11/14/2022 0 Comments The black mirrorOnce you’ve seen more than one or two episodes, you know the third-act revelation is coming. You begin in one place, half- to two-thirds of the way through, you get either a twist or an unexpected escalation, and then, yep, that thing you suspected was not good at the start, ends up being really, extra not good by the end. But the second and more widespread issue with Black Mirror as a whole is that “The Waldo Moment” follows a pattern that informs nearly all of its installments. “The Waldo Moment” looks like a fairly utopian vision of what political discourse could sound like compared to the contemporary real-world offerings. The first is that now we’ve seen the reality of this play out, it doesn’t feel quite so revelatory. Two-thirds of the way through the episode, you realize that Waldo will grow bigger than our comedian protagonist, and things will not turn out well for the world. He ends up detonating the political discourse, driving the electorate toward entertainment rather than real engagement with issues, and ultimately Waldo takes over the world as a global political brand selling an anodyne, featureless message of change. In it, a comedian who voices and controls a vulgar animated bear ends up running in a local election as a stunt. Take “The Waldo Moment,” a season-two episode with some marked echoes of our current political landscape. Oh, sure, the setup and the execution of those ideas is impressive, but the show’s primary crutch is too often that it uses thought-provoking and fascinating foundations in order to reach the simplest, most alarmist possible conclusion about a variety of technological innovations. Politics as entertainment? Definitely bad, but not ultimately as disturbing as entertainment-style justice. The thing is, for all its conceptual complexity - for all of the surprise twists and third-act reversals, for all of the high-concept premises and alarming escalations, Black Mirror’s messages are usually pretty simple. Of course the prime minister is going to end up actually committing bestiality with a pig. Of course she would then order the zombie body to go along with the social-media re-creation of her dead boyfriend. The resulting twists are simultaneously shocking and immediately recognizable. It operates on horrifying, too-plausible nightmare logic, tending to lean on literalizations of some strange minor quirk of a science-fiction premise, and following that quirk through inevitable, ghastly escalations. The world it imagines in each Twilight Zone–style stand-alone episode always begins with one set of rules, and then slowly peels away the resulting implications for humanity, layer by depressing layer. There are lots of reasons to love the series, which returns for a third season on Netflix today, chief among them being that it is really good at what it sets out to do. “I got you! Humanity is actually much worse than you thought!” And really, either you enjoy that experience, or you don’t. “Aha!” Black Mirror is constantly saying. It’s a show rooted in a specific, intensely cynical perspective, it tends to use surprise like a cudgel, and it seems to delight in combining those two things. I’m going to lay out some reasons why that is, and try to give a deeper explanation for exactly why it turns me off so aggressively, but ultimately my dislike comes down to a point of taste. Daniel Rigby in season two’s “The Waldo Moment.”
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