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Black Mirror

Black Mirror

Released Thursday, 22nd June 2023
 1 person rated this episode
Black Mirror

Black Mirror

Black Mirror

Black Mirror

Thursday, 22nd June 2023
 1 person rated this episode
Rate Episode

Episode Transcript

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It's been four years since the Netflix

0:23

anthology series Black Mirror made

0:25

new episodes of terrifying speculative

0:27

fiction, and in that time the real world

0:29

has made Black Mirror style tales

0:32

of dangerous technology seem even

0:34

more terrifying and far less speculative.

0:36

Five new episodes dive into

0:38

questions of identity, celebrity,

0:41

apocalyptic demons, the true crime explosion,

0:44

and the dangers of big intrusive content-packed

0:46

streaming networks. I'm Glenn Weldon.

0:48

And I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking

0:50

about Black Mirror on Pop Culture Happy Hour

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from NPR.

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create. Joining

2:01

Glenn and me today is Ronald Young Jr. He

2:04

is the host of the film and television review

2:06

podcast leaving the theater. Hi, Ronald.

2:08

Hello,

2:08

Linda. And also here

2:11

is writer, comedian, and co-host of the

2:13

Bad Romance podcast, Jordane

2:15

Searles. Welcome back, Jordane. Nice

2:17

to be back.

2:18

Black Mirror launched in 2011, and it's

2:22

made sets of episodes, what I would

2:24

call, sporadically, as

2:26

Clueless would say since then, mostly

2:28

about tech topics like surveillance,

2:31

manipulation of bodies

2:33

and minds, altered realities, and

2:35

the dangers of social networks. It's

2:38

always had impressive lineups of guest

2:40

stars. This season is no different. You'll

2:42

see Aaron Paul, Zazie Bates, Salma

2:45

Hayek-Pino, Josh Hartnett, and

2:47

Kate Mara, not to mention a lot of less

2:49

famous, but very impressive actors.

2:52

All five installments were written or

2:54

co-written by the series creator, Charlie Brooker.

2:57

And they once again touch on technology, society,

3:00

and in two cases, a streaming service

3:02

called Streamberry, which

3:04

very intentionally shares a look

3:07

and style that specifically mimics

3:09

Netflix. Let's see what I'm stringing,

3:11

Barry. All right.

3:12

Wow,

3:15

they got the dudum and everything. We'll

3:18

tell you a bit more about individual episodes

3:20

as they come up, but I want to jump right into

3:22

some general thoughts. Ronald, how did you

3:24

like this run of episodes as a kind

3:27

of chapter in the Black Mirror saga?

3:29

Overall, this was probably not

3:31

my favorite chapter, but I liked it. And

3:34

as a deep cut Black Mirror fan,

3:37

I feel like there's been episodes that I've

3:39

returned to over and over again. Of

3:42

these five episodes, I think there's only about

3:44

two that I think I'll rewatch. The

3:46

others, they were fine. They were good. They were

3:48

probably better television than the other

3:50

television I've been watching. But in terms of kind of the

3:52

bar that Black Mirror set, I

3:55

don't know if it set it as high

3:57

as it normally does this season,

3:59

but it was

3:59

still.

