S04.E01: USS Callister

[Dobian]

Star Trek from Hell, I loved it.  Great job by Jesse Plemons channeling William Shatner.  Except in this one Captain Kirk was a total monster.  And I thought Milioti was great as well as Jimmi Simpson from Westworld.  They all were.

I really liked how these people were totally aware that they were clones along with their memories of their whole lives up to the point that they were cloned for this virtual reality game.  One of my favorite Black Mirror episodes, kind of this season's San Junipero.

[SeanC]

On 1/9/2018 at 7:46 PM, Dobian said:

Star Trek from Hell, I loved it. 

The thing I liked most about this episode was that it moves from what is essentially a Star Trek parody to something that, by the end, is very much in the spirit of classic Star Trek.

[DrSpaceman73]

It was just a little moment, but I loved when they were about the fight the monster and Milioti puts her hands up like she is getting ready to fight, then shakes her head like "what I am doing, this is pointless", knowing she couldn't do anything. 

The overacting and overreactions are classic trek and Shatner. 

[Dobian]

On 12/30/2017 at 5:53 AM, mdwh said:

Was it explained how he got not just their DNA, but also a sufficient copy of their brain layout to replicate them exactly with all their memories? They didn't even seem to lampshade it with a handwavy explanation, which seemed weak, compared to White Christmas and San Junipero which covered this.

Yes that was a miss.  DNA has nothing to do with memory.  They could have included something like all employees get scanned, only the scan is actually an upload of their memories.  It would have been a reach but at least an explanation.  Also, when Daly is chasing their ship at the end, why couldn't he just make himself appear on board their bridge?  Being that he is basically the admin of this game, he certainly had access to console commands to let him do anything he wanted, like turning people into monsters and making Nanette's face disappear.  So why couldn't he just instantly move himself to the Callister?

But those nitpicks aside, it was a pretty thrilling and entertaining episode.

[CigarDoug]

5 hours ago, Dobian said:

Yes that was a miss.  DNA has nothing to do with memory.  They could have included something like all employees get scanned, only the scan is actually an upload of their memories.  It would have been a reach but at least an explanation.  Also, when Daly is chasing their ship at the end, why couldn't he just make himself appear on board their bridge?  Being that he is basically the admin of this game, he certainly had access to console commands to let him do anything he wanted, like turning people into monsters and making Nanette's face disappear.  So why couldn't he just instantly move himself to the Callister?

But those nitpicks aside, it was a pretty thrilling and entertaining episode.

She took the controller from him, did she not? Or maybe he is limited within the game, he has to be beamed back to the ship. But he can control any person he has within his sights, I don't know.

[ganesh]

I thought they reconfigured the controller when she jumped in the lake to make him swim with her as a diversion.

[Chicago Redshirt]

In the original Trek, a repeated theme was Kirk's ability to outwit, outlast or otherwise defeat gods/people with superhuman abilities (for example, Gary Mitchell, Charlie Evans, Apollo, Trelane, Sylvia). Same with his ability versus artificial intelligences (Nomad, the Controller, Roger Korby's androids, the androids holding Harry Mudd, M5, the computer from Return of the Archons).

Some of that was because of plot armor/writer fiat. Of course Kirk overcomes beings with seemingly inexhaustible abilities and/or that represent technology he can't otherwise fathom. He's James Tiberius Kirk! And of course, part of what Roddenberry and co. wanted to show was the human spirit could win out over superstition or artificial intelligence.

This episode plays with this. Daly -- who talks and acts like Kirk -- is the "asshole god" who even administers to Nanette one of the forms of punishment that IIRC Charlie Evans did to a rando crewwoman -- removing her face and her ability to breathe. And here artificial intelligence manages to outwit our Kirk figure by planning to go out on its own terms, and succeeding beyond their dreams.

