Black Mirror: White Christmas (2014)

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.

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.

I get that the series is a constant commentary on today's social networking and where it might lead us, but blocking everyone for a sex offender makes it immpossible for him to live. Also punishing a mental clone for 24860000 years in solitude is plain meaningless and stupid.

The first and third parts are funny due to the application of the reception of misunderstanding. The second part is more gloomy. And in it we get acquainted with the technology to which a reasonable question arises. Why is the copy of consciousness in confusion if the original knows about the process of copying her consciousness?