Black Mirror (Hated of the Nation)

The final episode in Series 3 (2016) of the British sci-fi series Black Mirror more than maintains the remarkably high quality of these productions.  Although not quite as successful as some of the other programs in this series this bonus-length finale -- it's about ninety minutes long -- "Hated of the Nation" achieves an exciting, thought-provoking, and even morally probing combination of Swiftian satire, dark humor so black that it doesn't exactly register as funny, and Hitchcock-style terror.  The weaknesses in the show are only evident in comparison with the astonishingly high quality of earlier episodes, some of which represent, I think, the best television ever produced.

"Hated of the Nation" involves cyber-shaming.  This is the phenomenon in which someone is caught on camera committing a disgraceful act.  The image of the act is posted and, then, reposted thousands of times and complete strangers mount a campaign to vilify the offending person.  The effects of this kind of mob bullying can be devastated -- people have had to quit their jobs, flee into the country, and, even, have been induced into suicide attempts.  A few years ago, a Japanese girl was shown in a confrontation with travelers on the subway -- her miniature poodle had defecated in the subway car and the girl didn't properly clean-up the mess.  The young woman was the victim of an international hate campaign; the identities of her parents were uncovered by the internet lynch mob and they also suffered enormously.  Ultimately, the girl tried to kill herself.  In "Hated of the Nation," a  journalist has written a disparaging column about someone in a wheelchair.  Disabilities' activists mount a hate-campaign using the hashtag #deathtoJoPowers. (Jo Powers is the journalist and, in fact, she dies in a gruesome manner).  While police are investigating Powers' death, and cynically trying to pin the crime on her husband, a rapper named Tusk mocks a young fan's dancing -- an image of his disdain is broadcast on the internet and he too becomes the focus of a hate compaign, hashtag #deathtoTusk.  When Tusk also is killed, it becomes apparent that someone or something is responding to these hashtags with literal, and lethal, ferocity.  The program follows the efforts of a hardened female police officer to solve these crimes and to protect the next hate campaign victim, a teenage girl photographed desecrating a war memorial by seeming to urinate on it.  A manifesto is internet-published called the Campaign of Responsibility -- the author of the manifesto is a computer nerd who has engineered a way to murder people who are identified with the #deathto -- tag.  In the manifesto, the author argues that people should be more careful and exercise greater responsibility about wishing others dead on the internet.  The author says that whomever gains the greatest number of #deathto hashtag followers will, in fact, die.  This alarms the Prime Minister since he is unpopular and routinely denounced on the internet.  In an extraordinary scene, the PM demands that his opposition researchers release incriminating video on political foes so that they will earn high numbers of enemies on the internet and, therefore, divert the threat away from him. 

Don't read below this line if you dislike "spoilers."  Part of the appeal of Black Mirror is its exceptionally clever and thematically effective plot twists, some of which in "Hated of the Nation" I reveal below.  There's simply no effective way to write about Black Mirror without revealing plot points.

As it happens, honey bees in the UK have become extinct due to "colony collapse syndrome."  Great Britain's "sceptered isle" is regarded by its inhabitants as a kind of garden and scientists have replaced honeybees with nano-bots -- tiny synthetic drones that pollinate crops and flowers throughout the nation.  The bee-bots are capable of reproducing by creating 3D printers in the hives that they inhabit.  Unknown to civil authorities, the government has weaponized the bees and turned them into surveillance devices by providing them with face-recognition software.  The bees are the instrument by which the internet "hive-mind" is inflicting death on the person proven to be most hated of the nation.  The power of this episode lies in the objective correlative, the metaphor linking the robot-bees with the casual mob-destruction of disliked persons, death by #hashtag.  In the same way that hostile internet posts can channel an avalanche of vitriol, the bees represent a hive-mind indifferent to individual rights and casually vicious to boot.  All of this is succinctly enacted with a couple of startling additional plot twists that I won't reveal.  The show's penetrating social satire is borne by an effective thriller plot including a terrifying set-piece in which millions of bees attack a victim sequestered in a rural safe-house -- in this sequence, the episode channels, in some cases shot-by-shot, a similar sequence in Hitchcock's movie The Birds.  (Indeed, allusions to The Birds pile-up as the show progresses -- for instance, one of the bee attacks takes place at an elementary school and the target is a young female teacher something like Suzanne Pleshette in the Hitchcock movie).  The only real weakness in the episode is that it is ten minutes too long -- the movie ends with a wholly unnecessary sequence set on Gran Canaria that seems justified primarily because someone wanted a trip to the Canary Islands.  Notwithstanding this cavil, the last episode of Black Mirror's third season is highly memorable and (mostly) completely admirable.