'Black Mirror' Season 3 Liveblog: What's Real in Netflix's Most Unnerving Show?

*This post contains spoilers for all episodes of Season 3 of Black Mirror. The spoilers will be in chronological order, starting from the first episode. So if you've seen part of the season you can safely read until I tell you not to.*

The last three nights, I've woken with a start sometime between 4:30 and 5:45 AM while in the middle of having some sort of stressful, dystopian dream. Roughly six seconds ago, I was being chased by some secret police force for sprinting away from a self driving car without tossing the artificial intelligence some cash, which is obviously a thoroughly stupid way of robot bill collection. Seems like a good time to power through some disturbingly realistic science fiction!

Here's the deal: I am going to watch the new season of Black Mirror starting right now, taking breaks only when my editors make me do something else. It's not some dumb psychological experiment, it's more that whenever I binge on a show, I want to read reviews, recaps, everything I can possibly find. But I also usually want it in a digestible and chronological form. So I'm going to discuss the real life tech, the broader themes, and holy shit moments of this season as we make our way through it. Think of it as a watch party. You're invited, obviously.

An early Motherboard tagline was (or still is? who knows.) "The future is wonderful. The future is terrifying." Black Mirror explores half of that. You know which. Anyways, let's do it. Email me at jason.koebler@motherboard.tv or tweet at me @jason_koebler if you wanna chat about the episodes.

6:30 AM: Episode 1: "Nosedive"

I purposely didn't watch any trailers, learn anything about the season, or ask for review copies of the show because I didn't want to ruin it. I don't normally do that with shows: I used to read the Wikipedia entries for The Wire three and four episodes in advance because I couldn't handle the tension. I watched Game of Thrones starting on season three, skipped season four, watched season five, and then went back to season one. Crazy show! Anyways, what I do know is that Michael Schur and Rashida Jones of Parks and Rec helped write "Nosedive," so I'm expecting some incredibly insightful city council meetings.

6:45 AM: I am watching this in a pitch black room with the glow of my laptop blinding my eyes. This is the appropriate way to watch Black Mirror.

Also: I have definitely practiced my laugh and smile in the mirror like Bryce Dallas Howard is doing. It looks like we're exploring a world where all of social media is available and streaming all the time, which requires us to make it seem like our lives are perfect, always. Strong premise to open on: If you're new to the show it's definitely a more accessible entry point than making the prime minister fuck a pig on live TV.

7:05 AM: I don't quite know where this episode is going yet but I've already got crippling anxiety and this already feels like one of the more realistic episodes of the show. We long ago moved to a world in which thinkfluencers have more social currency than the rest of us. Klout was kind of a failed experiment, but we've got Snapchat celebs who can score $10,000 from advertisers for a story. I've been in analytics meetings not unlike the one at the social media credit agency. Those were for news media brands, but we're all brands now, right? We've all uploaded a picture on Instagram, stared at our phones, and freaked the fuck out if no one instantly likes it. That vacant stare after uploading a picture of "Mr Rags?" Too real. When Naomi rated the pic five stars--that's that pure, uncut dopamine.

I know it works better for the narrative (and Uber drivers are most directly affected right now by the idea of a five star rating system), but why aren't these cars driving themselves? Also, either airport security has been privatized or the government has bought into the Uber/Facebook rating system mashup. ALSO, brilliant bit of writing to change the charging ports between the iCar 2 (or whatever we're calling it) and the iCar 3. Dongles are the future!

7:18 AM: Thank god President Donald Trump preserved retrograde internal combustion engine-powered long haul truck driving jobs. Cherry Jones is giving me what feels like the first breath of fresh air all episode, which is of course by design.

7:25 AM: Social media simulation 'like' forecasting is already a thing.

7:40 AM: Lacey's stealth infiltration and wedding speech was pretty cringeworthy, huh. For 40 minutes, this was one of the stronger episodes of Black Mirror, but the meltdown is over the top and drawn out. Black Mirror is best when it feels realistic. Lacey was pushed to her breaking point, but having her covered in mud, threatening the life of a ragdoll with a butcher knife in front of 200 wedding guests doesn't really feel like the logical end to all of this. Cathartic, but really went off the rails, huh. The last scene in the prison was nice, though.

In any case, the episode was thoroughly enjoyable and I'll have some more big picture thoughts on it in a little while, but for now it's time to move on to …

Episode 2: "Playtest"

We've got Priuses and headphone jacks in our normal smartphones. Looks like we're in a present-day situation ala "The National Anthem."

7:50 AM: "Funshittodo" is the name of my friends' ongoing upcoming concert / event email thread. She's also got an entire library of Playstation 3 games. More evidence that maybe this is going on in the recent past.

"The singularity: It's when men learn to act like women did years ago."

7:58 AM: The most dystopian and horrifying thing of all would be if it turns out they're playtesting the N-Gage.

8:05 AM: I'm pretty sure that this company is less secretive than Magic Leap, which is also developing augmented reality. This episode is definitely pulling punches and keeping us in the dark for now, so there's not a whole lot to comment on until we can figure out what it's got in store for us.