In terms of why Daly didn't just beam himself over to the Callister, there seem to be a few main explanations: 1. he couldn't, because even as an administrator he has limits or 2. he was so blinded by rage, he focused on beating the game, if you will, on its own terms.  

From what we see or hear about Daly's capabilities, they seem to be a. manipulating the cookies/himself (taking Nanette's mouth away, modding the crew to be genital-less, turning people into Arachnajax, his threat to turn the crew inside out and leave them alive in jars, being invulnerable according to Packer) or b. having access to technology the rest of the crew does not (the communicator that lets him talk to the outside world and the only working phaser.) There's not direct evidence that he can independently shape the system however he wants, instantaneously.

I would assume that if he disconnected, he could re-enter the game back on the Callister bridge, but maybe that's not a valid assumption, and he's stuck in the Space Fleet mod wherever his avatar last was. There's also the matter of time. By the time he worked out what the Callister crew was doing, he didn't necessarily have time to execute the sort of technological solutions he could have brought to bear as a master coder. 

But even assuming he had the capability to beam himself directly onto the Callister bridge or something for discussion's sake, I'd buy that he was so furious about being deceived and bested by the crew that he wasn't thinking straight. Part of how Kirk defeats those gods/AIs is that none of them use their abilities to their full potential, in part because of their emotional instability, hubris or other factors. A similar thing could be operating here. 

[TV Glotzer]

I like the detail of the office closing for two weeks for Christmas holiday. That, along with Daly turning on the “Do Not Disturb” sign on his apartment door, ensures that his body dies in that chair while his brain remains locked in stasis in the game. Thus no one finds him, revives him, and lets him start the whole thing over again.

[LittleIggy]

On 1/4/2018 at 4:37 PM, tennisgurl said:

I would watch the crap out of a USS Callister spin off. 

Me, too!

[ElectricBoogaloo]

Featurette:

[Last Time Lord]

So, this was the first episode of the show I’ve ever seen. I just sort of caught it on a whim after seeing it on Netflix’s “popular episodes” function that I never really paid much attention to before this. 

I’ve heard of Black Mirror, before, but never actually watched it. All I knew going into this is it is an Anthology Series (in the Tales From The Crypt sense, and not the American Horror Story type)

It took a little for me to get into it, but once it got going, it got good. 

The thing I found myself wondering the most is just how long Daly was doing this  

All I know is if they do more with this story, I would like to see where it goes. 

[romantic idiot]

On 1/1/2018 at 9:17 AM, Amarsir said:

I don't think the captives dying to a random player would make me like Daly any better. But the fact that one could debate that makes me kind of wish they had. For traditional storytelling I agree there's better closure with what we got. But for Black Mirror which leaves us questioning philosophy, I might have preferred more complication than "bad guy was bad and the good guys got a good result".

I thought the same thing and then I realized it did have some very intriguing and dark philosophy in it anyway (which I find comforting in a weird way - really finding all these seemingly 'happy endings' in BM unsettling) - I've ended up cheering for a man dying for his thoughts. I mean, Daly, at the end of the day, was just guilty of killing people in a video game. They happened to be sentient, but they were still digital constructs, so essentially he thought bad things but he didn't do them. So are we, through successive episodes of BM going to a place where you don't have to act on bad thoughts to be worthy of punishment / execution. A real human being was killed by a computer and we are okay with that. 

The other piece of course, from a meta perspective, how much the filmmaker was playing with how I naturally watch TV. The people in Daly's office didn't treat him badly at all - except Walton just asking him to be more assertive with people - which is a thing that my boss tells me to be at time and I tell my friends to do all the time - yet, my instinctive feeling about the people in the real world was that they weren't nice. 

On 1/1/2018 at 9:25 PM, iMonrey said:

Agreed - this was a good episode, but it felt like a variant on the same theme so it wasn't entirely original. 

