Change Your Image
heisenbrazier
Reviews
Black Mirror: Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too (2019)
Just pick one plot and stick with it
This episode attempts to tell two stories and interweave them, but they each would have been more effective as their own separate self contained stories.
A story about a girl becoming captivated by a mimic bot of a pop star she idolises. A story about a preppy pop singer who is being controlled to have a successful image.
They should have been their own episodes which I'm sure the writers could have made work really well. Unfortunately, that's not what happened and all we're left with is a story that could've been better.
Also, the Ashley O story is just a weird re-telling of Miley abandoning Hannah Montana.
Black Mirror: Smithereens (2019)
Good episode but ending didn't do it for me
Straight off the bad, I want to say that it may not be classic Black Mirror, but the show likes to do different things; sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. Here, I'd say it worked.
Andrew Scott portrayed the character well and the story had me interested the whole way through. It was a very self contained story where there wasn't some fancy technology threatening to change our way of life forever, but like I said, they tried something different. It's simple, but effective.
The problem came with the ending. The writers seemingly love leaving the viewer with an ambiguous ending. Thinking that having the viewer have their own interpretation makes them really smart, but here, I wasn't personally a fan.
*Spoiler Warning*
The episode ends with a shot fired and the audience unsure who the victim was. After this, random people check the story and are unaffected, moving on with their day. That part is fine, showing that people are so desensitised to it that it plays little to no part in their life, but we the audience should have been allowed to know the outcome.
The reason is, either character dying can leave Scott's character misunderstood. We saw him as a man who has nothing else and just wanted someone important - who had some kind of hand - in shaping his life to hear his story. But, social media will never know this story and that could work in the episode's favour. On Smithereen, he may instead just be a criminal who died due to his crime or got a poor intern killed. I just feel that this would work better in this different quote of episode.
Feel free to agree or disagree with my rant/review, in the end we'll all take away something different from this.