#black mirror is the type of anthology where there’s one fantastic episode each season

[athetos]

Watched the first 3 episodes of new black mirror season and my reviews are, in order, “kind of entertaining but mid,” “actually really good and I liked what it had to say”, and “predictable and uninteresting even if the premise was mildly intriguing”

[jbk405]

Huh, I gotta say I did not predict where The Hollow was going.  I don’t think I’ve ever quite seen a show that had such a season one/two dichotomy without being an anthology or One Story Per Season type series.  It’s a continuous story with the same characters, but simultaneously two separate stories with two different casts of characters.  What they did might actually be unique (Which is no mean feat in this day and age).

In the first season we follow three characters who wake up in a bare cell with no idea who they are, each with a unique power.  Standard You Wake Up in a Room scenario.  After escaping the room they discover a series a challenges and puzzles they need to solve, each with a distinct theme.  Eventually they (And we) discover that they are playing an immersive video game, but instead of reassuring them that there’s no danger they learn the game is crashing so the threat is real even though the fantastical dangers they face aren’t.

Season two, however, shows them mysteriously still in the game after having escaped at the end of the season one, except this time the game mechanics aren’t responding to them as if they were the players the game.  Eventually, they discover that they are digital copies of the players from the first season who were scanned and imported into another version of the game as NPCs, and who weren’t supposed to have their real identities.  They must now find a way to get themselves out of the Game part of the game so that they aren’t killed by the hazards or by the game itself when it turns off.

Surprisingly, once they learn what had happened to them in season two the show very firmly stomps on them getting back to their “real” bodies.  Their bodies aren’t empty husks waiting for their minds to return.  They left the game in season one, went home, and that’s it.    The originals have no idea that anything happened and aren’t missing any part of their mind or soul.  The ones in the game are copies.  There’s no going “back” for them.  For them, this digital world is all they have.

It’s actually very similar to the episode “USS Callister” in Black Mirror (Without the torture and psychosis, of course).  Once they learn what’s happening their only goal is make this existence better, because there’s no going back to the existence they knew before.

Like I said, a very unique twist.

My biggest criticism would have to be the game concept itself, because “Your real-life memories will be erased while in the game” is actually really fucked up.  I’d be terrified to play that for fear of what I or others may do if I’m in what I think is a deadly scenario and don’t have any information.  Especially since it’s apparently a spectator event and other people watch the game live.  We see people try to betray/kill other players in the course of the game when they think it’s all real, and once they wake up will need to deal with the fact that they tried to kill somebody.  Or what about revealing personal secrets?  We see one character try to kiss another because she’s forgotten that he’s gay in real life, and that might have outed him.  It’s seriously messed up.

Other than, it was actually really interesting.