Just an attempt to piece together some coherency to Black Mirror, not the whole series, mind...
the White Bear Continuum (Black Mirror)
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Just an attempt to piece together some coherency to Black Mirror, not the whole series, mind, just a few episodes that I feel can be easily linked together into one timeline. Major spoilers for all seasons of Black Mirror follow.
S1E1: National Anthem
In 2021, the Prime Minster of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had sex with a pig on national television.
He didn't want to, of course. But the finger that showed up at the UKN studio turned public opinion more towards sympathy of the kidnapped Princess Susannah rather than the beleaguered Prime Minister.
The act itself lasted over an hour, but by the time Prime Minister Callows - ahem - finished, Princess Susannah was back in government custody, though with all her fingers intact. DNA evidence showed the warning came from her kidnapper, performance artist Carlton Bloom, who committed suicide shortly after releasing Princess Susannah - which he did shortly before the Prime Minister gave in to his demands.
This was, understandably, covered up in the official report. For nearly everyone in the world, Callows had saved the life of a member of the British Royal Family that had been beloved by the public as no other had been since Princess Diana.
Still, the event was a moment of profound national humiliation. Over 1.3 billion people had watched the act live, and the government was rather embarrassed on several levels. The reaction to preserve such things as the respectability and dignity of the highest government office was...extreme. It was made illegal to not only possess but to view a recording of "the act", the law being passed not a day after the broadcast, and the game of cat-and-mouse that began to play out between the British government and online hackers and trolls who spread the video around led the former to go to increasingly strict length to monitor and police the Internet. Similarly, the attempt to find Princess Susannah before the deadline through the Internet, communications tracking, and various other technological means had completely failed, with an additional gaffe of the sting on Bloom's suspected hideout leading to the injury of a journalist who happened to be shadowing the raid. The government immediately put all their efforts into an expanded surveillance state through the real world and cyberspace both, the twisting claws of British intelligence sinking ever deeper into public life. Never again, they said, as they passed the required legislation.
Of course, royal, national, and international sentiment was entirely with the PM. This was rather rich, considering it was due to public pressure that Callows had buckled to the demands, with everything from the Queen telling him "I'm sure you'll do everything in your power to get her back" to his own party letting him know they couldn't ensure his safety is Princess Susannah died. After all was said and done, Callows enjoyed higher favorability ratings and publicly recovered quite well, even being able to joke about the event once a few years had passed. His relationship with his wife, though they put on a good face in public, never quite recovered, and they divorced, though not until after Callows had stepped down as PM.
For the British public, the knowledge that they had been played in a piece of elaborate performance art stung. While there were certain elements of the populace that took a certain sadistic glee in watching "the act", for the most part disgust, sympathy, and embarrassment ruled. That Bloom had escaped justice by killing himself rather than being taken in made things all the worse. To be blunt, the nation was traumatized, and like all victims of group trauma, the nation reacted in shocking ways.
People protested (what, they weren't always sure), or rioted, or got into drugs and alcohol. They called for a surveillance state, or the dismantling of the surveillance state (more the former than the latter). A wave of obscene and surreal art swept the nation, and there was a noted decrease in pork consumption. The legal status of bestiality became part of mainstream political discourse for a few years, then everyone decided talking about that wasn't going to make things much better.
For lots of people, especially the young, the reveal that the government could be turned into a piece of performance art on the whims of a single man was a heavy disillusion moment. The government suddenly seemed flimsy, and lacking in dignity. The Prime Minister had, to put it bluntly, fucked a farm animal. What makes him so special?
S2E3: Waldo Moment
In 2022, the Tory MP of Stentonford and Hersham resigned over a twitter scandal involved inappropriate correspondence with a teenage girl. This triggered a by-election in which the two main candidates were the Tory's Liam Monroe and Labour's Gwendolyn Harris.
Then a blue cartoon bear entered the race and, so say some political commentators, changed political discourse forever.
Waldo was a CGI bear "played" by an actor using motion capture. A popular feature on a late-night comedy show, Waldo was known for crude humor which he used to mock politicians and authority figures. The showrunners decided, for a laugh, to enter Waldo in the by-election as an independent candidate. They drove around Stentonford and Hersham in a van with a television screen on the side, broadcasting Waldo.
At first, Waldo targeted Liam Monroe, subject of a former interview. The van would appear at public events hosted by Monroe and heckle him until he left. It wasn't particularly biting satire, Waldo mainly made dick jokes at Monroe's expense.
But for some reason, people actually wanted to vote for Waldo. Not many, but still. Then, at a televised debate, "Waldo" gave a surprisingly impassioned speech, decrying both sides as fake and out of touch, saying that it was career politicians who had driven people away from politics. The crowd ate it up, and Waldo went viral overnight. In polls taken the day after the debate, Waldo had overtaken the LibDem candidate to gain third place.
