Matylda Swan
It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.
matthewparkin-35963
I enjoyed the first and third stories but the second story and the end were not enjoyable for me. I think this is the risk they took but creating three stories but I do praise the way that they linked the stories except the ending. I feel like the ending was just put in to have an additional link to an earlier story when it was not needed.
joe
Let me start this off by saying that I love "Black Mirror". All the previous episodes shone with great acting, real-feeling, mostly sympathizable characters and a vision that, while grim, still mostly seemed believable for a world where we haven't been paying close enough attention to the side effects of cutting-edge technology."White Christmas" though... well...It started out well enough. The "remote-assisted seduction" part felt real enough to make me cringe throughout the character's clumsy flirting. (In a good way!) And towards the end, of course, it became very thrilling indeed, assisted by intelligent use of the first-person view - although as a portrayal of schizophrenia it was already a bit lazy (and, some mental health advocates might argue, harmful).And after that, the storyline just started to fall into utter ridiculousness.The "cookie". Oh my. What a tragically, if not comically bad cliché portrayal of deep learning and artificial intelligence.The whole issue of "fully conscious copies of human beings are a commercial product, but no one seems to even consider it an open question if maybe they should have rights, even though you can literally see them suffer" aside, why on Earth would any sane, rational, profit-oriented company go through the (certainly enormous) R&D effort of creating this fully-fledged, fully conscious virtual copy of a human being only to have it resist (i.e. fail) when tasked with the most mundane "smart home" related functions, forcing you to literally torture them into submission? Why on Earth would you not just use deep learning to train the functional parts of the AI (i.e. the parts that decide how dark the customer likes her toast and how warm she likes the floor heating) and implement it into an emotionless, unconscious management software that simply does its job?It makes no sense. Absolutely none. It's just a cheap cliché for people who don't understand how deep learning works and who think "neural network" = brain = full human consciousness. And it makes that misunderstanding worse.Then there's the characters and their "development". Especially the female characters seem like they are just shallow vehicles to demonstrate how the most impulsive and heartless person imaginable would use the "block" function. Living together, happily married with a small child? Doesn't matter, you'll get blocked before the first big argument is even over. Really?And the ending... I mean, hey, nice "plot twist" there. If only it didn't, once again, lead to even more ridiculousness, with the "hero" being granted the very lenient sentence of total social isolation for the rest of his life. Which is, I think most people would agree, orders of magnitude worse than even a lifelong prison sentence.I don't know what they were thinking with this one. Shallow characters, bonkers misrepresentation of technology, and a half-baked and incongruent story. How this is the highest-rated episode of "Black Mirror" is beyond me. There are much, much, much, much better ones.
mateo130
I think the concept is absolutely genuine and interesting. I would even say that this so called "cookie" could be extremely useful.
The thing I must learn from this episode that until humanity exists in the present format we will never lose the hidden evil inside. Whatever we make or will make in the future will always be used for the wrong purposes and to hurt others just because our own ego.
This episode and black mirror itself is just phenomenal because it highlights topics which are deeply pressed inside us in this heavily sugarcoated society.
imdb-878-923522
In their effort to be clever, myriad new technologies are thrown at us - and the characters - as if we're all still stuck in 2014. No societal adjustment, expectations or learning to deal with these technologies has happened - they've just dropped out of the blue onto the characters, without any explanation or hint that they're widely used and accepted.This is a problem with much modern scifi - uncareful attention to details or backdrop. See instead Blade Runner's extremely careful writing and attention to this. Westworld built up the background of societal tolerance and interaction to the androids - where as Humans again just dropped us into this future with no warning (no one has dealt with attractive female bots living in family homes before? cmon.) Additionally, no discussion or hints to the societal attitudes towards the cookies/eggs. We can interrogate them but they're not exact copies to the point that extended decades of solitary confinement (which is illegal in all western nations even for multiple homicides) is OK? Even for a manslaughter self defence charge? Cmon.It was tweaked to lead the viewer into feeling the injustice of the main character's situation and then suddenly foisting surprise societal norms on the viewer. Poor writing.Very flashy technology ideas but anyone with any background in scifi reading will recognize these as being tried and true concepts developed from the 1920s through 60s. Blade Runner is the same - but the execution of the original and sequel was so environmentally accurate and self consistent, that is gives amazing life to these stock ideas -- but this episode was careless and gratuitous.
