Attach the block: Netflix's Black Mirror: White Christmas imagines a cold future where people can be blocked in offline relationships like on Twitter

The following is a repost of a piece from December 17, 2014. It was published right after Black Mirror: White Christmas had its British premiere on December 16, 2014. White Christmas had its American premiere on DirecTV's Audience Network on December 25, 2014 and will finally be added to Netflix this Christmas day.

Goddammit, Black Mirror! Why do you have to be so amazing? Black Mirror isn't just the best anthology franchise currently on the air. It also contains some of the craftiest sci-fi storytelling on TV in 2014, as exemplified by Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker's feature-length Black Mirror: White Christmas, a delightfully twisted piece of non-traditional holiday entertainment that premiered in the U.K. on Channel 4 last night. White Christmas, which guest-starred Jon Hamm and a couple of Game of Thrones alums, Oona Chaplin and Natalia Tena, feels more like a feature film than a typical Black Mirror episode, which is why I'm writing the title in italics instead of in between quotation marks.

I've written about Black Mirror before, after it was added to Netflix in America, and as someone who stubbornly refuses to become a smartphone zombie like the male smartphone zombies in my family, I just love how much twisted and subversive fun the show has with exploring the dark side of technology. Want to live inside your phone? Well, you get your wish, but you have to part with a little thing called free will. Want to block your significant other from your marriage or any future interactions you have with him or her, just like how you can block some anonymous troll on Twitter? Well, here's the tech to block that bastard, but that person's going to be driven so crazy by being blocked that the bastard will come back later to murder your entire family.

I'm making it sound like Black Mirror is the kind of completely technophobic piece of shit Michael Crichton used to crank out. But the writing in the six previous Black Mirror episodes and White Christmas is more nuanced than that. Black Mirror's attitude isn't "Technology is evil." The show's attitude is more like "People are evil and fucked up, and when they have all this technological power in their hands, they don't know what to do with it." Not every gadget on the show is a detriment. There's one gizmo from the show I'd want to have, and that's the digital drawing board Hayley Atwell uses to create illustrations and graphic designs in "Be Right Back." But as for all the other gadgets, they seem appealing at first because of the immense power they give their users--like the "Entire History of You" device known as "the grain," which allows people to record everything from their workdays to their bedroom sessions with an implant in their skulls--but then they lose their appeal for me because of the horrible mistakes Brooker's characters make with these devices.

The first and third segments in White Christmas' triptych of interconnected horror stories about technology made me notice that there are never any healthy romantic relationships on Black Mirror. They all end badly. (At times, Black Mirror feels like the serious sci-fi version of many of Aziz Ansari's more recent stand-up routines, which have been based on extensive research he did about how much technology has changed relationships and romantic interactions.) Mankind's inability to contain its greed or keep its addiction to technology in moderation poisons everything, especially relationships. Even the original Twilight Zone, a huge influence on Brooker, was less cynical about relationships impacted by machines. When William Shatner and Patricia Breslin escaped the clutches of Satan's fortune-telling machine at the end of "Nick of Time," you knew their marriage was going to turn out okay. That's never the case with any relationship on Black Mirror.

The star of Mad Men, who portrays in White Christmas a futuristic dating coach who, of course, is unable to control the horrible outcome of one such ill-fated relationship, is the Kendrick Lamar of both American and British TV. He appears on everything. (Oh, look, he's on The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret! Now there he is on Parks and Rec, as the only employee of Leslie Knope's who's more incompetent than Jerry!) In White Christmas, I like how Brooker and director Carl Tibbetts got Hamm to tap into his comedic side, as seen in countless comedy podcasts, his 30 Rock guest shots and Bridesmaids, instead of doing nothing but brood a la Don Draper for the entire Christmas special (all the brooding during the special is left to Rafe Spall as a man who receives the aforementioned "block" from his girlfriend, who's played by Salem star Janet Montgomery). Hamm's so skilled at both anchoring Brooker's stories and injecting levity into them (his unreliable narration is the funniest part of the first White Christmas segment) that had Brooker wanted to go old-school instead and have a host introduce each story on Black Mirror, Hamm would have been the perfect Black Mirror host/narrator.

As a viewer of several comic book-inspired shows that are attempting to build shared universes of their own by dropping one reference to either the source material or a sister project after another (with his giddy habit of giving criminals colorful villain names that are the exact same names as their DC Comics print counterparts, Cisco from the CW's The Flash should be called "Mario Sue," as in "mare-ee-oh"), I'm getting kind of Easter-egged out. White Christmas is full of Easter eggs that reference previous Black Mirror episodes--at one point, Spall is seen flipping through TV shows that were featured in "Fifteen Million Merits" and "The Waldo Moment," as a sort of stocking stuffer from Brooker, in addition to this whole feature-length Christmas present he's written--but I don't mind those Easter eggs.