Waldo was a magnet for protest voters, the disillusioned and disenfranchised, and the smug centrist crowd. In the following election, he may not have won, but he came second to Liam Monroe by a mere 3,000 votes. Monroe took his seat, Harris moved on to another constituency, and the voter base stayed interested in Waldo.
A few people were troubled by the fact that, more than once during the campaign, Waldo had encouraged people to throw punches (and shoes) at protesters and other candidates. It was just a joke, surely, and if anyone took his egging on seriously, well, that was on them, right? Nevermind that people seemed so eager to lash out...
Meanwhile, as they were packing up after the campaign, a certain three-letter government agency approached the network that owned the rights to Waldo. Waldo was a unique tool, one that could attract attention better than any human candidate, and one who was proven to undermine establishment candidates with the precision of a political assassin. With some work, Waldo could be retooled to deliver any political position, or undermine any candidate, in a way the people would eat up. And the agency had some opportunities in mind in South America...
S3E3: Shut Up and Dance
In 2023, a wave of blackmail targeted several British citizens. Some of them were ordinary people, though one was a CEO. The hackers had collected extremely damaging personal information on them - some had solicited the services of prostitutes, some had expressed racist opinions in private correspondence, quite a few had viewed child pornography. As all the victims stood to suffer greatly if that information got out, they were willing to do whatever it took to keep it quiet.
After the string of thefts, bank robberies, and murders was over, the information was released anyway.
Public opinion was deeply divided. On the one hand, here was a person or group of people stealing personal information and releasing it in a harmful way, and the government had been unable to stop it. Many citizens grew paranoid, there was some general panicking, people tried to bury whatever dirt they had. On the other hand, though...the victims were solicitors of child pornography, racists, and adulterers, and generally were of the asshole brand of victims anyway. Was it really so bad if justice had been taken into the hands of ordinary citizens? It's not like the government had caught the child pornographers themselves, and that was actually illegal!
The British government looked at the reactions, tightened control of the Internet (while taking a few notes on the hackers' methods), and a few sociologists commented on the rising tide of sympathy for mob justice in the UK. Laptops without built-in webcams became popular for a while.
S3E6: Hated in the Nation
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, in order to combat colony-collapse syndrome among honeybees in the British Isles, the government contracted the technology company Granular Corp to construct a host of minute drones armed with artificial intelligence to replace the bees and pollinate the fruits and flowers of the British countryside. This saved the Isles from an ecological collapse, and was hailed globally as the next step in environmental and technological advancement. What very few people knew was that one of the conditions for funding the project was that the bee drones be allowed facial recognition software in order to help the British government's ever-expanding surveillance state. With this, they were able to stop terrorist threats, track down criminals, and even find missing persons, without the general public ever knowing about most cases.
In 2023, disgruntled Granular Corp employee Garrett Scholes quit after his girlfriend, another employee, attempted suicide after being harassed with death threats online.
In 2024 the Game of Consequences began.
It started as a hashtag campaign, twitter users were encouraged to tweet #DeathTo followed by the object of their hatred. This seemed innocuous, and plenty of people used to to attack subjects of public scorn. Then, on the day a journalist who had mocked a disability activist's suicide got the most #DeathTo mentions, she was found dead in her apartment, apparently having killed herself after being wracked with extreme, uncontrollable pain.
The next night, the "winner" of the game was a rapper who had publicly mocked a child fan. He was rushed to the hospital, apparently in unimaginable agony, and when placed in an MRI machine, one of Granular Corps' bee drones was ripped from his brain, where it had apparently lodged itself, killing him instantly.
British Intelligence stepped in at this point. On the third night, the "winner" was rushed to a government safe house, but the bees swarmed it, bypassing the police and intelligence agents guarding her entirely. One burrowed into her brain and died.
Meanwhile, analysis of the bees' code had revealed a manifesto embedded there by Garrett Scholes. His intention was to teach people that their actions have consequences, even online. Analysis of the manifesto led to a safe house where a hard drive was recovered. On the hard drive were the names of the 387,036 people who had used the #DeathTo hashtag, identified through the very systems the government had implemented over the last few years.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Tom Pickering was in the lead for the Game of Consequences that day. British Intelligence agent Shaun Li made the decision to pull the plug on the drones. For a moment, every drone in the British Isles went down. Then, they reactivated, completely out of the government's control, and went after their new targets.
Over the next week, every member of that list of 387,036 people was killed. In their homes, on the streets, in their places of business, in front of friends, family, strangers. It was the greatest act of mass murder in modern history, one of the darkest days in the history of the United Kingdom, and a profoundly traumatizing moment, far surpassing the Prime Minister's humiliation three years earlier. As with Carlton Bloom, Garrett Scholes had escaped justice, this time fleeing the country months before the Game of Consequences began.
Some unpleasantness followed.