3:59

and it still made me talk about it with

4:02

friends. It just wasn't my favorite. Yeah,

4:04

I'm gonna come back to you about what the ones are that

4:06

you might rewatch, but first I wanna go over and

4:08

ask you, Jordane, how about you? What's

4:10

your general feeling about season six,

4:12

Black Mirror? My general feeling

4:15

is that it's very sentimental

4:18

in a way that I find interesting,

4:19

but I'm not really

4:22

sure how the sentiment translates from episode

4:24

to episode. There are probably

4:27

two that I really enjoy,

4:28

and then the rest I can see

4:31

what Brooker is doing, but I'm not sure

4:33

if I'm on board. Yeah, okay. Glenn, how

4:35

about you? Well, I determined what it takes for me to

4:38

like a Black Mirror episode. It either needs

4:40

to be funny, have lots of humor, or

4:42

needs to have like a dose of humanism, a dose of hope. I'd

4:45

prefer both, but I'll take either, so it can be as dark

4:47

as scathing and nihilistic as it wants to be. If

4:49

it's funny, I like it. If it can be bleak and

4:52

sad, if there's a tiny bit of hope of human connection

4:54

in it, and I like it. It's when I get neither,

4:56

as I do in episode three here, which

4:59

is called Beyond the Sea, which stars Aaron

5:01

Paul and Josh Hartnett as two astronauts who are participating in

5:03

this kind of weird project where they're able to both

5:06

be in space and at home at the same time. After

5:09

something really nasty happens on Earth, both men wind

5:11

up connected to Paul's wife, played by Kate

5:13

Mara, and a very bleak story ensues about loneliness

5:15

in families. It was so unrelentingly

5:18

humorless and long that I just started

5:20

picking it apart. Like, not

5:23

to falter performances, but that's when you start, because it's

5:25

very long, you start poking away at the premise and the second-guessing

5:27

the characters and looking harder

5:29

at the dialogue. And this is the thing. Like,

5:31

you watch Black Mirror differently than you watch other shows, because

5:34

you're always trying to second-guess. You're

5:36

always trying to figure out what the hook is, right?

5:39

And if you're me, you pause it, and you turn to your beleaguered husband,

5:41

and you say, this is what's going to happen. And

5:43

most of the time, you're right. And

5:46

the time that you're not, I mean, I thought this

5:48

was a big improvement over season five, because we're stepping

5:50

away from the narrow strictures of dystopian

5:53

science fiction technology, technology bad. Now

5:56

we're getting into more media stuff, more

5:59

how we package.

5:59

people's lives from mass consumption. So

6:02

after season five, I would have told you this would run its course, but

6:04

this feels like fresh blood to me. Beyond the Sea

6:06

was my favorite episode. Oh, no.

6:09

Oh, deadly. Oh, no. No. First,

6:13

it's directed by John Crowley, who made

6:15

Brooklyn in 2015, which is a

6:17

very good movie. And I was

6:20

really struck by how well-directed

6:22

it was, how well-structured it was. I

6:24

actually kind of felt like it could have

6:26

been a movie all in itself. It

6:28

really felt like it was doing something interesting

6:31

with sci-fi, and I really thought that

6:33

it was

6:34

fascinating, the way that the family

6:36

dynamics interlocked. Josh

6:39

Hartnett's performance, Aaron Paul's

6:41

performance, Cape Mara,

6:43

like it was a really depressing bit

6:45

of television, but I felt like

6:48

it really got into the way that

6:50

technology can bring us

6:52

together and also alienate

6:55

us. And I loved the sadness

6:56

of it. I don't disagree with anything

6:59

you said. I think the acting was great. As

7:01

it started and moved on, I'm like, this is Black Mirror.

7:03

This is very, like you're telling me a story

7:06

and you feel something very unsettling

7:09

began to start. I think the problem is, and I

7:11

think you addressed it by saying maybe

7:13

it would have been a better movie because I think

7:15

they did not build out Sky Command

7:18

or whatever NASA would have been at that time

7:20

because I think they needed something

7:23

to get them where they were going that was

7:25

not what ended up getting them

7:26

where they were going. Because when I watched

7:28

it and it gets to its point, I said, oh,

7:31

that's dumb what just happened. Not

7:33

what happened, but how it happened to be clear. Because

7:36

getting to that destination doesn't bother me, but

7:38

like when he got there, I'm like, no, no, you need

7:40

like at least one to two other things

7:43

to have happened for that to have happened.

7:45

That's all I'm saying. And when it happens like

7:47

that, it just made me confused.

