It's baaack! After a few months' hiatus following the release of the Black Mirror-branded stand-alone film "Bandersnatch", Season 5 has finally arrived with three new episodes, hearkening back to the the show's first two truncated, Channel 4-produced seasons.
Unfortunately, while the six episodes that made up Black Mirror's first two seasons gave us five unforgettable classics and one unfortunate misfire ("The Waldo Moment"), Season 5 brings us three episodes that, while far from unfortunate, aren't likely to inspire much excited, wide-eyed chatter at the proverbial water cooler, either.
Case in point, episode one, "Striking Vipers". This is a story about two former college roomies, Danny (played by Anthony Mackie, aka the MCU's Falcon) and Karl (portrayed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), somewhat accidentally stumbling upon an unadvertised bonus feature of the cutting edge VR tech used in the video game system Karl buys Danny for his birthday.
Basically, it lets players engage in spectacular, better-than-lifelike sex with each other.
Of course, the ability to engage in superhumanly perfect, hyper-addictive, electro-stimulated endorphin/serotonin-squirting brain-sex doesn't exactly work wonders on the romantic lives of Danny and his devoted wife Theo (the wonderful Nicole Beharie), which sucks for them, as they're trying to conceive their second child.
And that's the set-up. The game in this episode is an obvious stand-in for online pornography, and in the Big Picture sense, the destructive potential of porn addiction is one of the avenues explored. Of course, there's more to it than that, but to go into too much detail would be to rob anyone reading this of the pleasures this "Striking Vipers" has to offer... and it has a few.
For instance, this episode is absolutely refreshing in its portrayal of the Black middle class family experience. I respect that Brooker and company had the balls to let Danny and his family be so... mundane. Mundane and normal. It's also commendable for its sensitive, emotionally mature treatment of the issues that it raises, while never taking the easy way out by failing to acknowledge how fraught and complicated of an issue such things can be for some—indeed, most—of us.
"Striking Vipers" could easily have ended on a bleak, downer note, wallowing in yet another example of our species' increasingly obvious failure to engage in the mutual respect necessary to achieve actual, worthwhile communication. That it doesn't is a blessing, and makes it the best of this season's three middling offerings from Black Mirror.
No comments:
Post a Comment