![]() People are becoming increasingly cool with not owning things, with relying on the free entertainment presented to us and waving away potential inconveniences with a buck here or there because it's just a buck, right? "Fifteen Million Merits," the first great episode of Black Mirror, takes the world of YouTube and mobile gaming and pushes it to hellish extremes, presenting a future world where money simultaneously means nothing and everything, where ads literally invade your home and will pause if you close your eyes. At some point, we decided that paying a little extra to skip an advertisement or make a digital avatar look a little cooler is perfectly fine. When I think about "Fifteen Million Merits," I think about how we've decided that microtransactions are okay and how insane that is. Here is Black Mirror doing what only Black Mirror can do – it packages that emotional turmoil in genre concepts that ease you into the trap and only make the final gut punch all the more painful. Strip away the science fiction and you're still left with a skin-crawling tale of marital infidelity and toxic masculinity that bruises the soul. ![]() It also means that everyone essentially has a perfect memory and that lies, of both the white and non-white variety, have become impossible to hide. In "The Entire History of You," that tech is the "grain," a tiny implant behind the ear that records everything you see, allowing you to keep a database of your memories on hand to revisit and share with friends. This is bread-and-butter Black Mirror: you introduce a piece of science fiction technology into a real-world setting or relationship, allow that technology to amplify the emotions that would already be present, and watch as those involved circle the drain, their lives undone by their own actions and feelings that were simply enhanced by the presence of that technology. And if this, the first shot across the bow from a show with both eyes on the near future, feels so unsettlingly plausible, what does that mean for the rest of the series? If you believe Black Mirror takes place in a shared world and that each episode occurs at a different point on the same timeline, "The National Anthem" is the insane event that made everything else possible. It could happen tomorrow, if the right elements aligned. The sick joke at the heart of this story, where England's Prime Minister is manipulated into a horrific sex act on live TV as part of a twisted social media plot, would have felt like pure science fiction a decade ago. But like the rest of the show, "The National Anthem" is all about how we've let technology dominate our lives and how we are simultaneously at its mercy and completely addicted to it. The first episode of Black Mirror stands apart from almost every other episode of the series, taking place in the here and now with nary a single science fiction element to be seen.
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