7:48

Yeah, I mean, there's a character

7:51

played by Rory Culkin and it's

7:53

very hard to like figure out

7:56

what his deal is because I believe

7:58

it takes places in an. alternate in 1969. So

8:02

I guess it was a kind of like Manson

8:05

thing going on, but it was very unclear

8:08

what that whole cult ethos

8:10

was. And I do think that if you're

8:12

going to give us a cult, you should probably

8:15

tell us more about the cults. Yeah,

8:17

and why didn't they show up again? They were gone. They

8:19

came and they left. My problem with

8:21

it was exactly the structure. The structure, once you kind of

8:24

get

8:24

what's happening, then you get where we're going. And

8:27

I might not have arrived at precisely what

8:29

was going to happen, because I don't think it was officially

8:32

set up. But I knew something was

8:34

going to happen. I knew the nature of it. I knew

8:36

the beats of this story from the first 15 minutes,

8:38

which is not the structure is so rigid and

8:41

so predictable. And it was so

8:43

flat and humorless. And the performances were amazing.

8:45

But the structure kind of imposed this

8:47

flatness that I just didn't dig.

8:49

Huh. That's interesting. I

8:51

don't know if I would call it predictable, but I do

8:53

think that I do believe

8:55

that there is something missing. But that's kind of how I feel about

8:58

a lot of the episodes though. Like, there's

9:00

just like a little something

9:01

missing. I think

9:04

that maybe the most complete one is

9:06

Locke Henry. Yes. Yes. So Locke

9:08

Henry follows this young couple, their

9:10

documentary filmmakers played by

9:13

Samuel Blanken and My Hala Harold,

9:15

who is, by the way, the star of the HBO show

9:18

industry. They are visiting

9:20

his mother in Scotland when they start

9:22

to investigate this legendary murderer

9:25

from this small town. This

9:27

episode has less to do with tech

9:29

than most Black mirrors. It's

9:31

more

9:31

of a straight up mystery. It

9:34

sort of touches a little bit on the true crime

9:36

phenomenon. Jordan, tell me more about your feelings

9:38

about Locke Henry. This is a very emotional

9:41

season. Like, I really feel like Charlie

9:44

Brooker, he has an axe

9:46

to grind with each episode. And

9:48

for Locke Henry, obviously,

9:49

that axe is true crime.

9:52

I've been obsessed with this show called Deadly

9:54

Women. You have.

9:57

I have. And I

9:59

won't spoil it. the murders in it and kind of like

10:01

the characters and like what they're invoking is

10:03

like very famous

10:06

murders that happened in the UK. And

10:09

so that's really fascinating to me

10:11

because you know one of the filmmakers is this

10:13

black woman and

10:15

I had so much trouble with

10:17

the fact that she would knowingly

10:20

walk into this. I was just like

10:22

this girl is like she's really built different

10:24

because like I don't know I

10:27

wouldn't have gone into that but you know instead

10:30

of just being like true crime bad I

10:31

think it really like digs into

10:34

how exploitative it is especially

10:36

considering you know how it basically

10:38

re-traumatizes everybody just

10:41

by virtue of just talking about it bringing

10:43

it up and the whole idea that

10:46

we're gonna get an award for this. This is

10:48

gonna be on streaming you know the whole

10:50

uh

10:51

cynicalness of the endeavor. Yeah

10:54

and I think this is one of two

10:56

maybe three that are more horror adjacent episodes

10:59

this season and so it brings in

11:01

kind of Jordane what you were talking about this kind of

11:03

um there's a thread of horrors

11:05

kind of moralistic or normative vibe here. There's some

11:07

finger wagging to lock Henry where

11:10

the filmmaker Pia doesn't share

11:12

her boyfriend's moral qualms

11:14

to exploit this tragedy and so she

11:16

has to suffer for it right. I think

11:18

that's what I picked up on here. I still

11:20

enjoy the episode

11:21

but I felt like we were falling

11:23

into pretty predictable horror

11:26

tropes. What this episode did for me

11:28

it just kind of reminded me that Black

11:30

Mirror is just kind of evolving and

11:33

this was a story that I enjoyed

11:36

as just as an episode the story I really

11:38

enjoyed it but it was so far

11:40

from a commentary on technology

11:43

which I've just gotten used to like bleak dystopian

11:45

future this wasn't that but

11:48

it also just made me realize that Black Mirror can

11:50

be very good about telling stories

11:52

questioning the things that we value and

11:55

if that's what they're going to do more of in the future

11:57

then I think Black Mirror has like hundreds

11:59

of seasons to go.

