Some of the biting fizz has gone out of Black Mirror, the British sci-fi anthology, and the three shows produced for 2019 seem more than a bit weary. The show remains reasonably exciting and features excellent acting and production values. Indeed, the final two shows for this season were spectacularly mounted, but the material -- mostly variants on themes involving artificial intelligence and virtual reality --has become a little thin. It's not clear to me that the subject is exhausted or whether these episodes simply suffer by comparison since they are unable to achieve the transcendent status of some of the previous Black Mirror programs, particularly the ineffably sad and brilliant "San Junipero" from a couple of years ago.
"Striking Vipers" is the weakest of the three episodes. Two hunky African-American dudes, all-male types who look like professional athletes, compete for women. One of the protagonist gets married and has a family. The other man continues to play the field picking up gorgeous women in bars. After being apart for seven or eight years, the two friends begin to play a virtual reality game called "Striking Vipers" -- it's one of the computer games in which the player chooses a persona and, then, duels other players. In this game, the participants actually feel the bumps and bruises and blows. As it happens, one man selects as his surrogate a gorgeous blonde. The other guy plays the game through a Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee type kung fu fighter. After exchanging a few blows, the two antagonists suddenly begin to kiss and have virtual sex. This becomes addictive and the two men consummate a torrid love affair through their avatars on the game screen. The family man tries to break off the affair but, ultimately, capitulates to his desires. Oddly, when the two men meet in real life and kiss, they don't feel any sexual charge at all -- their passion is entirely implemented through their avatars. The show features a confusing ending or non-ending -- apparently the family man's wife decides to authorize the ongoing virtual affair. The show is twenty minutes too long for its slender premise and, although handsomely produced (the urban landscapes glow with eerie intensity like computer game backdrops), there's not too much to the episode. The dialogue has an annoying stammering, stuttering Brokeback Mountain sound -- it's embarrassing and not too convincing.
"Smithereens" is a suspenseful hostage movie. It's not really science fiction at all and demonstrates that the premise -- a deranged man takes someone hostage on the basis of some unreasonable grudge -- can generate considerable tension and a sense of impending calamity, even though the plot is mostly generic and was old seventy years ago (for instance, see the 1955 Bogart move The Desperate Hours). In "Smithereens", a Uber or Lyft driver snatches an intern from a company like Facebook (it's called "Smithereens") and holds the man at gunpoint while demanding to talk to Billy Bears (someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobst), the CEO of the company. The kidnapers motives are obscure and not revealed (disappointingly) until the end of the episode. The episode's principal innovation is that the media company Smithereens, of course, possesses more up-to-date and exact information about the hostage-taker and his victim than the rather hapless police summoned to the scene of the stand-off. The CEO of the obnoxious Facebook-type company as played by Topher Grace actually turns out to be a decent fellow. But everyone is too entrenched in their positions and the stand-off plays out in a tragic manner. The main reason to watch this show is its brilliant mise-en-scene, a globe-trotting collage of sequences in London, in a lush, grassy meadow near Heathrow, Furnace Canyon Utah where the tech company CEO is on a silent, tech-free retreat, and Silicon Valley where the hard-nosed female operating officer and the company lawyer try to finesse the situation. Most noteworthy is the performance by Andrew Scott as the hostage-taker. This actor played Professor Moriarty to great effect on the BBC/PBS show Sherlock and he's extraordinary in his role as the twitcht, crazed, grief-stricken desperado. It's all pretty standard stuff but effectively presented.
"Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too" is an exuberant mess. It doesn't make any sense but it's reasonably fun and a relief, in some ways, from the somber tone of some of the show's other episodes. Ashley O (Miley Cyrus) is a twenty-something girl who has made a fortune singing and dancing in light, cheerful pop songs. When she tries to record some darker, goth-inflected material, her manager rebels, puts her into a coma, and, then, begins quarrying her brain for new material, actually dredging out of the inert singer's mind new songs. Ashley O has licensed a sort of robotic doll named "Ashley Too" into which much of he mental activity has been encoded. A lonely loser new to her High School bonds with the doll and, ultimately, uses the little mechanical toy to free the singer from her manager's induced coma. This ridiculous plot is coupled with a subplot involving the lonely high school girl's family -- her mother is dead and her father is literally trying to invent a better mousetrap. This vocation causes him to drive around in a shaggy pick-up equipped with literal rodent ears atop the cab. The mouse-trap theme gets entangled with fan-rescue plot. It's garish, light-hearted, whimsical, and somewhat amusing. But the show has no real bite and confuses the viewer with a really radical shift in tone half-way through the episode -- the first half of the show is morose and sad, featuring a lonely girl who desperately clings to a doll as her only solace in the cruel world; the second half of the show involves a giddy car-chase, concert sequences, and some cartoonish violence. (In the show, the comatose Ashley O is taken to San Junipero hospital and, in fact, the credits reveal that Capetown, South Africa stands in for LA and Malibu.)
Black Mirror feels like it's come to the end of its run. These shows are worth watching for their brilliant production values but the metaphysical sorrow and yearning and terror depicted in earlier seasons is now largely just a memory.
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