8:18 AM: It doesn't use your mind against you, but augmented reality survival horror is already in the works. Night Terrors will use your phone's camera and accelerometer to turn your house into something you probably don't want to be in. I've been dying to try it.

Black Mirror is always uncomfortable, but it's rarely "scary." The idea of a personalized augmented reality (basically an irl version of the boggart from Harry Potter) is a great conceit to do a straight near-future horror / ghost story without resorting to the supernatural. Must admit I'm a bit on edge here. We've got straightup jump scares and everything. I do not like this man…or this painting:

8:46 AM: Cooper's worst fears weren't spiders or his old bully—they were his loss of sense of self, ending up with Alzheimer's like his dad, never seeing his mom again, being betrayed by the woman he's infatuated with, losing a sense of reality, etc. This all makes total sense and it was where I figured the episode was heading once we learned that the neural network AR device used his brain to build out the game. That said, I sat with my hands clutched for the last 10 minutes of this episode and I had to stop it twice to catch my breath. My heart rate went up, my neck tensed, I clutched my hands together. It was fucking scary.

How do we all feel about the extra twist + gut punch at the end?

The idea of a games developer literally killing their playtesters and shrugging it off feels a it farfetched, but if you squint hard enough, you can see some real world analogs, I think. Pokemon Go launched and instantly had unexpected real-world effects, with people playing in traffic, finding dead bodies, getting mugged, etc. And we get addicted to our devices and games and rarely consider the potential health effects of losing yourself in virtual worlds. A stretch, I know, but I think this may have been the underlying context showrunner Charlie Brooker was looking at.

Also interesting: White Christmas played with the idea of time prisons, and this episode revisits that theme. Cooper felt like he was in the simulation an entire evening, and then when he came "out" of it, he had lasted only one second. Then he gets his bearings, flies back to the United States, meets his mom … and then we learn that the entire thing had been hallucinated and lasted only .4 seconds. There is indeed the beginnings of research right now into the effects of virtual reality on time perception; there have been anecdotal accounts of VR slowing down the perception of time i.e., a VR game developer thought he had spent three hours in virtual reality when actually it had been 12. Crazy, crazy stuff.

9:48 AM: Had to head into the office, sorry for the delay. I think it's worth noting that Cooper went into the play test not having any idea what augmented reality is. The conscious choice to set this in the recent past was one that I think ramped up the horror a bit—a lot of Black Mirror episodes take place after a technology has already permeated and been accepted into society. The show obviously has no narrative threads between episodes, but I think what this episode is suggesting is that technological advancement doesn't take place in a vacuum. What we're seeing here is a beta test for an AR platform that very well may be perfected and commonplace by the time we see a world more like the one that played out in "Nosedive." We're basically getting a peek behind the curtain at how—in Black Mirror's universe—the underlying tech gets developed, which is a worthwhile angle for the show to take.

9:53 AM: Episode 3: "Shut Up and Dance"

One of my closest friends had review episodes of this season and told me she had nightmares from "Shut Up and Dance." She also said she "hated" it, which is often a compliment for Black Mirror.

10 AM: Kenny Kenny Kenny. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU CLICKING? For someone being portrayed as a bit of a computer geek, he really should know better. Again, we don't seem to be in the future, and I'm getting very strong surveillance / cryptolocker / hacking / blackmail vibes from this episode so far. Also, Kenny could not masturbate more stereotypically. An EDM music video? You're better than that.

10:01 AM: This is actually a Black Mirror episode about stigmatization of healthy sexuality.

10:38 AM: I'm still here—there have been multiple Black Mirror episodes that don't make a whole lot of sense while you're watching it, but are building toward something profound at the end ("White Bear" comes to mind). I think this is going that way, so I'm holding off for now.

10:59 AM: Ohhhhhhhkayyyyyyy, I am glad I reserved judgment, and I obviously take back my earlier statement about "healthy sexuality." Throughout this entire episode I kept thinking: Black Mirror is better than this. Like "White Bear," the episode makes little sense unless you know what The Deal is. And The Deal is obviously going to get revealed at the end. But unlike "White Bear," I didn't find myself terribly intrigued with the plot of the story, as all of it is rather predictable. Kenny is clearly in over his head, clearly impressionable and prone to bullying, and clearly about to be asked to do some pretty messed up things. The underlying question running through the entire episode is: "Why?" If the options are: A) A video of you masturbating becomes public or B) Rob a bank and kill someone with your bare hands, why on Earth would anyone choose option B?

Of course, Kenny's "why" comes in the last few minutes with the devastating line "How young were they? How young? me too." It's upsetting gut punch that pulls the rest of the motivations of the episode into focus and flips everything on its head in a way that only Black Mirror knows how.

I've got some more thoughts and some real-life comparisons to make, but I've got to step away for a bit. We'll do the last three episodes this afternoon.

2:11 PM: I didn't love watching "Shut Up and Dance," and it's not just because it's utterly demoralizing. Because Kenny is acting entirely irrationally, we know there must be a why, as I mentioned, and we know it'll play out in a twist. But along the way, the how-not-to-respond-to-a-hack public service announcement isn't terribly entertaining or enlightening.