11:59

Yeah, I felt like this one was maybe a little bit less

12:02

a text story and

12:04

more a media story, which is also true

12:06

of a couple of other stories they've done

12:08

here and some stories they've done in the past. Jordanne

12:10

liked Beyond the Sea, Jordanne liked Lock Henry.

12:12

Ronald, I want to go back to what

12:15

the two were that you liked. I

12:17

liked Jonas Awful.

12:18

Yes, and I think probably people who have seen like clips and bits

12:24

of this season, Jonas Awful is maybe the one that Netflix

12:26

has kind of foregrounded the most. I

12:30

would say it's about this woman

12:32

named Joan played by Annie Murphy from Schitt's

12:34

Creek who discovers one day that her her

12:37

favorite streaming service, Streamberry,

12:39

the one that we already heard going dung, has

12:41

a show that appears to be stealing

12:44

her life on a day to day basis.

12:46

She's played on that show by

12:49

Salma Hayek Pino, who appears

12:52

as a version of herself and also

12:54

as the TV Joan. It gets very

12:57

multi-layered. It's more comedy

13:01

based, I would say. Ronald, tell me what

13:03

you liked about Jonas Awful.

13:04

It's funny because when it started, I was

13:06

probably about 20 minutes into that episode and

13:08

I was like, well, Black Mirror has jumped the shark. It has

13:10

jumped the shark. This is absolutely

13:12

ridiculous. And then it started doing this

13:15

very specific Black Mirror

13:17

twist. And as it started to twist,

13:19

I said, oh, and by the time we

13:21

got to the very end, it lands

13:24

it very well. I just enjoy the idea

13:26

of one, them kind of lampooning themselves.

13:28

I'm probably one of the few people that enjoyed Banders

13:31

Fetch, which is the interactive episode

13:34

of Black Mirror. I really like

13:36

when it starts questioning my own reality as

13:38

I'm sitting in the chair. I really like that. And I thought

13:40

that this episode did a lot of that, but when it got

13:42

to the end, it felt very much like

13:45

the air quotes happy ending that you get in

13:47

Nosedive, where, you know, they're

13:49

kind of just yelling swear words back and forth at each

13:51

other, but they're finally free of

13:53

whatever oppressive system was holding them

13:55

down, arguably like subjugated to a new

13:57

oppressive system, but still the one that was like

13:59

probably worse is now off their necks. I

14:02

really enjoyed kind of the whole flow of that episode.

14:04

I mean, the jokes were solid. The performances were

14:06

great. The winks were pretty much start

14:08

to finish. I really dug this episode.

14:11

And I love this season kind

14:13

of on the bookends. The first

14:15

episode and the final episode, Demon 79, were

14:17

my two favorites. I think that's fair. That's me

14:19

too. But I also liked Locke Henry. But

14:22

you're right. Those two are my favorites by far.

14:23

Your two are the two on the end,

14:25

this one. And then Demon 79, which we have not

14:28

talked about yet. Demon 79 is set in 1979 in

14:30

Northern England. And

14:33

it's about a young woman who begins

14:36

receiving visits from the titular demon

14:39

who tells her these very scary

14:41

things about what's coming in the future and the

14:43

things that she can or must do

14:46

to prevent it. Jenna

14:48

Vassan, who was also in We Are Lady

14:50

Parts, plays the woman. And

14:53

Papa

14:53

Essiadoo plays a very particular,

14:56

yes, woohoo, indeed, plays a very particular version

14:59

of her demon. I had

15:01

very mixed feelings about

15:04

Demon 79. I couldn't tell whether

15:06

I was really locking into this story.

