Black Mirror (Part 4)

White Christmas

I was very foolish to think that the Christmas episode of this show would be any less dark or depressing than the other episodes. "White Christmas" has an incredibly crushing storyline--in fact, it manages to squeeze three crushing stories into one episode! All at the cost of just twenty extra minutes of runtime. There's a lot to cover here, and I'm not entirely sure whether I should cover it all, but I'm going to try.

For starters, here's your promised video introduction to this episode, which doesn't do a good job at explaining the plot of this episode at all. Two men are stuck in a remote, snowy outpost with each other. Matt (Jon Hamm) and Potter (Rafe Spall) share stories with one another about how they managed to land themselves isolated at this wintery cabin in the middle of nowhere.

Matt's story begins with what got him into trouble--helping an awkward young man get a date. Matt uses a neural implant that everyone receives to see through another man's eyes. Using an earpiece, he talks to young man through a party in order to land a girl. However, his plan backfires when the girl targeted turns out to be a homicidal schizophrenic. She sees the young man talking to real voices in his head, thinking that he understands her pain. She takes his romantic advice literally, taking a chance at a fresh start and poisoning them both. Now guilty of murder, Matt rushes to get rid of the evidence, but is discovered by his wife.

Matt tells us about the terrible experience he has being blocked. The neural implants act as a social media system in a way. You can "block" real people, and it erases them from your life. Their figure is filled with static, their voice muffled, and any video or picture of them is similarly blocked.

This, however, was not Matt's day job. His day job was to help program personal assistants, as he explains to Potter. The personal assistant is based off of a "cookie". An artificial intelligence that is inserted into your brain for a short period of time to learn your thought patterns, preferences, and the like. The computer becomes you, and then is removed. Using software, Matt is able to break down the cookie (the brunette woman in the white room shown in the trailer is this cookie). He can simulate the passage of time, forcing the cookie to spend three weeks, then six months, in solitary confinement. Without anything to do, the cookie goes mad and begs to be put to work, now gladly operating as a personal assistant without resistance. There's a tricky moral issue here. The cookie believes itself to be a real person, despite just being lines of code. Should we feel sympathy for this coded woman, being forced to serve a real, biological woman's needs?

After this, Matt finally gets Potter to open up. He was in love with a woman, Beth. He tells us that they were together for years, and that her father never liked him but they stayed together all the same. We see her start to grow distant for reasons unclear to us, and Potter finally discovers that she's pregnant. She's not happy with the pregnancy, however, and in an argument blocks Potter completely, enraging him. She never unblocks him, and it drives him mad. He tries to forget, assuming she will soon get an abortion or miscarry because of her drinking, but when he sees her blurred form on the street, still very much pregnant, he tries to confront her about it. This confrontation turns physical enough to be deemed assault, and the block now comes with a programmed restraining order.

Potter realizes he can still see Beth at her father's each year for Christmas. He wants to see his child desperately, but discovers that the block transfers to the child as well. He hovers around for several years each Christmas, sometimes leaving gifts for the child he soon discovers is a girl. Beth dies in a train crash, removing the block. Potter sees this as an opportunity to finally see his daughter. But when he goes to talk to the little girl, he discovers that she is not his--she looks nothing like him. He confronts Beth's father, and in an argument, throws his gift at him, killing the old man. The little girl is left alone, and dies in the cold when she goes for help. This tragic event leads Potter to the outpost, or so we think.

As it turns out, Potter (the version we've seen) has been a cookie this entire time, involuntarily taken from the real Potter in order to get a confession. Matt's story was still very much real, and the police used his skill to get the confession in exchange for being released from jail. The only consequence is that Matt is now blocked by everyone as a registered sex offender, meaning he can interact with nobody in the real world. Potter sits in a jail cell in the meantime, but the police decide to punish his cookie with a thousand years of imprisonment in the snowy outpost.

There's lots of questions posed by this episode: the first is the more human aspect. If we can block people in real life...is it a morally correct thing to do, to be able to unilaterally shut someone out of your life? We see how Matt's wife does it, and how Beth manages to drive Potter slightly mad by cutting him out of her life, and cutting her out of his forcefully. Does Matt's freedom at the end of the episode have any meaning if he can't interact with anybody at all?

The Cookies raise another interesting point. Once again, at what point is a person a person? Is it morally reprehensible to force a computer to do something, if that computer believes it's a real person? Is anything accomplished by torturing Potter's cookie instead of the real man? Should we feel bad for the computer, which has done nothing wrong? Was justice served, or was Potter simply the victim of two different technological advancements?

When we have the ability to use technology for these purposes, we'll be forced to ask ourselves what the consequences are in their use. The stories that Black Mirror tell are overwhelmingly negative, but in a fascinating way that keeps you coming back for more. The creators seem to be keen on forcing introspection through these stories, and they succeed fantastically.