Black Mirror has kept viewed entertained, puzzled, and thoroughly disturbed since it broke onto the scene in 2011, on Channel 4. In 2015, Netflix purchased the anthology series, and has since been cranking out season after season of the mind-bending series.
Every standalone episode, often with a sci-fi feel, looks at stark consequences to modern society and often, our use of technology; or how technology can turn darkly against us in the most frightening and extreme ways.
The latest season 5, released in June, consists of just three episodes. Featuring more well-known American actors than the previous ones, like Anthony Mackie, Topher Grace, and Miley Cyrus, they’re just as enthralling as the others, and serve as thought-provoking social commentary on the way we live our lives and how technology can consume us.
What can you learn from the three new episodes? Here are 10 lessons any viewer should take away from them after watching. Note: major spoilers ahead for series 5, so don’t read on unless you’ve seen all three new episodes!
Don’t Text and Drive
In the second episode of series 5, entitled “Smithereens” Chris, a driver for the fictional app Hitcher, is on the prowl to give a ride to someone who works at a social media company Smithereens, with plans to kidnap them and hold them hostage until he’s able to speak with the CEO. Why? It all traces back to a happier time in his life that came to an end when he looked away from the road for a split second to check a social media notification on his phone and crashed into another car. The message he was so eager to see? A meaningless “like” to one of his posts.
While he survived, his fiancée did not. He was never charged because the driver in the other car, who also passed away, was drunk at the time and blamed for the accident. And Chris was burdened with guilt ever since.
The surface-level lesson of the episode: don’t text and drive.
Be Aware of Your Surroundings
Interestingly, in “Smithereens,” Chris parked his car outside of the Smithereens headquarters, day after day, waiting patiently for an employee to hail a car via Hitcher. How did no one notice?
Perhaps it was a taxi stand of some kind. Or maybe it was common for drivers to do such things. Nonetheless, the young intern Jaden, who was unfortunately at the wrong place at the wrong time, is the one to get in.
We can’t blame Jaden, nor say he should have realized the driver was a troubled man. Nonetheless, it raises the important lesson that one should always be aware of their surroundings.
Don’t Mix Virtual With Reality
In “Striking Vipers,” the first episode of the series in season 5, Danny starts to play a virtual reality game with Karl, an old college friend, whereby their consciousness is completely taken over by the game. It’s virtual reality to the max.
But when the two start getting intimate via their virtual characters, the result of a presumed dissatisfaction with their real lives, things get dicey. Karl seems to develop an addiction for the experience while Danny apparently does too, but tries not to accept it since he’s married.
Bottom line: stick to high kicks, throwing fireballs, and 10-hit punches in video games, and leave the intimacy to real life.
Virtual Acts Can Be Cheating
In “Striking Vipers,” Danny struggles with his desire to continue to play the “game” and his commitment to his wife. Is he really cheating? Well, in a way, yes. He’s emotionally invested in the relationship, even if he’s in the body of an Asian woman in the game when he’s committing the act.
Plus, it was clearly affecting his marriage. And judging from the fact that it seems, after confessing, the couple apparently agreed for Theo to fulfill her fantasy of sleeping with a stranger once a year while Danny got to play the game with Karl at the same time, she felt so, too. Of course, another lesson to take here is that it's possible to come to agreements outside the norms of monogamy, as long as that makes everyone happy.
Social Media Is Addictive
It’s no surprise that social media is designed to be addictive, feeding you constant rewards and instant gratification through things like likes, views, and an endless scroll of information and posts.
But this fact is amplified in many of the scenes in “Smithereens,” where Chris is constantly haunted by the constant ding and pings of cell phones all around him, everywhere from a coffee shop to riders in his car. It’s something that has become part of daily life, yet we don’t really notice unless we take our own faces out of our own phones long enough to do so.
Even the Smithereens CEO had had enough and took a retreat to a remote mountain where he was completely cut off from all technology. He admitted that he hated what the company had become.
Sometimes Virtual Reality is Too Much Like Reality
If you’ve ever engaged in a virtual reality experience, you know how trippy it can be. Looking down from a virtual ledge, you can’t help but flinch, believing that you might really fall into oblivion. Or swimming underwater, you feel the pull of the waves as if you were really there.
The experience between Danny and Karl in “Striking Vipers” makes this even more evident, and takes it to an incredibly intimate level where the sensations the players feel while their consciousness is taken over by the game start to turn into real, yet very confusing, feelings.
Technology Can Impact Relationships
People already get addicted to video games, impacting their relationships with others, whether it’s parents, husbands or wives, friends or other family members. In “Striking Vipers,” it was taken to a whole other level that is frightening enough to consider that, as virtual reality technology continues to evolve, could become reality.
Given how real the game experience was, Danny was having trouble being intimate with his wife, and found himself sneaking off in the middle of the night to play. Karl, meanwhile, had trouble feeling the same passion when being intimate with his girlfriend in the real world that he did while playing the game with his friend.
Big Tech Companies Probably Know More About Us Than Law Enforcement
One of the most terrifyingly real parts of “Smithereens” is when Chris has Jaden hostage in his car at gunpoint, and law enforcement, talking with a team at Smithereens on the phone, are trying to figure out his identity, who’s the hostage, and any possible motives.
At every turn, Smithereens knows more about Chris than law enforcement, able to figure out who he is, who he kidnapped, how he managed to be employed with Hitcher, and even who the car is registered to, and the address.
It’s highly disturbing when you consider that, in real life, this would probably be the case as well. Social media sites probably know more about you than anyone else, given the amount of data they have aggregated about you over the years through your posts, demographics, likes and dislikes, social circle, activities, and so on.
Don’t Always Believe What You See
While you might see your favorite actor, singer, or other celebrity on television, seemingly enjoying a perfect life, it likely isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Celebrities have to show their best selves, and often a persona, not who they really are.
In “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” the third episode of series 5, a 15-year-old girl idolizes a pop star Ashley O, played by Miley Cyrus, and asks for an AI robot likeness of her for her birthday. Her fascination with Ashley is juxtaposed with clips of Ashley behind the scenes as we see that she despises the music she makes, the persona she is forced to put on in front of the camera, and her controlling aunt. It’s called show business for a reason.
Be True To Yourself
Ultimately, in the end of “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” Ashley finally followed the cookie cutter advice she had been spewing to her fans (at her aunt/manager’s insistence): be true to yourself. Instead of producing bubble gum pop songs, she used her creativity to produce the kind of music she wanted and wrote a song that was a big middle finger to her betraying aunt.
The two sisters Rachel and Jack learned to be true to themselves as well, especially after not only meeting the real Ashley O, but chatting with the robot AI (limiter removed to access the full replica of her personality) and realizing that she was nothing like her on-screen persona.