15:09

Glenn, what did you like about Demon 79?

15:11

Again, jokes, jokes, jokes.

15:13

I thought this piece had a very funny attitude

15:16

it had. It was kind of getting its Neil Gaiman on. I

15:18

liked the kind of not

15:20

particularly subtle anti-fascist

15:23

thread that was through it, anti-prejudice,

15:25

anti-racism thread that was in it. I

15:28

thought for a while that they weren't going to give her agency, and then they suddenly

15:30

did. So yeah, I just had a ball

15:33

with this. I really like this tone. I think for

15:35

me, what I always like about Black

15:37

Mirror is when it acknowledges that

15:40

all of this is a shared universe.

15:41

And I think there's flashes

15:43

in this episode about things

15:46

that come and why they are to come. And

15:48

it kind of reminds me of that show on HBO

15:50

called Years and Years. Incredibly bleak. Oh

15:52

yeah, it's very dark, but it's basically

15:55

this British family that this kind

15:57

of Trump-like figure gets elected as prime minister.

16:00

and Britain gets just worse and worse as technology

16:02

continues to evolve. I kind of like

16:05

sensed that in this, like the whole idea. And

16:07

then I think during that election kind of cycle in

16:09

this episode, I realized that, oh, demon 79,

16:12

that's what they mean. Like, I didn't understand

16:15

what the title meant until kind of that point.

16:18

I enjoyed it, and it kind of like still points to this

16:20

future of Black Mirror where they're kind of like

16:23

playing in this large sandbox and saying, all

16:25

of these things are kind of connected, and there's

16:27

a larger theme at hand. I really like that. Everything

16:29

that y'all said is true about it, I guess. I

16:33

just felt like it was maybe

16:35

a little too obvious. I

16:38

don't know. It's weird because it's all talking

16:40

about, you know, things that I

16:42

agree with, you know, anti-fascism, anti-racism.

16:45

I wanted to point out that demon 79 has a co-writer. It's

16:48

the only episode in the season

16:50

that has a co-writer, which I think

16:53

is really interesting and adds like

16:54

a different layer to it. Now that I notice it, it does change

16:57

my thought on it a

17:00

little bit, but I still, I don't know,

17:01

I

17:04

still wanted more from that episode, but

17:06

I like what they're trying to do. Yeah. I

17:09

felt the same way, you know, I got to the end

17:11

of this episode and I was like, okay. Well,

17:13

I mean, like, if you sat down at the very beginning of

17:15

this episode and you were like, well, here's like

17:17

the obvious ways this would go. I

17:19

feel like that ending is one of them, and that's not a

17:22

common Black Mirror thing for me and

17:24

my favorite Black Mirror episodes. I really liked

17:26

the ones where I wind up being like, oh, that is not

17:28

what I thought was going to happen. Now, that is not always

17:30

a good thing,

17:32

which brings us to the only one of these

17:34

episodes that we have not talked about, which is

17:36

also the shortest, which

17:40

I was prepared to be enthusiastic about because

17:42

sometimes, you know, I like for anthologies

17:44

to remember that everything does not have

17:46

to be super long, but

17:49

the one called Maisie Day is

17:51

about a paparazzi photographer, played

17:54

by Zazi Bates, who is on the

17:56

trail of this young, scandal-prone

17:58

actress.

17:59

She's in seclusion, nobody really knows what's going

18:02

on with her. This little kind of

18:04

group of paparazzi photographers are all

18:07

jostling for the opportunity to get rich, taking

18:09

a picture of her.