I think they'll keep coming back to this digital construct / Ai piece multiple times because it is quite a deep well. Whether you treat the world inside the world like "The Matrix" where nothing is 'real' and you keep trying to wake up from it, or whether you take it like a version of Hindu philosophy where everything is an illusion and your reality is nothing but a lesser dimensioned shadow of a higher dimension self, there are many different lenses to the story, so I'm going to tell myself to be more open to having multiple takes on the same subject. 

On 1/1/2018 at 10:07 PM, Amarsir said:

It occurs to me that real-world Nanette is probably going to think she was party to a murder. All she knows is that her nerdy boss was home alone on the computer, she tricked him into swapping out his neural interface, and shortly after he turned into a vegetable. So I guess this episode had a dark side to the ending after all.

My worry is about her fingerprints, really. Her fingerprints would be in places they shouldn't be, so if the police were to find the circumstances suspicious she might be charged with felony murder.

On 1/2/2018 at 10:22 PM, ganesh said:

If they were going to make this episode 76 minutes, there was room for some editing of the main story and adding a coda to it because there are certainly some loose ends. 

It's ambiguous. They put a high level story / concept in, but the endings are never cut and dried. It wouldn't like it in other shows, but it's what makes BM, BM for me. I like it here. 

[Chaos Theory]

On 1/20/2018 at 12:36 AM, Last Time Lord said:

 

I’ve heard of Black Mirror, before, but never actually watched it. All I knew going into this is it is an Anthology Series (in the Tales From The Crypt sense, and not the American Horror Story type)

 

A lot of the episodes get really really dark.   If you decide to start with season 1 I might actually start with with episode 2 and then work your way to episode 1 (National Anthem)  if/when you decide you like the series.  The irony is the first episode of the series is among the most divisive of the entire series.  Personally after watching it I quit the series for a long time before going back.

On 1/20/2018 at 12:36 AM, Last Time Lord said:

 

The thing I found myself wondering the most is just how long Daly was doing this  

Probably not long.  Daly is the kind of guy to let rage accumulate.   This big new program was his opportunity to get revenge on those he perceived as being mean to him.  The first person put in the program was his business partner.  He used the guys son to break him.  Once he did that he put everyone and anyone who crossed his path in there.    

[nicgwatchingtv]

On 2/26/2018 at 10:51 AM, Chaos Theory said:

A lot of the episodes get really really dark.   If you decide to start with season 1 I might actually start with with episode 2 and then work your way to episode 1 (National Anthem)  if/when you decide you like the series.  

I've watched all the other episodes and still haven't made it back to episode 1 from season 1. I only made it about a 1/3 or so through that episode. 

Now I know too much ?and sorta suspect I'll never get through it.

[shrewd.buddha]

Finally saw it - and thought it was very well done in terms of acting, special effects and sets. 
There were a lot of leaps in logic and believably, tho : getting full memories from a dna sample, a complex neural interface the size of coin. Just the technology to create sentient A.I.'s in a virtual world would be ground breaking.

I was hoping for a Black Mirror that was more fun, and this was - at the beginning. But it got more disturbing as it went on. The socially awkward nerd we sympathized with at first was revealed to be a type of secret serial killer, child murderer, monster, etc. (At least in a virtual world, populated with sentient AI's.)

It appeared to me that only the sentient VR characters on the ship that made it to the worm hole survived. So, the woman from marketing, and any other co-workers Daly 'created' would have perished? 
For myself, I think a more satisfying ending would have been for Daly's private version of the game to get exposed to the public version and have his co-workers see his twisted fantasies. 

I did not give the Daly character a pass because the game was not 'real'. His desires and rage were real. And the virtual AI's he tortured had real personalities and memories. With his magical technology, Daly could have made simplified, fantasy characters, but he chose not to.

Edited May 27, 2018 by shrewd.buddha

[DrSpaceman73]

This episode won four Emmys, for Best TV Movie, outstanding writing on a Limited series and two for editing. 

