re: Rank The Black Mirror Episodes So Far

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easily the worst episode to me.

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I just don't get that. I really enjoyed that and being that it was one of the first I watched it really gave me the "black mirror" feel on what the show is all about. I can see people not caring for it, everyone has different tastes, but I honestly can't see how someone could rank it below national anthem and waldo.

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I just don't get that. I really enjoyed that and being that it was one of the first I watched it really gave me the "black mirror" feel on what the show is all about. I can see people not caring for it, everyone has different tastes, but I honestly can't see how someone could rank it below national anthem and waldo.

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The national anthem episode had some entertainment value, even if it wasn't anything like the rest of the series.

spoilers involved regarding shut up and dance.

I saw it as more of some hacker just blackmailing folks to do whatever was requested. So the hacker built an organization of folks being blackmailed willing to do anything to cover up their dirty secrets, which pretty much anyone has (esp the kid who only looked at some cp when others did way worse stuff.) Then the hacker was going to just release whatever blackmail anyway so you should just accept the consequences of your actions, not commit more and worse crimes (bank robbing, killing etc). so that you can cover up your initial crime you were blackmailed for.

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im not gonna rank them all, but i guess my hot takes are that i really like 15 million merits and i really, really fricking hate nosedive

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I feel like nosedive turned out exactly the same way it would have if one of us wrote it.

This show was recommended on here. Sat down with the wife and watched the first one about the British PM fricking a pig.

Might have been the worst hour of tv Ive watched in years.

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and Shut Up and Dance is just unnecessarily cruel.

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Yet you have White Bear ranked #6? It is just as cruel, and arguably moreso, especially considering she has no idea why anything is happening to her the whole time (which the protagonist-turned-antagonist knows the whole time in SUaD).

The cool thing about this show is that clearly resonates with different people in many different ways. The huge difference in everyone's ranking lists in this thread attest to that.

I watched it last night and came away with the same general impression as the first/only other time I watched it.

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It hits a cord because it's so similar to our everyday world now, only taken to the extreme. But again I just really didn't like the ending. It was just way too predictable and formulaic, like something that you'd see from a guy in a HS English class. Girl is hyper-obsessive about her rating, her rating starts to tank, she's distraught, she loses her mind, gives a stereotypical crazy-person speech at a wedding, is finally "free" at the end because she no longer cares about rating. I guess there isn't a whole lot they could have done with the ending based on how they got themselves to that point, it just didn't really wow me. I was very entertained and captivated the whole way through though which I guess is what ultimately makes for good entertainment.

With the news of the new season upcoming I guess it's time to dive right back into BM again. A few months ago I (and others) started rewatching a few, and I watched playtest last night. I've seen teh great ones many times but to my knowledge I had only seen playtest once so I wanted to give it another go.

SPOILERS below....













It's kinda hard to express my exact thoughts here. The dark and foreboding nature of BM is one of the things I love about it, but honestly I felt like PT intentionally tried to have TOO MANY twists and turns, simply to be dark. The dude goes to the room and has the sample playtest, all good. He then signs up for the serious one and he's in the spooky house. Shite gets real crazy, he's terrified, thinks he's abotu to die, then is snapped back to reality back in the chinese guy's office. They state that that entire length of time (in dude's 'perceived time' it was probably over the course of several hours) was actually only 1 second in IRL time, and the program was too powerful than they imagined. That right there is a solid twist. So then the guy gets his gear, packs his bag, flies across the ocean from Europe back to America. He goes home and sees his mom with a smile on his face, a new renewed sense of self and a desire to rekindle a bad past with his mom. Then at this point, we realize this is also a dream and now we're back to the ORIGINAL room, and that because of cell phone interference the ACTUAL test lasted 0.01 seconds and his brain basically shut down and he died. So the original easy playtest with the funny moles never even happened either.

I understand that real time and perceived time are capable of beign wildly differnet (the ending of Contact comes to mind as well). But what I don't like is that the guy imagined doing the haunted house part, imagined being terrified, imagined being safe and rescued, somehow imagined a trans-atlantic flight, cab ride home, and made it all the way into his home in 0.01 seconds before brain collapse. I mean why add that final twist? The episode would have been perfectly fine with him just going in to his mom and ending right there.

But...ultimatley I'm being very nitpicky here. It was enjoyable and I did like it. Not one of my favorites but certainly not one of the worst either.

White Christmas is far and away the best episode.