18:11

This one goes to some very weird

18:13

places. Again, it's not as much

18:15

a tech story as it is a media story. I

18:17

would argue it's not a tech story really at

18:20

all. It's very hard to talk about this

18:22

without saying exactly where it's going.

18:25

And it's true that I was surprised by

18:27

where it was going. But

18:29

you want to be surprised and delighted,

18:31

not just surprised.

18:34

I don't know. The whole time

18:36

I was watching this episode, I

18:38

was thinking about the South Park episode

18:40

with Britney Spears. Mm-hmm.

18:43

Go on, say more. Britney

18:45

is being hounded by paparazzi.

18:48

It's a really depressing episode, but

18:51

it touches on this idea of

18:53

the way that the camera

18:56

can be a tool for harm. Literally,

18:59

Zazie does struggle

19:01

with what does this job

19:03

mean? Does it mean that I'm a bad

19:05

person and everything? I wanted it to be more

19:07

about that. I wanted it to be more about that

19:09

too, unless the South Park episode.

19:13

Yeah. It does avoid the trap that Lock

19:15

Henry fell into because it avoids having our main

19:17

character, the one pushing for immorality. She

19:21

has moral qualms about

19:24

what she realizes is a systemic misogyny

19:26

that she's taking part in. She abandons it, but then she comes

19:28

back to it. The people who really come to a bad

19:31

end are her fellow paparazzi. They

19:33

come to a bad end and I was pumping my fist. I was

19:35

satisfied by this ending. Seeing

19:37

that she survives is satisfying,

19:40

but had it been a morality tale

19:43

about what we're consuming and

19:45

how we consume folks. Black Mirror has

19:47

touched on that in other episodes, the Miley Cyrus

19:49

episodes specifically last season.

19:52

But Black Mirror has touched on that before,

19:54

the idea of consumption in that way. If

19:56

there was a writers room, which it doesn't seem like

19:58

there is because they all see.

19:59

to be written by Charlie Brooker. It just

20:02

seems like somebody said something in

20:04

that room. What if it were this and nobody

20:06

said, nah, that's a terrible idea? It's

20:10

sort of

20:10

true. He does sometimes seem like he needs

20:12

a no person and maybe doesn't have one.

20:15

Yeah, because when that happens, I'm just watching.

20:18

This isn't Blackbeard. This is something else entirely.

20:20

Like, this is love, death, and robots

20:22

now. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah, but that's evolution.

20:25

Is that evolution, though? That's growth. Getting

20:28

away from technology is bad, which, by

20:30

the way, is not the theme of the show, technology is bad. Humanity

20:33

is bad, and technology makes us worse. That's

20:35

the theme of the show. I don't know. I didn't have a problem with

20:37

this episode at all.

20:38

I will say the one thing that gave

20:40

me pause about the season as a whole, particularly

20:43

because the first two episodes are Joan is Awful

20:45

and Lock Henry, I was like, is

20:47

this whole season going to be Netflix

20:50

managing to both be

20:52

upsetting as a corporation

20:55

and then also monetize

20:57

its own upsetting-ness in the content

21:00

that it's making? And I had a real issue

21:02

with that. There's a moment in Joan is Awful

21:05

where they actually get into a conversation about

21:07

how Netflix exploits talent. No, I'm

21:09

going to sue Salma Hayek.

21:11

It's not really Salma Hayek. Yes,

21:13

it is. No, technically,

21:17

the show deploys a digital likeness

21:20

of Miss Hayek. They

21:22

don't film her. She licensed

21:24

her image to them. And I was like, listen,

21:27

we're in the middle of massive labor

21:30

actions in Hollywood related,

21:33

perhaps more than any other one

21:35

single thing, to Netflix not

21:37

paying talent appropriately. I

21:40

don't know that I'm prepared to have them

21:42

put out content that

21:44

on the one hand, you can be like, ooh, he doesn't care.

21:46

Whose feet he steps on? And then it's like, but

21:49

if they thought this was really stepping on their

21:51

feet, they wouldn't be putting it up. Exactly.

