Black Mirror: USS Callister (2017)

There are two main plotholes to this story: 1- Why would a genius so smart to have been able to build such a complex world be so stupid to let so many childish software bugs exist in the world so that the captive copies can use them against him? How can you even make an actual thinking person being able to remember their past or parallel life by a copy of their DNA? 2- Why would a genius build a virtual world in which there is a wormhole by which the captives can not only escape from it but also get him entraped to death?! Not so genius.

No controvercy, no real thought, not moral questions, no thought provoking - just sfi-fi adventures. I hoped that Black Mirror will change for the better with the new season - nope, Netflix Mirror is still the same streamlined, dumbed donw entertainment, which is hillarious considering the original premice of the show. Honestly, if you gonna "omage" Star Trek, pick a theme that wasn't explored in Star Trek - the whole sapient simulation things was in Trek, and done better. And stick the happy ending on it - because factual details of your tech are dumb and wrong. Why is your dev kit conntected to the internet? Why are your admin privileges SO limited that you can't stop them flying the ship at a distance? How come a huge nerd didn't built in ANY system for not being trapped in VR himself, which is pretty much the main Sci-Fi fear of VR. Why for the love of god do you need to have the game running while you're offline? Just pause the simulation, you know like in White Christmas, a good Black Mirror episode.All in all, makes you question even watching the show anymore.

Didn't surprise me at all. The ending was flat.Is this really season 4's best episode? :(

The return of Black Mirror was greatly hyped of course, and as one who has watched since that first famous episode, I was happy to see Brooker doing well, even if it cost us Screenwipe 2017 due to his workload. The first episode starts out within an episode of a Star Trek clone of sorts but then jumps to the real world where we find the 'captain' is also the CTO of an online virtual gaming company. The USS Callister is his personal offline version of that game, where he has characters based on people he knows in the real world.In the spirit of the show, there is an element of the real word within this episode. Specifically the idea of people within online games using them as a place to vent frustrations and limitations within the real world. This is me being a bit generous though, because that link to the real that would make it chilling is a bit weaker here, Instead we are held within the detail of the plot - the characters inside the game and their efforts to escape. In this way it is a perfectly fine episode with some drama, urgency, comedy, and a conclusion. Perfectly fine - but not more. What limits it is that the smartness is not there to the degree I'd like. The plot holes in the writing are distracting in their presence. I'm not picking some small technical detail but rather the way things happen (like the fate of the main character) don't have any base, and seem just like good things to happen which were written backwards. Speaking of the writing, I do think the lack of real link to the real world of today hurts it; I am kind in my link to online trolling because there is not that impact to something we know - which is the type of commentary that I followed in Brooker when he wrote in the Guardian, and in other BM episodes.The production standards are high, and the cast is impressive (with Fargo and Breaking Bad written large across several of them, as well as many other well-known faces). It is a perfectly fine episode, with plenty to make it entertaining, but the writing doesn't manage to find that Black Mirror gut-punch or connection that it has so often managed to do. It is disappointing from that standpoint, but still fine as a piece of television.