Black Mirror is a British science-fiction television series. Each episode is its own storyline, and the episodes revolve around future technology that mess with society. Being one of the people that have watched all of the episodes in order, I personally can rate each episode by how insane and obscure they are. Some episodes are just downright scary and violent while others are confusing and relatable; either way, they’re messing with your mind. Here are my personal top five mind-boggling episodes that I definitely recommend watching:
5. “BE RIGHT BACK”
This episode is all about a woman who’s grieving over her dead lover. There’s new technology that allows you to “communicate” with your lost loved one…but it actually isn’t your loved one. It’s a technology that looks into your lost one’s social media and is able to come up with a “robotic” version of the person that sounds just like them. This woman starts having text conversations with the technology, then it goes to phone calls…and the woman finally decides to have the technology make a real live robot version of her lover. This episode is so creepy because her lover is dead and everybody knows that, but she has a robotic replica walking and talking around her house. This episode is also so emotional because you watch this woman lose someone and then have them come back, until she realizes that he’s not the same as before because… robots don’t have emotions.
4. “ARKANGEL”
This episode relates to me the most, considering it’s about a mother worried about her child’s safety, so she buys a device to keep a watchful eye on her daughter at all times. This device is implanted into her daughter and she can pretty much see what her daughter sees. She can also block what her daughter can and cannot see and gets notified when her daughter is seeing something “explicit.” Something like a scary dog barking can be blocked and the daughter only sees fuzz and doesn’t hear the barking. Obviously, this gets worse as the girl gets older, because being kept away from all explicit things makes you obviously grow up differently. This freaks me out because if this device were real, I could see a lot of parents using this to make sure their kids are safe. The girl goes into her teen years and obviously asks her mom to remove the censorship. In the end, the mother keeps watching the device to see where the girl goes without her knowing, and it’s very uncomfortable to watch this episode watching the mom watch her child hang out with “bad” boys and sneak out of the house. It’s very close to home watching a mother just wanting her child to be safe. I won’t spoil the ending for you all, but it’s very violent, I’ll be honest.
3. “THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF YOU”
This episode can be relatable and is freaky because it’s all about this new device that can be implanted behind your ear and allows you to record everything you see and hear. Using a remote, you can play back memories to a video monitor. Everybody has secrets, but do you want these secrets to be played back for others to watch? This episode is about a couple that have a baby, but the man is a little skeptical about his wife’s relationship with a past lover. After a ton of arguing and lack of trust, the couple shows each other their memories and it’s revealed that the wife was cheating on her husband with her past boyfriend. In the end, the man realizes that he’s not the biological father of his son and he violently cuts the device out of his skin and everything goes black. We can only assume, because of this, all of his memories have been erased… or not.
2. “HANG THE DJ”
This episode is very interesting because it’s all about online dating and how compatibility is tested in the future. It starts off with showing this dating system, where you’re set up with someone and they give you the amount of time that you will date that person for. Sometimes it can last a few days, and sometimes it can last years. To be part of the system, you have to stay with that person for that amount of time, and then say bye to them when your relationship is supposed to end. It’s interesting to think about because sometimes opposites attract, and sometimes people that don’t seem compatible might actually make a good couple. The episode brings about two people who are only supposed to date for a day. They enjoy their time and then have to say their goodbyes without really getting to know each other. They meet again in the future and decide that they don’t want to check their “break up” time. They enjoy dating each other for over two years and the man decides to check how long they have. Because he broke their promise, the relationship ends abruptly, but they decide to go against the rules and stay together. We find out that this whole scenario was actually a part of the dating app, and to see if you’re a match with someone, they run tests like these to see how many times you “break the system.” In this scenario, this couple went against the system 98% of the time, meaning they’re compatible. This is a very mind-boggling episode because you realize in the end that the whole episode was just showing how the system works and none of it was real.
1. “WHITE BEAR”
This is my all-time favorite episode because the ending completely caught me off guard and had such a plot twist that made you rethink the whole episode. It’s not relatable to my life at all, but really makes you want to watch the episode again while knowing how it ends. I recommend NOT READING AHEAD if you haven’t watched this episode yet. It ruins the episode if you know the ending! This episode is able to truly disturb viewers in a way where you get chills down your back. The whole episode is about a woman who wakes up in a town that she has no recollection of, and where it seems that all of the citizens – except for her – have been brainwashed. The people that haven’t been brainwashed are either trying to help her or trying to kill her, while the brainwashed citizens record her on their phones. Until the last five minutes of the episode, you really don’t know what’s happening and why people are acting this way. In the end, we find out that this woman videotaped her boyfriend killing a little girl and her punishment is for her to wake up – not remembering anything from before – and she has to find this girl she has a picture of, until the end where she finds out that she helped kill this girl she was trying to find. It makes you think, right?
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