21:53

And I'm concerned about letting

21:55

them kind of be like,

21:57

wink, wink, we get it, elbow, elbow.

22:00

Aren't we stinkers? It's like, no, you're

22:02

terrifying often. You don't get to laugh

22:04

at this joke. The entire concept

22:07

of Streamberry, every single time

22:09

I heard the word Streamberry, or

22:11

as the creator says, Streamberry,

22:14

I got so angry. Because

22:17

it comes up in Lock Henry too, these

22:19

discussions of how like, isn't it funny

22:21

how Streamberry is making all its money on

22:23

these horrible, exploitive documentaries

22:25

about murder, and you just sit there going, yes,

22:29

and it's you, and I'm not prepared

22:31

to praise your content

22:34

that is going to live right alongside

22:36

all the documentaries that they're talking about. It

22:38

felt very cynical to me, and

22:40

it felt very like in a weird

22:42

way, exonerative, almost

22:45

like, well, you know, it's not that bad if we

22:47

can all laugh about it, right? And it's like,

22:49

I'm not laughing about it. Like, that

22:52

was my one thing, like, I like Joan

22:54

is awful, if Joan is awful, we're

22:57

running somewhere else. I

22:59

think I would have appreciated it more,

23:01

but I don't know that I'm prepared for

23:04

that story in this setting

23:06

where like, everybody's getting

23:08

paid by Streamberry to make

23:11

the thing about Stream, mm-mm, I

23:13

had qualms.

23:14

I think for me, what I always do with

23:16

Black Mirror is I always like, rank the season against

23:18

the other seasons. You know which ones like,

23:20

you just return to over and over again. And

23:24

I just know that this season was

23:26

much better than season five, but

23:28

I think that is the only season that season six

23:30

is better than. It is not better than any of the other

23:32

seasons, in my opinion, especially

23:34

in terms of like, episodes that I liked. If you

23:36

just go by sheer numbers of the episodes I

23:38

like, I think that kind of speaks the

23:40

truth to me about like, what Black Mirror

23:42

is right now, but I still think that there's hope for

23:44

it to like, continue to be like, still

23:46

good, and better than generally

23:49

than other shows, I think, in most

23:51

ways. Yeah, and I think by the end of season five,

23:53

the whole dystopian technology thing,

23:56

I kind of get what it's going, but I got a feeling

23:59

throughout this season.

23:59

like I got with San Junipero back in season

24:02

three, which is like, oh, we can do this too?

24:04

We can have a little bit of hope in humanity? This

24:07

show has room enough for

24:09

that? I mean, it was a very dark kind of hope in humanity, but

24:11

it was still, it was a mote of light

24:14

amid what this uniform

24:16

approach is. And the fact that they're diversifying the approach, yeah,

24:18

that they're not gonna be winners, but I like this

24:21

flexibility. Yeah.

24:22

Well, once you get a chance to

24:24

check it out on Streamberry, I mean Netflix,

24:27

we wanna know what you think about the new season

24:29

of Black Mirror, find us at Facebook.com slash

24:31

PCHH. That brings us to the end of our

24:33

show. Glenn Weldon, Jordane

24:36

Searles, Ronald Young Jr., thank you so much for

24:38

being here. This was absolutely delightful.

24:40

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much

24:42

for having me. We wanted to take a moment and thank

24:44

our Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus subscribers. We

24:46

appreciate you so much for showing your support

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of NPR. If you haven't signed up yet, you

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wanna show your support and you'd like to listen

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to this show without any sponsor breaks, head

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over to plus.npr.org

24:58

slash happy hour or visit the

25:00

link in our show notes. This episode is

25:02

produced by Hafsa Fathima and Mike Katziff

25:05

and edited by Jessica Reedy. Hello,

25:07

Come In provides our theme music. Thank

25:09

you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from

25:11

NPR. I'm the real

25:13

Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all tomorrow.

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