[benteen]

1 minute ago, DrSpaceman73 said:

This episode won four Emmys, for Best TV Movie, outstanding writing on a Limited series and two for editing. 

Very well-deserved.  My favorite episode of the show.

[Kel Varnsen]

This episode managed to save itself for me. At first I was kind of annoyed that it was sort of a8 White Christmas/San Junipero/Playtest mash up, with them using the same tech all over again. But by the end I was really into it. Also why is Cristin Milioti not ib more stuff? Someone else in that role and the episode would be so much worse.

On 12/29/2017 at 1:54 PM, Chicago Redshirt said:

And in the real world, at some point, Daly's corpse will be discovered and Callister Inc. very well might crash and burn. Can you imagine what would happen if the CTO of Blizzard (the company that makes World of Warcraft) was found dead because he was playing WOW and something weird and unexplained happened?

Actually that is a good question. If the CTO of Callister dies weiry  playing the game his company created the company would probably tank. If the company goes out of business and the Infinity servers get shut off are Nanette and all the other characters dead.

Hell for that matter if the King of Space had blown up their ship would they be dead? Or is it a Wreck it Ralph kind of thing where as long as you die in your own game you respawn?

On 1/5/2018 at 10:53 AM, jade.black said:

I agree. I wrote a whole post in San Junipero about how the people were still dead and the copies were just computer programs, so who cares? 

This episode made me wonder if we were supposed to assume it was the same technology used in San Junipero. If so does that mean if someone wants to spend the afterlife with their favourite celebrity do they just need to get ahold of their dna. Even within this episode I wonder how prevalent the dna scanning tech is. Is Daly the only creep out there with fantasy versions of real people on his computer or are there millions more?

[theatremouse]

On 1/2/2018 at 7:53 AM, Lady Calypso said:

I agree. The more I process the episode, the more I realize that maybe Walton wasn't the pure bad guy. Sure, he seemed like a douche and all that, but Daly was definitely a participant in his own demise. Shania even said it to Nanette. She was put in the game because she dared to call Daly out on the creepy staring. Daly didn't have any social skills to be able to be a face for the company. Walton had to step up; sure, maybe he needed to treat Daly like a co-owner rather than another employee. But Daly really put a lot of that on himself. And I will say that at least he got his own office and a proper title. Thinking back on it, if Daly was completely justified in his anger with Walton, he could have not gotten an office right beside Walton's. He could have been in a cubicle like the others. Also, Walton got angry for a reason; Daly was too distracted by Nanette to do his actual job in getting the update out earlier. Walton asked him to make sure the new patch was out in the next couple of days, and Daly screwed up. Daly didn't seem to get involved in the company any further than doing the tech stuff. Perhaps he sits in on the meetings, but I bet he doesn't fully pay attention or understand how difficult it is to really run the company from more than the technological side. 

To me Walton vs the Daly is the difference between being a bit of a jerk to one's employees/co-founder vs having seriously disturbing and controlling impulses that suggest something more like being a sociopath (argument over whether the code-versions of people "count" notwithstanding). Nutshell: Walton's a guy to find frustrating/annoying and Daly's a guy to be scared of.

On 1/2/2018 at 9:30 AM, iMonrey said:

I'm not sure I buy that they were able to "hack" into the game, or the system, or whatever, through a control panel on the space ship. We were told that all the buttons were the same and it didn't matter which one Nanette pushed on the Captain's orders. So if the control panels are basically decorative and serve no real purpose, how were they able to use them to do anything as functional as bringing up the game controls or sending outside messages?

I took it as the buttoney-buttons all did whatever he said they ought to do in the moment, but when she was hacking, she was using a keyboard. So the keyboard was a keyboard (presumably since it was laid out and labeled as a normal keyboard), but it didn't matter if Blue Circular Button meant "weapons" one moment but "teleport" the next. And Green Rectangular button could just as easily be "turn up the thermostat". Because Random Colorful Button has no intuitive meaning. Also, as others mentioned, it's a joke on original ST.