The possibility in White Christmas that all these Black Mirror stories take place in the same universe is interesting, and it reminds me of how the '90s version of The Outer Limits used to take its most well-received episodes and create sequels to them or intertwine those episodes' self-contained continuities with other episodes' continuities. In fact, Black Mirror is essentially an Outer Limits for the age of Google Glass and digital footprints, but better, stronger, faster. And--despite not containing any bug-eyed monsters or Cronenbergian creatures--scarier.

The first two seasons of Black Mirror--just three episodes each--can be streamed on Netflix, and they'll be joined on December 25 by the long-awaited addition of White Christmas to the streaming service. A 12-episode third season was commissioned by Netflix earlier this year and has not yet been given a premiere date.

Attach the block: Black Mirror: White Christmas imagines a cold future where people can be blocked in offline relationships like on Twitter

Goddammit, Black Mirror! Why do you have to be so amazing? Black Mirror isn't just the best anthology franchise currently on the air. It also contains some of the craftiest sci-fi storytelling on TV in 2014, as exemplified by Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker's feature-length Black Mirror: White Christmas, a delightfully twisted piece of non-traditional holiday entertainment that premiered in the U.K. on Channel 4 last night. White Christmas, which guest-starred Jon Hamm and a couple of Game of Thrones alums, Oona Chaplin and Natalia Tena, feels more like a feature film than a typical Black Mirror episode, which is why I'm writing the title in italics instead of in between quotation marks.

I've written about Black Mirror before, after it was added to Netflix in America, and as someone who stubbornly refuses to become a smartphone zombie like the male smartphone zombies in my family, I just love how much twisted and subversive fun the show has with exploring the dark side of technology. Want to live inside your phone? Well, you get your wish, but you have to part with a little thing called free will. Want to block your significant other from your marriage or any future interactions you have with him or her, just like how you can block some anonymous troll on Twitter? Well, here's the tech to block that bastard, but that person's going to be driven so crazy by being blocked that the bastard will come back later to murder your entire family.

I'm making it sound like Black Mirror is the kind of completely technophobic piece of shit Michael Crichton used to crank out. But the writing in the six previous Black Mirror episodes and White Christmas is more nuanced than that. Black Mirror's attitude isn't "Technology is evil." The show's attitude is more like "People are evil and fucked up, and when they have all this technological power in their hands, they don't know what to do with it." Not every gadget on the show is a detriment. There's one gizmo from the show I'd want to have, and that's the digital drawing board Hayley Atwell uses to create illustrations and graphic designs in "Be Right Back." But as for all the other gadgets, they seem appealing at first because of the immense power they give their users--like the "Entire History of You" device known as "the grain," which allows people to record everything from their workdays to their bedroom sessions with an implant in their skulls--but then they lose their appeal for me because of the horrible mistakes Brooker's characters make with these devices.

The first and third segments in White Christmas' triptych of interconnected horror stories about technology made me notice that there are never any healthy romantic relationships on Black Mirror. They all end badly. (At times, Black Mirror feels like the serious sci-fi version of many of Aziz Ansari's more recent stand-up routines, which have been based on extensive research he did about how much technology has changed relationships and romantic interactions.) Mankind's inability to contain its greed or keep its addiction to technology in moderation poisons everything, especially relationships. Even the original Twilight Zone, a huge influence on Brooker, was less cynical about relationships impacted by machines. When William Shatner and Patricia Breslin escaped the clutches of Satan's fortune-telling machine at the end of "Nick of Time," you knew their marriage was going to turn out okay. That's never the case with any relationship on Black Mirror.

The star of Mad Men, who portrays in White Christmas a futuristic dating coach who, of course, is unable to control the horrible outcome of one such ill-fated relationship, is the Kendrick Lamar of both American and British TV. He appears on everything. (Oh, look, he's on The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret! Now there he is on Parks and Rec, as the only employee of Leslie Knope's who's more incompetent than Jerry!) In White Christmas, I like how Brooker and director Carl Tibbetts got Hamm to tap into his comedic side, as seen in countless comedy podcasts, his 30 Rock guest shots and Bridesmaids, instead of doing nothing but brood a la Don Draper for the entire Christmas special (all the brooding during the special is left to Rafe Spall as a man who receives the aforementioned "block" from his girlfriend, who's played by Salem star Janet Montgomery). Hamm's so skilled at both anchoring Brooker's stories and injecting levity into them (his unreliable narration is the funniest part of the first White Christmas segment) that had Brooker wanted to go old-school instead and have a host introduce each story on Black Mirror, Hamm would have been the perfect Black Mirror host/narrator.

