Black Mirror - Season 2 Episode 2 Review

*CAUTION: The following review contains plot spoilers for this episode of Black Mirror. If you have not yet seen it and wish to do so, then proceed with caution*

Having started off the series with a show about talking to the dead, Black Mirror naturally progresses to a show with roots in the living dead.

In one of Charlie Brooker's many previous projects - the 2008 zombie show Dead Set - there was a graphic scene of a man meeting his grisly end at the hands of a zombie while a bunch of kids happily got video on their cameraphones.

This is another extreme but more and more cameraphones are around and everyone is documenting their lives. Every gig is a sea of cameraphones recording the artist, even when the gig is being professionally filmed. It's not just these sort of events. The grimmest extension of this came in 2011 when the still-warm corpse of Colonel Gaddafi was surrounded by people on cameraphones, but whenever a big story breaks, chances are a cameraphone will be nearby.

What they're filming is also getting more outlandish. People are willing to go that extra mile to entertain their audience, and often play up to their audience to encourage certain traits. It is also guaranteed anything and everything is on YouTube, and people will not stop plumbing further depths to find more unsettling things to put for their friends to see. Where these keepsakes could lead is anyone's guess.

For the first two-thirds of the second installment of Brooker's anthology show, this nightmare is played upon at blistering breakneck pace. White Bear begins with a young woman called Victoria (Lenora Crichlow) who wakes up disorientated with no recollection of who she is and suffering seizures triggered by a signal that has replaced images on every screen.

She leaves her house and quickly runs across a man in a mask with a gun trying to kill her. They're promptly pursued by the entire neighborhood, who instead of trying to stop her instead are filming her and taking pleasure in watching the events, sort of like the terraces at a football match.

During this period of the show, she runs around in the company of a young woman called Jem (Tuppence Middleton) that has seemingly escaped the camera signals and adjusted to this new world. They're taken on by a man called Baxter (Michael Smiley), who seems to be their friend but is actually about to kill them. Jem escapes and is able to kill Baxter just before Victoria can be hung, all the while the audience continues their grim fascination with filming it.

Things begin to point in the direction of a solution when part 3 rolls around and Victoria and Jem head onto the White Bear transmitter. They get into the control room where two assassins quickly follow, and move in for the kill. Victoria thinks she has a salvation as she nicks the gun of one and pulls the trigger, only for a burst of red and silver confetti to emerge instead of a bullet. At this point proceedings change in an even more outlandish direction when the doors open and she's revealed to be in a theatre, presented to a whooping crowd.

As this is all from her point of view we still have absolutely no idea what the fuck has gone on. But then all becomes clear when Baxter returns and is revealed to be the comprere for the audience. She's not a lost woman in a world full of zombie voyeurs, and the girl she kept seeing in polaroids was not her daughter.

Instead the truth is far grimmer. It's revealed she and her fiancee abducted the girl from a school, dumping her favourite white teddy bear in a layby and sparking a nationwide manhunt. They took her to a similar forest Baxter had taken them too in the simulation, where he tortured the little girl and she filmed everything on her phone. Said fiancee had a tattoo in the shape of the signal she thought was used for the brainwashing, and is revealed to have hung himself in prison, while she was sentenced by the judge to be the subject of this cruel and unusual situation.

The progression is bizarre, having seemingly hitched zombie movie to a pontification on potential future criminal justice operations. It does have a point though, and it's perhaps even more hauntingly relevant in the current age where witch-hunts and campaigns basically fuel the news. It's a disturbing progression on the already unsettling scenario posted above - photoing the dying and then decaying remains of Gaddafi was horrible enough, but openly fucking around with the heads of these people is even more horrendous. It's hardly a way of condoning this - the sort of crimes Victoria is complicit in are just as nauseating and deserve punishment. But matching it in the gross out stakes is just as horrendous.

Even more unsettling is when all the phones return. Again, crowds of gleeful people video and photo her. This time, Baxter acts like Davina McCall and encourages them as she is loaded into a Popemobile-like vehicle along the road back to the house where it all started in for the crowd to leer at her like the stocks of ye olden days, replete with rotten fruit to hurl at the perspex. At the end of the road the procedure begins again, when the producers re-dress the house and her bloodcurdling noisy screams fill the room as she is shocked back into a catatonic state ahead of the re-starting of the simulation the following day. It's a truly horrific note to end on, and for lesser shows that would be that.

But for those who need a bit more, the unsettling factor is raised to peak and immeasurable bleakness during the end credits. Here it's revealed she's actually the main attraction at the White Bear Justice Park, sort of like a zoo of criminals. We get cheery behind the scenes vignettes of visitors being welcomed, the set pieces being curated, the auditorium getting ready for the big reveal, the return to the house, and then it ends on Victoria waking up again stuck in this cycle forever.

The streak of bleakness makes it probably the one thing that has ever made The Road feel like optimistic feel good television. In the hands of lesser actors it would all feel silly, and at times it does feel like it's stretching the boundaries of plausibility.

Credit to the actors is due - Lenora Chrichlow is very good at conveying both the confusion and the anguish, and her talent at layering scream after scream helps convey the emotion superbly well. The other actors also play their parts very well, both before and after the game changes away from what we thought it was.

While not quite as good as Be Right Back it is nevertheless an engaging and delightfully dark hour's worth of drama. Just don't watch it before bed or else you will have nightmares all week.

3.5/5