[Ottis]

On 12/29/2017 at 2:39 PM, Chaos Theory said:

First off although  I like Black Mirror a lot it is often way too dark for me.  I thought this was one of the best episodes maybe in large part because I am such a Star Trek fan.

Watching it wayyyyy late, but yeah, I agree with you. really enjoyed this one. Especially how at first it looked like Daly was the poor, forgotten guy, and then he turned out to be the nut. And he ended up ostracized, with a poor rep, because of his own actions IRL (including missing multiple deadlines).

Edited February 25, 2019 by Ottis

[Ottis]

On 12/31/2018 at 8:43 PM, Kel Varnsen said:

Hell for that matter if the King of Space had blown up their ship would they be dead? Or is it a Wreck it Ralph kind of thing where as long as you die in your own game you respawn?

There was a line in this ep where they said that, if the ship blew up, they don't die. They just float in space, I guess freezing? Not sure how far that plays out.

[Blue Plastic]

On 1/1/2018 at 10:56 PM, Cheezwiz said:

Although there were dark thought-provoking themes, I loved the comedic stuff in this episode - not typical for Black Mirror. When Daly went on his first pizza break during a gaming session, I laughed out loud when all of the characters slumped into relaxed positions - including the space monster!

The slumping space monster was amusing.  But that was before I realized it was actually one of the DNA cookie characters!  And I guess that one died.

On 1/2/2018 at 11:30 AM, iMonrey said:

I'm not sure I buy that they were able to "hack" into the game, or the system, or whatever, through a control panel on the space ship. We were told that all the buttons were the same and it didn't matter which one Nanette pushed on the Captain's orders. So if the control panels are basically decorative and serve no real purpose, how were they able to use them to do anything as functional as bringing up the game controls or sending outside messages?

One of many plot holes, along with DNA clones not having any mechanism to retain the memories of the original organism, in this episode but I did like it.  It worked for me.

On 1/12/2018 at 6:20 AM, Chicago Redshirt said:

In the original Trek, a repeated theme was Kirk's ability to outwit, outlast or otherwise defeat gods/people with superhuman abilities (for example, Gary Mitchell, Charlie Evans, Apollo, Trelane, Sylvia). Same with his ability versus artificial intelligences (Nomad, the Controller, Roger Korby's androids, the androids holding Harry Mudd, M5, the computer from Return of the Archons).

By coincidence I watched the "Roger Kirby androids" episode (so corny!) of Star Trek that happened to be airing and then decided oh hey I'll watch an episode of Black Mirror and it was this one with the heavy parody elements from Star Trek.

Edited March 17, 2019 by Blue Plastic

[Neurochick]

On 1/1/2018 at 11:35 PM, ganesh said:

There was a great article a few years ago called something like, 'no you're not entitled to a hot chick', and I think this was the type of character they were portraying. That said, I didn't think real life Daly was a 'good guy' for a second. He was practically seething all the time, and they tipped us off with the conversation over the coffee making. 

Just watched the whole episode now.  Here's my thing.  This episode is the saying, "resentment is drinking poison and wanting someone else to die."  Daly created the company, Walton fucked him over.  Daly had a justifiable beef with Walton and the other co workers.  He could have hired a lawyer and sued Walton.  

But Daly didn't have the balls to do that.  Now, it's one thing for a person to take people they dislike and write bad fanfic using them, no harm in that.  But this guy took it to the next level, stealing their DNA; throwing a minor child out an airlock because Walton screwed him over.  That was some next level bullshit.

It's kind of like, you slap me in the face and I blow your brains out.  Not cool.

Still, I kind of understood where Daly was coming from.  I work with someone who is a total witch.  For some strange reason, she doesn't like me and doesn't include me in anything.  I feel, she's just being a witch, why should I talk to her?  But I don't know if I'd go as far as Daly though.

Edited October 4, 2019 by Neurochick