Thoughts On Black Mirror (Season 1)

Black mirror is a series about different aspects of technology and how it will advance and affect us even more in the future. Every episode has different characters and themes, some darker than others. It scared me to watch it alone as they set the tone of most of the episodes pretty wild and chilling. Season one wasn’t that great, but it did give a lot of food for thought.

Season 1 has three episodes with three different themes. The first episode is about the prime minister of UK. He wakes up to find out that Princess Susanna of the royal family has been kidnapped. The kidnappers release a video on YouTube of how they want to see PM have sex with a pig while being video tapped live. This leads to a social media discussion and social pressure beings to dawn on the Prime Minister. That leads him to actually carry out the task with live cameras on. I’m going to leave out the technical aspects for you to watch. This brings into perspective of how much social media has an impact that even if the PM was given max protection by the best services, nothing could’ve prevented him from social pressure and nothing could’ve brought back the Princess but him. The hackers did it for the lulz. And in that they ruined his life. The internet is a harmful place and with the crazy ones who do understand it, they can make the world dance on their fingertips. Is what we pressure other people for really worth the pain? Is one person’s respect more important than the others? Why is it that we only see one aspect of a situation posted on social media and when it turns out to be EXACTLY the way it should we regret our decision?

The second episode is a little slow. I believe it’s more metaphorical than a technological aspect of the series. So, I’m going to skip that. The only interesting thing about it is that humans live on a ship floating in outer space (kinda like the idea of spaceX), They're all surrounded by technology and the only thing fueling the ship is people running on machines, to which in return they get paid in their own space money. All in all, nothing is real but the humans.

The third episode is where Black Mirror starts getting interesting. In the future, they have introduced a technology that can record everything you see and is planted in your eyes. You can connect the device on your TV or rewind it so that you can see what you did and when. You can also erase memories. It revolves around how the main character is obsessed with finding out about his wife and an old friend of hers. He keeps rewinding to the time she was startled to see her with him. Till he cracks her and figures out she had been cheating on him and their child wasn’t his. This episode genuinely scared me to see where the future was going. On one hand, this technology is all we can hope for, to rewind good memories and keep watching them over and over again. But then it has the element of how bad memories can affect everyone around us if watched with them on a tv or if a loved one asks to view out old memories. We would be able to see erased memories as they have a blank area under some dates. And sometimes some memories might make us either stuck in time or obsessed with a memory to make us do something irrational, as was justified in the episode. If this sort of technology is ever introduced in the time that we live, I’d think a thousand times before getting it.