![]() ![]() Watkins does an excellent job maintaining tension throughout the episode, although it lags a bit once Kenny joins up with Jerome Flynn’s Hector. “Shut Up and Dance” is written by Brooker and William Bridges, and directed by James Watkins, whose previous work in psychological horror includes the 2007 backpacker thriller Gone and the 2012 supernatural horror The Woman in Black. Minutes later, he gets an email from an anonymous account, which reads, “WE SAW WHAT YOU DID.” Then another: “REPLY WITH YOUR PHONE NUMBER OR WE POST THE VIDEO TO EVERYONE IN YOUR CONTACTS.” Kenny does, which sparks a series of texts ordering him to fulfill various bizarre tasks: Meet a guy on a rooftop, deliver a cake to a man in a hotel room who’s being similarly manipulated, join forces with that man (Jerome Flynn) to pick up a car, rob a bank, drive to an isolated location in the woods and go alone to a drop-off point, where yet another victim of the unseen overlords is waiting. In the privacy of his room one night, Kenny goes to his computer and is seen unzipping his trousers and reaching for tissues. After his sister freezes his computer trying to watch illegal movies, Kenny downloads a free malware program called Shrive, which, unbeknownst to him, activates his laptop camera and begins filming him. After that, the episode focuses on Kenny (Alex Lawther), a sweet and shy teenager who works in a restaurant kitchen. In the first scene, an anxious-looking woman is seen leaving a car in an underground garage, looking around nervously, and then fleeing. Structurally, it was also similar, with a protagonist being plagued by unknown enemies for reasons impossible to discern. “Shut Up and Dance,” for obvious reasons, feels like something of a redux of “White Bear,” but let’s focus on the twist later. In Mirror-land, the most nightmarish situations seem to occur when all the people involved are devoid of empathy: when Jon Hamm’s character breaks a woman in “White Christmas” by leaving her alone in a white box for six months, or when Victoria Killane in “White Bear” is tortured every day for mass entertainment by being forced to relive a crime she doesn’t remember committing. It’s that familiarity that makes them so disturbing, and “Shut Up and Dance” upset me more than any other Black Mirror episode to date. ![]() Hence episodes like “Shut Up and Dance,” seemingly set in the present like “The National Anthem” and “White Bear” and “The Waldo Moment,” all of which imagined scenarios so plausible that two of them have apparently come true. It takes our worst instincts as people, as societies, and magnifies them. In terms of focusing on the evils of technology, though, it seems to me that Black Mirror has always seen technology as something with the potential to enable and encourage human evil, rather than something that’s inherently evil by itself. After so many twists (bullies! spiders! spider bullies! Terminator hookups!), the end didn’t evoke pathos so much as a sense of absurdity. See all of their coverage here.ĭavid, I agree with you that the ending of “ Playtest” fell flat. The reviews contain spoilers don’t read further than you’ve watched. Sophie Gilbert and David Sims will be discussing the new season of Netflix’s Black Mirror, considering alternate episodes.
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