So besides making us feel bad or shocking us with its twist, what, then, is the point of this episode? That's the question the friend I mentioned earlier asks in her review of "Shut Up and Dance" over at The Atlantic (go read it, she's brilliant). Sophie rightfully points out that the best episodes of Black Mirror explore how technology exacerbates our worst instincts, but there's no great evidence of that happening in this episode.

"I didn't take anything away from this episode other than a sense of doom, and an urge to cover up every camera I own," she wrote. "[Show creator Charlie] Brooker's already made the point that moral panic is a bad thing, and to relish in the degradation of criminals makes us as bad as them. So what was the point of this episode? To understand that good people can have awful urges? To be very afraid of downloading anything? To realize how awful it would be if everyone's private internet activity was made public? To be horribly depressed?"

Sophie has a point, and I generally agree with her about this episode as a whole. But I think one other thing Black Mirror does well in general is point out a phenomenon we see today in technology and take it to its logical extreme. In doing so it asks the question: Is this the path we really want to go down?

Online vigilante justice is something we're seeing more and more of: People whose details were included in the Ashley Madison hack were extorted for money (and there were several suicides after that data was posted online); a hacker has set up To Catch a Predator-style honey pots and extorted the pedophiles he's caught; there is widespread speculation that the NSA and CIA have been involved in blackmailing people culled from large-scale mass surveillance; who knows what's been done in the name of suppressing revenge porn, etc.

And so, like in White Bear, this episode isn't about the ostensible protagonist of the episode. It's about the anonymous hackers, and it's about the fact that technology has wrought a makeshift anonymous online medieval justice system. I think it's telling that not all of the "bad guys" in the episode were pedophiles; we've got racists and adulterers too. On the one hand, fuck them. On the other: Where's the line?

2:14 PM: Episode Four: "San Junipero"

Sorry for the delay over here. Can I just say that damn near half of the internet is down as a result of a widespread DDOS attack? I'm very on edge today and it's not just because of this show.

Anyways, "San Junipero." Oh god we're in the 80s. Is this the first Black Mirror that's obviously in the past? I feel like part of "White Christmas" may have been set in the past, but I might be crazy. Also: Max Headroom!!!!! Classic Motherboard content.

3:55 PM: Because of time dilation (pausing the episode to edit a story), I'm only about halfway through. This is one of those Black Mirror episodes where we don't know wtf the conceit is. I'm very much enjoying the story, and I'm holding out hope this will end in a much less dark place than "Shut Up and Dance," but jury is still out.

3:58 PM: Wait wait wait wait how are we in 1996 "one week later?" And then 2002! Where does she go during the week? How are we time traveling?

4:10 PM: Oh I very much like where this is going. Neuromancer meets Ready Player One meets transhumanism is very good territory for Black Mirror to trod.

4:23 PM: Clicking around the internet, "San Junipero" is getting reviews as the best episode the series has ever done. I think it's unnecessary to choose one, but I can see why it's getting such rave reviews. It's narratively compelling, subtle, and broaches some of the most existentially focused subject matter the series has ever attempted. It focuses on seniors, a demographic of people often ignored by tech and by media, and forces us to confront our mortality. What a refreshing episode after the crushing slog that was "Shut Up and Dance," that had to be purposeful.

Most importantly, though, it hammers home the underexplored Tuck Everlasting problem with transhumanism. Living forever is a horrifying proposition, psychologically speaking, and if we ever achieve immortality or digital consciousness upload, we will be stratified into two groups of people: Those who live forever and those who do not. I very much love my life, but I've also lost people who I know are very much in that second category. No future technology is bringing my dead loved ones back, and living forever could never dull the pain I feel every day from having lost them. Life is wonderful, but the idea of living forever with that pain is unbearable.

Further reading: Please Kill Me (Eventually)

4:36 PM: Episode Five: "Men Against Fire"

4:49 PM: One thing I've realized in doing this exercise is that if you can count on anything, you can count on Black Mirror episodes starting slow as they build their worlds. I mean, in this episode we've got a futuristic army battling Resident Evil-style vampire demons within the first 10 minutes, but there's still no narrative. This isn't a knock on the show—it just strikes me as even more impressive that the show manages to regularly keep its viewers confused or in the dark for huge stretches of time without ever failing to deliver on its climax.

5:07 PM: And there it is: The "roaches" aren't subhuman vampire demons, they're helpless refugees and normal citizens in a burnt out warzone. The implants we're giving to our supersoldiers dehumanize them in the minds of the soldiers, dulling the psychological toll of killing innocents. Fuuuuck, Black Mirror knows how to pull off a twist. I can see how people might have seen it coming, but I honestly didn't.

5:41 PM: Another thing Black Mirror is excellent at: Making its characters choose between two terrible situations. I have to catch a bus—I'll have more on "Men Against Fire" and "Hated in the Nation" sometime this weekend. Thank you for bearing with me!