As a viewer of several comic book-inspired shows that are attempting to build shared universes of their own by dropping one reference to either the source material or a sister project after another (with his giddy habit of giving criminals colorful villain names that are the exact same names as their DC Comics print counterparts, Cisco from the CW's The Flash should be called "Mario Sue," as in "mare-ee-oh"), I'm getting kind of Easter-egged out. White Christmas is full of Easter eggs that reference previous Black Mirror episodes--at one point, Spall is seen flipping through TV shows that were featured in "Fifteen Million Merits" and "The Waldo Moment," as a sort of stocking stuffer from Brooker, in addition to this whole feature-length Christmas present he's written--but I don't mind those Easter eggs.

The possibility in White Christmas that all these Black Mirror stories take place in the same universe is interesting, and it reminds me of how the '90s version of The Outer Limits used to take its most well-received episodes and create sequels to them or intertwine those episodes' self-contained continuities with other episodes' continuities. In fact, Black Mirror is essentially an Outer Limits for the age of Google Glass and digital footprints, but better, stronger, faster. And--despite not containing any bug-eyed monsters or Cronenbergian creatures--scarier.

Both seasons of Black Mirror--just three episodes each--can be streamed on Netflix. There haven't been any announcements yet regarding Netflix making White Christmas available to American viewers. Parts of White Christmas are reminiscent of the sci-fi-tinged Batman: The Animated Series episodes "His Silicon Soul," in which a neglected robot clone of Batman believes he's the real Batman, and "Perchance to Dream," in which Bruce Wayne wakes up to discover his parents were never murdered. Excerpts from the late Shirley Walker's superb score from "Perchance to Dream" can be heard during "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" and "Hall H" on AFOS.

The best anthology show I saw this year first aired three years ago in the U.K.

"Fifteen Million Merits"

"I love technology, but not as much as you, you see... But I still love technology... Always and forever."--Kip Dynamite's wedding song

My favorite anthology show of the moment is one I watched for the first time when all six of its episodes so far became streamable on Netflix in America just last week, but international viewers, Americans who were able to catch it on DirecTV's Audience Network last year and, of course, torrenters have been aware of it for quite some time. Even though its first season premiered three years ago on Channel 4 in the U.K., Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror easily trounces Fargo and True Detective--or as a Yo, Is This Racist? reader wanted to rename it, White Men Talking, Black Men Listening--as an anthology show.

While Fargo and True Detective are anthologies with a self-contained season format that was first popularized by American Horror Story, Black Mirror opts for the older Twilight Zone/Outer Limits self-contained episode format. Before Black Mirror, I was only familiar with Brooker's work as a satirist in the mold of The Daily Show and The Soup and an essayist castigating The Dark Knight and Skyfall for being too po-faced as action entertainment, so I was initially surprised by the unrelenting bleakness and serious questions about technology, social media and celebrity culture on Black Mirror. It's akin to Daniel Radosh or his former fellow Daily Show staff writer Wyatt Cenac suddenly wanting to write and produce The Twilight Zone. As Brooker said during Black Mirror's first season in 2011, his show raises the question "If technology is a drug--and it does feel like a drug--then what, precisely, are the side-effects?" On Black Mirror, the side effects are, of course, not pretty.

The first season of the original version of The Outer Limits was noteworthy for featuring in each episode what Outer Limits showrunner Joseph Stefano referred to as "a bear," which he explained was "that one splendid, staggering, shuddering effect that induces awe or wonder or tolerable terror or even merely conversation and argument"--or in other words, the creature of the week. On Black Mirror, the bear is YouTube or the iPhone--or in the show's more fantastical episodes, it's a chip in your skull that can record everything you see (and then play the footage back to you in your head) or a digital incarnation of your dead lover that can replicate that deceased individual's personality and sense of humor. That particular Black Mirror episode about a dead lover's return, "Be Right Back," is, interestingly, like a precursor to those gender-reversed Her parodies that were all over the Internet earlier this year, but darker and sadder (and anchored by an effective performance by Hayley Atwell, a.k.a. Agent Carter).

Where Black Mirror differs from the '60s sci-fi anthology shows that influenced it--other than the sex scenes and profanity, of course--is its unwillingness to hold the viewer's hand as it immerses the viewer in whatever future world it posits in each installment. There's no Rod Serling or Control Voice to provide soothing exposition; Brooker never turns up on screen or in a voiceover with some overly flowery intro to set up the future world of the week. That's one reason why "Fifteen Million Merits" is my favorite Black Mirror episode. It's set in a future where the working class is forced to pedal exercise bikes that power an unspecified energy source--the workers are paid in "merits" that they're required to spend only on porno videos and pointless apps for their avatar or "doppel"--and the episode outlines the rules of this dystopia in only visual terms, a very cinematic approach to storytelling beautifully and confidently laid out by veteran modern Doctor Who director Euros Lyn.

