<i>Black Mirror</i>: 'Arkangel' Mines the Horror of Helicopter Parenting
Sophie Gilbert and David Sims will be discussing the new season of Netflix’s Black Mirror, considering alternate episodes. The reviews contain spoilers; don’t read further than you’ve watched. See all of their coverage here.
David, I loved “USS Callister”—it’s my favorite of all the new episodes. You’re smart how it starts with this mopey cliché of a lonely coder, encouraging you to sympathize with him, and then flips it on its head, showing the darkness of his walled-in fantasy world. It’s also interesting how the technology in the episode appears to nod back to “White Christmas” and its seems as compelled by the idea of the carbon-copied soul as ever, but if it was surprisingly bullish about the concept in “San Junipero,” “USS Callister” reinforces the argument that humans are too frail to be trusted with such godlike powers—that they’re inevitably going to abuse them.
