Black Mirror: Man more terrifying than any technology

Andrea Riseborough's character kills to prevent her past from wrecking her future. Photo / Netflix

Spoiler alert: Contains spoilers for the new season of Black Mirror.

Black Mirror and its creator Charlie Brooker are sometimes spoken of in terms of prophetic ability.

That 2011 episode about a PM and a pig resonated in the real world.

The Waldo Moment generated viral headlines, crediting the episode with predicting President Donald Trump's rise to power.

And in the Nosedive, episode, a person's life depends on their social media rating — enter China's idea for a "social credit" system.

But Black Mirror is also about the present. The anthology series' futuristic technologies of varying plausibility are used as vessels to say something about what we're capable of doing right now.

In Season 4's six episodes, new to Netflix, humans, not technology, are the scariest things.

Crocodile, a bleak episode co-starring Andrea Riseborough, is about a woman who kills people to protect her past from ruining her future.

The technology is a machine that collects memories, controlled by an insurance investigator played by Kiran Sonia Sawar. The technology isn't the reason Riseborough's character begins to kill; instead, it's a figure from her past who plans to dredge up their mutual secret.

The technological trick that makes USS Callister — widely considered the season's standout episode — possible is one Brooker has used before. Place a real human consciousness into the line of fire of the sort of human cruelty we're capable of through technology — when we think no one is looking, or no one can hold us accountable.

These consciousnesses live inside a private, simulation video game controlled by Robert Daly, the quiet in-real-life Chief Technology Officer of a tech company, played by Jesse Plemons.

During his downtime at home, Daly built a simulator to let him be the captain aboard the USS Callister — the spaceship from his favourite TV show. His crew comprises the stolen, captive human consciousnesses of several co-workers, each of whom has committed some perceived slight against Plemons' character in the real world.

All Daly needs to do to create a new prisoner is steal a DNA sample, which he does to his new employee, Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti). Cole doesn't smile at him enough on one occasion, earning her DNA a one-way trip to the Callister.

The imprisoned Cole consciousness tries to free herself and her fellow co-worker clones from Daly's godlike control.

The episode accomplishes two things at once: It's a thrilling space adventure story, and it embodies the cruelty of the toxic masculinity it seeks to condemn. For Daly, what might feel like an outlet for resentment and anger from being the Nice Guy nobody appreciates is shown as the violence it really is.

Many of us have seen or experienced the same sort of online cruelty the episode dramatises, but it will have obvious resonances for women in tech and video games who have experienced mobs of online harassment.

The structure of Black Museum, a story about violence against black Americans, is simple enough: Nish, played by Letitia Wright, follows Rolo Haynes (Douglas Hodge) through a tour of Haynes' Black Museum, a crumbling roadside attraction in the desert.

The museum is filled with technological items connected to crimes. Regular Black Mirror viewers know many of the stories already — many of the objects come from previous episodes. But two new ones (for viewers, at least) lead Haynes into the mini-stories that give this episode its anthology feel.

In one mini-story, Haynes tells the tale of a doctor who became addicted to the experience of feeling his patients' pain through a new device.

The short tale is told as dark entertainment: It contains both the sort of brutal violence you'd expect in a torture porn film and an intentionally gratuitous joke about an erection.

In the second storyline, a man agrees to share his brain with the consciousness of his comatose wife. When her constant presence leads to nagging and fighting, the wife is removed from her former husband's skull and placed into that of a stuffed toy monkey.

But then the anthology premise is dropped, and the viewer learns what Haynes and, secretly, Nish, knew all along: The main attraction of the Black Museum is the imprisoned consciousness of a black man who died on death row.

Haynes once profited handsomely off the torture of this man's consciousness, allowing busloads of giddy tourists to pull the lever and electrocute him.

The most coveted souvenir of the museum? A keychain that contains a piece of his consciousness at the moment of electrocution, face screaming in real agony, forever.

The new, terrible souvenir technology comes from an old idea: Photographs of actual lynchings of black Americans were once sold as commodities to white Americans.

Nish visits the Black Museum when it's all but abandoned by visitors, the consciousness of Haynes' prisoner tortured into a vegetable-like state. He's no fun to electrocute any more, even for hardcore sadists and white supremacists.

Nish hasn't forgotten: She's the man's daughter.

As she reveals who she is, she speaks about another sort of pain — the kind that remains when an injustice is abandoned without being fully righted, even as other injustices are committed on top of it. It takes no future technological breakthrough to connect what Nish says to our current reality.

There are resonances here with essays and articles by black writers about the trauma of repeated, viral, black death.

Both Callister and Black Museum have revenge endings. They're not quite the happy endings of San Junipero from the third season, but not as bleak and hopeless as viewers have come to dread from the show.

The good side wins; as in Kafka's In the Penal Colony, the bad guys meet their demise through the tech they once controlled and misused.

The repetition of the human consciousness theme, and the twinned revenge endings in the first and last episode of the series, are fine. But as I watched Black Museum, I felt as if I was seeing the show press itself up against the glass of a paradox it will never really be able to escape.

As many have already noted, Black Mirror is not a show for Luddites.

It invites us to enjoy and dread the possibilities presented by technology.

In doing so, it also asks us to do the same of human violence.