Black Mirror season 4

#1 "USS Callister." Strangely, there seem to be a lot of reviews claiming the episode is about 1) online harassment and/or 2) toxic masculinity. I'll take the latter as an obvious characterological point that's only interesting insofar as people populate institutions, and ownership and power are harmful when concentrated anywhere; the former makes no sense at all. The episode is clearly about an authoritarian workplace, specifically in tech but with application as broad and deep as the real-life seepage of tech workplace culture into other industries. Protagonist Nanette Cole, coder and self-described "fangirl" of coding genius and company CTO Robert Daly, explicitly sets up this premise when she remarks early in the episode on her "toxic" former workplace. Daly's Star Trek-like virtual universe, into which he conscripts digital copies of Cole and her co-workers, has all the earmarks of the same: coercion, retaliation against organizers, retaliation by proxy, sexual harassment, the well-being of family members leveraged as blackmail, no ownership of the means of production (the ship, the code) OR reproduction (Ken and Barbie anatomy), the expectation of constantly available labor, the compulsory performance of enthusiasm and passion, and the threat of not death but routine terror and misery mitigated only by the occasional happy-hour cocktail. 

It's worth noting that the emotional and dramatic payoff of the episode comes when the ship, now in the hands of the crew, successfully flees Daly and clears a "wormhole" into the Cloud. Having expected extinction, the crew instead find freedom. And they're not only rid of Daly and his open shop; they're free to play--to explore "an infinite, procedurally generated universe," from the starry heavens around them to their own fully restored human bits below. Essentially, they've transformed the ship and themselves into a workers cooperative. The episode doesn't so much lampoon or pay homage to Star Trek as approach its dream of freedom and egalitarianism in a way that was precluded by the original series's liberal pluralism. It's a very gratifying conclusion, even with Aaron Paul's adenoidal reminder that boundless exploration still leaves us squarely in the world of territorial pistol-shooters. 

So "USS Callister" does share some of Star Trek: The Original Series's bullishness about techno-humanism, but it's not unqualified. What I find somewhat interestingly unresolved across the last couple seasons is the show's attitude toward the Cloud. Even without Aaron Paul's voice cameo at the end of this episode, it's hard to think about this Cloud ex machina without considering the shaded ending of season three's "San Junipero." The two episodes' endings, both reliant on the Cloud as a salvific zone, share a dramatic rhythm and a mixed tone: Yorkie and Kelly's Cloud-based bliss in "San Junipero" is overlaid with the happy/creepy ambivalence of the closing warehouse shot, and "USS Callister"'s final scene in Infinity, a Cloud-linked space of (for this crew) collective self-determination and real discovery, is comically punctured by another brief power struggle with an antisocial petty tyrant--surely the first of a virtual infinitude. The show's move seems repeatedly to be to hold out the possibility of the Cloud as a utopian space, but then to undermine this belief by showing that it's dependent on the characters' nodular position within the Cloud. As if to say, if only they, or we, could see the whole thing as it really is.... 

#3 "Crocodile." No joke, this episode scared the shit out of me. It didn't help that I watched it at 4am while hideously jetlagged, or that afterwards my attempts at sleep were routed by thoughts of a gaunt white woman standing over my bed with a hammer. More to the point, I'm not surprised Charles Mudede wrote about this episode (you should probably just skip this and read his piece instead), because when I first saw it, I thought, This is about Seattle! A white woman with an ugly secret who's made a career out of rehearsing progressive values (when we first catch up with her in the present day she's literally practicing a speech about sustainable architecture in her home, a terrifying, isolated Modernist box) turns out to be willing to throw anyone in the garbage heap to preserve her own future. This future, as Mudede points out, is also the future of urbanism, a future built over the places where displaced people of color used to be. 

The only thing I'd add is that the murder scene continually and unknowingly reconstructed by Shazia, an insurance inspector, takes place in a hotel room on an older downtown city block. The room where Mia murders her ex and former accomplice is in one of many densely arranged buildings, oriented to a street where pedestrians walk (there's even a comic book shop) and where building occupants have some relationship to ground level, enough to look down from their windows and observe goings-on they're not entirely isolated from. It's this street design that eventually allows Shazia to track down Mia, in an instance of the past catching up to the present to annul the future--both the personal past of Mia's complicity in a bicyclist's death and the infrastructural past of how lives were organized to move through and participate in other lives. It's the kind of street where, we later piece together through Shazia's investigation, a classical musician and a woman who wears a high-vis jacket and hard hat for work pass each other on foot with flirting glances in an almost meet-cute. The allusion to Rear Window through a voyeur's camera flash braids together the episode's paranoia about the anonymous gaze and its nostalgia for it. When Mia later smashes Shazia's car window and attacks her, it's in broad daylight right outside Mia's own home, in the middle of nowhere, not another soul for as far as the eye can see. 

#5 "Metalhead." Nothing to say, except to note the irritating overuse of the "freezing and staring agape at something horrific instead of running even though the person actually being attacked is telling you to run" trope. My second-least favorite trope, after "Person A spirals into panic, hyperventilation, and rapid speech while Person B tries without success to calm them down by talking over them with increasing volume and frustration before eventually screaming at them to be quiet."

#6 "Black Museum." Without getting too far into the weeds with the question of who has the right to weigh in on what in art, I'll say that the last section of this episode felt intensely exploitative. I get that part of the point is the episode's reflexivity, but what's not in the frame is what's exonerated by British disgust with Americans' obsession with black pain. That vignette's placement as the coup de grâce in an anthology of Grand Guignol moral gaping doesn't help.