The second episode of Black Mirror's fifth season, "Smithereens", is a relatively straight-forward police procedural with a twist, all wrapped around a central riddle. Chris (in an award-worthy performance by Andrew Scott) has a job providing ride-share services, where he concentrates exclusively on the area surrounding the corporate headquarters for Smithereens, a fictional company meant to stand in for social media giant Facebook.
One day, Chris pulls a gun on one of his passengers, a young man named Jaden (Damson Idris), who appears to be a Smithereens executive. After a series of fuck-ups, Chris and Jaden—who turns out to be an unpaid intern—end up in an open field in the countryside, surrounded by police, negotiators, and snipers with itchy trigger fingers. Chris demands to speak to Smithereens' equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg, Billy Bauer (Topher Grace).
The riddle at the center of all this is... Why? What does Chris hope to achieve by communicating one-on-one with the young billionaire creator of Smithereens?
It turns out the answer to that question is a lot less important than the details that make up this episode's complex procedural narrative, which has a lot to say about the awesome powers that most of us have willingly (if unwittingly) handed over to the handlers of the unaccountable, Panopticon-style social media surveillance structures that have become ubiquitous virtually overnight. This point is hammered home by foundering officials expressing dumbfounded gratitude to Smithereens' C-wing representatives, who keep popping in with offers of such difficult to obtain, proprietary intel as perpetrator photographs and background checks, the ability to eavesdrop on Chris and Jaden, etc.
After an interminable wait, during which Chris frankly displays the patience of a Saint, another serious screw-up forces Bauer's hand, and Chris gets his long-delayed chat. Simultaneously devastating and yet also somehow anti-climactic, this discussion almost seems like an afterthought compared to what precedes it. And then, there’s the final twist of the metaphorical dagger, a joke on the viewer that should leave you inwardly groaning and damning whoever conceived of this shaggy dog coda.
Although it's incredibly well acted, it also caps off the least Black Mirror-like episode of the entire series, in the least Black-Mirror-like way possible.
Apparently, showrunner Charlie Brooker wanted this episode to contain no science-fiction elements, so as not to distract from its message. It's a message that I would dearly love to reveal to you right now, but I refuse to spoil it for you.
Allow me to conclude by offering up this double-rating:
As a random TV drama: 8/10
As an episode of Black Mirror: 4/10
Make of the above what you will.
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