It's no shock that Sara does not grow up well-adjusted, at one point self-harming to draw blood, which flows out of her as pixelated colors. Single mother Marie installs a device in her daughter Sara's brain that runs the experimental Arkangel program, basically the high-tech equivalent of parental controls-meets-geolocating, that prevents Sara from having to see or experience anything violent, scary, or remotely bad. Helicopter parents get the Black Mirror treatment in "Arkangel," an often silly, sometimes queasy episode from 2017 directed by Jodie Foster. It gets points for experimenting, but, like most first-time experiments, it ultimately fails. If you happen to be a fetishist for 1980s video games, particularly those of Imagine Software, a company that went bankrupt before it could release the actual Bandersnatch, you may feel particularly close to this special. It's extremely difficult to create compelling characters and give depth to a story when the reader/viewer constantly jumps from one narrative to another, and "Bandersnatch" muddies the water even further by attempting to turn the story into a meta-commentary on Netflix itself and the nature of free will. Formally daring in its willingness to take on a technologically advanced approach to storytelling, "Bandersnatch" seems to have forgotten that there's a reason the vast majority of choose-your-own-adventure books are for children. It's one of the meta-themes of "Bandersnatch," about a young video-game programmer (Fionn Whitehead) who wants to adapt a celebrated choose-your-own-adventure novel into a game, and applies on a meta-meta level - whoaaaa - to the special itself. Sometimes, ambition destroys creativity and quality. The most valuable lesson might be: Don't sleep with dudes whose alter egos are smack-talking bears. Underneath the rather prescient main arc, though, is a somewhat telling examination of how far a jilted man will go when his pride has been hurt. There's even a line about the guy needing to prime himself to fire off "Twitter-ready zingers" during political debates. Long story short, his dick jokes make him unbelievably popular among the voters, who don't really care about politics at all, and Waldo is swiftly elected king of the world. The premise becomes clear after the first 10 minutes or so: A washed-up comedian is stuck being the voice behind this irritating little character named Waldo who, through the machinations of his parent company, ends up weaseling his way onto the political scene after absolutely destroying a British politician in a debate. It's not clear whether it's the foul-mouthed cartoon bear or the "really makes you think"-ness of "The Waldo Moment" that makes it so annoying, but it's a very annoying Black Mirror episode. The episode is boring, tediously plotted, and telegraphs almost every move it's going to make. Stripe (Malachi Kirby), a soldier whose MASS implant device (placed in all soldiers to give them augmented reality stats, make the enemy appear as mutant, and so on) begins glitching out, learns the hard way that carrying out a genocide requires every human sense and instinct to be dampened. Black Mirror has more than a century's worth of material on which to draw, then, but in this episode the show chooses to put forward the most bland thesis imaginable: To make killing palatable, you must see the enemy as literal monsters. Exploring how war dehumanizes those who participate in it has been a prominent theme of war literature at least since the beginning of the industrialized conflicts that have defined the 20th and 21st centuries. You'd have to have some kind of futuristic vision-altering device implanted in your brain not to see the twist coming in "Men Against Fire," a plain-vanilla allegory about genocide and the military-industrial complex. If you don't agree with our choices, you can pull a Bing, shatter the screen, and turn your phone/computer into a black mirror forever. With 23 during its five seasons in existence, a number that includes two specials, the British sci-fi hit that Netflix picked up after Season 2 has given fans everything from "that was devastatingly good" to "did a child write that?" We're here to sift the wheat from the chaff, because this is a valuable service to our readers, and rankings often perform well on the internet - the tool that destroys you, but which you can't live without. Wherever you fall on the love-hate spectrum of Black Mirror, it's a given that any series will vary in quality from episode to episode. Others believe the show is the spiritual descendant of The Twilight Zonein its intelligent science-fiction critiques of contemporary life. Some people find its twist-filled, mystery-box plots hokey and insipid. Like the technology that serves as its main theme, Black Mirrorattracts millions of people who are divided on its quality and utility.
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