LogFAQs > #883660570

5. White Christmas

So begins our top five.

When I heard there was a Black Mirror Christmas special, I couldn't help but immediately laugh out loud at how hilariously twisted that was. I had a feeling I was in for something special, and by and large, White Christmas does not disappoint. Despite the lofty goal of tying three seemingly disparate plots together, there are only a couple nitpicks along the way, and the episode manages to solidify itself as one of the absolute best the series has to offer.

The unique interconnected short story structure that this episode goes for was indeed ambitious, but while it's a shame that I didn't totally love all three angles, if one had to be a bit weaker, the episode was well-served by it being the first. I found the story about Matt teaching Harry to be a darkly funny take on the pick-up artist lifestyle, but the ultimate reveal that Jennifer was completely insane and thought the voices he heard were the same as the voices inside her own head (including the "voices that tell you to do it") was simultaneously pretty clever yet also... a bit much. It almost felt less like a punch and more like a punchline, which is all well and good but didn't rank among my most memorable Black Mirror narratives. Still enjoyable overall.

However, my criticisms basically end there. From that point on, White Christmas descends on a downward spiral into increasingly hellish territory, ultimately tying all three narratives together with unrivaled finesse. The cookie technology is inherently warped beyond all reason; exploring the moral ambiguity of AIs is fairly old hat by dystopian sci-fi standards, but rarely have I seen it be so forthright with a concept like creating an artificial intelligence with the sole purpose of immediately submitting it to incomprehensible mental torture. If you'd told me beforehand that Black Mirror was going to take on Siri/Alex/etc., I'd have been intrigued but never have imagined what they came up with here. This show is so very good at coming up with terrifying technologies you wouldn't necessarily have thought up yourself, but yet seem completely plausible -- the cookie ranks very high on that list.
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-Shred