Daniel Kaluuya stole The Fades as the lead hero's nerdy, Mork & Mindy-loving best friend (in fact, back when Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn't hit its stride yet and was struggling to figure out what to do with Fitz, the supergenius character played by Kaluuya's Fades co-star Iain De Caestecker, I initially wanted Agents to replace De Caestecker with Kaluuya), so it's a bit jarring to see this guy who was such a charismatic chatterbox on The Fades robbed of his voice at the start of "Fifteen Million Merits." Kaluyya doesn't speak for about the first 15 minutes, but he's terrific at expressing his worker character's ennui with just his face and posture--I had flashbacks to Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. In fact, that's what "Fifteen Million Merits" carries echoes of: a little bit of Modern Times with a smidgen of THX-1138 and a shitload of the Axiom from WALL•E, but with the added twists of both a reality TV talent show as the primary escape route for the working class (Brooker's wife Konnie Huq, who co-wrote "Fifteen Million Merits," skewers her own reality TV hosting past here) and a clever visual metaphor for "people who live in their phones."

Other than MC Bashy's hideous attempt at an American accent while portraying a talent show judge, the most disturbing thing about "Fifteen Million Merits" is how much this world where workers must live in cramped cells that look like smartphone menu screens--and where a female contestant like Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay, a.k.a. "Way Hot" from Downton Abbey) has such depressingly limited showbiz career options--isn't too far off from our own. I refuse to get a smartphone. I don't want to be a smartphone zombie. "Fifteen Million Merits" is a great argument for why some of us refuse to get bitten.

Kaluyya and Findlay's episode is Black Mirror's second episode, but it really should be your intro to Black Mirror if you haven't streamed it yet. It's where Brooker's blend of satire and despair first truly comes alive. Like Alan Sepinwall said, "Fifteen Million Merits" better represents what Black Mirror is capable of--and how unconventional and imaginative it is as an anthology show--than "The National Anthem," the more conventional premiere episode. However, "The National Anthem" is hardly as mediocre as "The Waldo Moment," Black Mirror's last episode before the show's return to Channel 4 next week (on December 16, to be exact) in the form of a Christmas special guest-starring Jon Hamm and Oona Chaplin.

I like what "The Waldo Moment" says about how an apathetic attitude towards democracy can be destructive; I just don't like the way it's executed. It's the show's only dud so far (the fact that "The Waldo Moment" was a rejected script idea from a completely different show explains much of its clunkiness). Remember the Star Wars Machete Order? A Star Wars fan suggested to other fans that they should try rewatching the pre-Force Awakens films in a different order: the 1977 Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back first, followed by Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, and then Return of the Jedi as the final installment, with no need to suffer through The Phantom Menace again. Because Black Mirror's episodes are self-contained, they can be watched in any order, so for Netflix viewers who are about to discover Black Mirror, I've come up with the Black Mirror Machete Order.

1) 1.2, "Fifteen Million Merits"
2) 1.3, "The Entire History of You"
3) 2.1, "Be Right Back"
4) 1.1, "The National Anthem"
5) 2.2, "White Bear"
(Skip "The Waldo Moment" or save it for another week. An underwhelming episode from Brooker is actually better than most American network TV.)

This rearranges the order of Black Mirror episodes so that the strongest episodes are first--"Fifteen Million Merits," "The Entire History of You" and "Be Right Back"--followed by the slightly lesser "National Anthem." Under the Machete Order, Black Mirror doesn't end with a whimper and wraps up instead with a gut-punch of an installment, "White Bear." It's best to not know anything at all about "White Bear" before watching it. Like "Fifteen Million Merits," "White Bear" excellently immerses the viewer into its future world through largely visual storytelling, and then like the most unnerving past works of horror anthology TV--the '80s Twilight Zone's "Gramma" comes to mind, as does "Home" from the quasi-anthology that was The X-Files--it proceeds to sock you in the nads. Then after you stream those episodes, read the thoughtful essays Emily Yoshida wrote about each episode back when she was a Grantland staffer (she's now with The Verge).

"White Bear"

At about this time last year, the Seattle hip-hop group The Physics released Digital Wildlife, a finely crafted concept album that could function as an aural companion piece to Black Mirror. Both the Physics album and Black Mirror explore the idea that digital advances may be improving a few aspects of our lives, but those advances haven't yet been able to delete human problems like loneliness or concealing lies. But Black Mirror goes a step further and straight-up says those problems can never be deleted. They'll only get worse at the rate humanity is going. Somewhere, Kip Dynamite is eating his words.

Both seasons of Black Mirror--just three episodes each--can be streamed on Netflix. The original Twilight Zone, a huge influence on Black Mirror, was turned into a 1983 feature film that remade three of the '60s show's episodes. The John Landis and Steven Spielberg segments suck, but the Joe Dante and George Miller segments are excellent, as is the late Jerry Goldsmith's original score. Goldsmith's Twilight Zone: The Movie end title music isn't currently in rotation on AFOS, but it ought to be.