to delete themselves completely from the game, a better option than being held captive to the whimsy of the man who brought them there. It's a compelling idea, because in reality what we're watching is nothing more than raw data simulating real people, but we feel for these digital copies as they negotiate their way through a hostage situation.
The "Black Mirror" spin on this is that we're forced to question whether or not our CTO is, in fact, a bad guy. After all, although he has stolen the DNA that allowed him to create these digital copies in his fantasy universe, the copies are, in fact, not real people. By using them to work out his anger and frustrations, isn't he really allowing himself to be a healthier emotional person in the real world?
In the end he is played as the villain and our digital heroes the victims, but though he may seem like the real creep, his actions were truly reactions to the way the very real people in his workplace were cruel to him... so who's the bad guy?
"USS Callister" really starts off season 4 of "Black Mirror" with a phenomenal moral dilemma. The entire cast is superb in their roles, notably Michaela Coel as Shania, the co-worker whose only real offense was rejecting her boss' romantic interest. Set up to seem like a superficial bitch in the real world, her digital version proves that human beings (and their copies I suppose) have far more layers than anyone gives them credit, and Coel manages to take something that could have been trite and make it both tangibly deep and horrific as it unfolds.
Here's hoping "Black Mirror" continues to push these boundaries!