S2E2: White Bear
From 2022-2023, the nation had been engaged in a nationwide manhunt for the missing child Jemima Sykes, following impassioned pleas from her parents. The only clue was her white teddy bear found two miles from the family home, which became an enduring symbol of the hunt.
The nation became invested in the case, which is why it was so shocked when Jemima's body had been found burned in the local woods.
Eventually the evidence did out. Jemima had been tortured and killed by Iain Rannoch while his fiancee Victoria Skillaine filmed it. The videos were discovered on her mobile phone[1], and the two were taken into custody and given a swift trial in 2023.
The punishment, the judge said, would be proportionate. Iain Rannoch would hang himself in his cell, escaping justice, so thought the public, as others had before. In the riots that followed, the public demanded Victoria Skillaine face the full brunt of public justice.
The government saw their chance. After the Game of Consequences, faith in the government was at rock bottom, even though the appropriate scapegoats had been hung out to dry, after very public hearings where the guilt was laid out for all to see. Despite those responsible being sacked, the government had still demanded the use of the bees for surveillance. A distraction, they decided, was necessary.
The past five years' trauma, they privately decided, could be unleashed on Victoria Skillaine. What followed was the construction of infamous White Bear Justice Park.
Every day, Skillaine's memories were wiped using the latest in neural technology[2]. Then, she was set free in an enclosed suburban neighborhood, hounded by staff and visitors with cameras, who came to record her panic and confusion. This was repeated, day in and day out, again and again. The public kept coming. Here, finally, was the outlet for the past four years of terror, and outrage, and frustrated attempts to find justice in a cruel and incomprehensible world.
The solution, the British public had found, was to inflict those feelings on one single public scapegoat.
[1] The agent who cracked Iain Rannoch's hard drives would later go on to help unravel the trail of Garrett Scholes' code. After the Week of Terror, she left the country, apparently intending to go into hiding to avoid the guilt she must have felt.
[2] Chillingly, the by-product of the latest augmented reality video game platform developed by a Japanese gaming company.
S1E1: National Anthem
In 2021, the Prime Minster of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had sex with a pig on national television.
He didn't want to, of course. But the finger that showed up at the UKN studio turned public opinion more towards sympathy of the kidnapped Princess Susannah rather than the beleaguered Prime Minister.
The act itself lasted over an hour, but by the time Prime Minister Callows - ahem - finished, Princess Susannah was back in government custody, though with all her fingers intact. DNA evidence showed the warning came from her kidnapper, performance artist Carlton Bloom, who committed suicide shortly after releasing Princess Susannah - which he did shortly before the Prime Minister gave in to his demands.
This was, understandably, covered up in the official report. For nearly everyone in the world, Callows had saved the life of a member of the British Royal Family that had been beloved by the public as no other had been since Princess Diana.
Still, the event was a moment of profound national humiliation. Over 1.3 billion people had watched the act live, and the government was rather embarrassed on several levels. The reaction to preserve such things as the respectability and dignity of the highest government office was...extreme. It was made illegal to not only possess but to view a recording of "the act", the law being passed not a day after the broadcast, and the game of cat-and-mouse that began to play out between the British government and online hackers and trolls who spread the video around led the former to go to increasingly strict length to monitor and police the Internet. Similarly, the attempt to find Princess Susannah before the deadline through the Internet, communications tracking, and various other technological means had completely failed, with an additional gaffe of the sting on Bloom's suspected hideout leading to the injury of a journalist who happened to be shadowing the raid. The government immediately put all their efforts into an expanded surveillance state through the real world and cyberspace both, the twisting claws of British intelligence sinking ever deeper into public life. Never again, they said, as they passed the required legislation.
Of course, royal, national, and international sentiment was entirely with the PM. This was rather rich, considering it was due to public pressure that Callows had buckled to the demands, with everything from the Queen telling him "I'm sure you'll do everything in your power to get her back" to his own party letting him know they couldn't ensure his safety is Princess Susannah died. After all was said and done, Callows enjoyed higher favorability ratings and publicly recovered quite well, even being able to joke about the event once a few years had passed. His relationship with his wife, though they put on a good face in public, never quite recovered, and they divorced, though not until after Callows had stepped down as PM.
For the British public, the knowledge that they had been played in a piece of elaborate performance art stung. While there were certain elements of the populace that took a certain sadistic glee in watching "the act", for the most part disgust, sympathy, and embarrassment ruled. That Bloom had escaped justice by killing himself rather than being taken in made things all the worse. To be blunt, the nation was traumatized, and like all victims of group trauma, the nation reacted in shocking ways.
People protested (what, they weren't always sure), or rioted, or got into drugs and alcohol. They called for a surveillance state, or the dismantling of the surveillance state (more the former than the latter). A wave of obscene and surreal art swept the nation, and there was a noted decrease in pork consumption. The legal status of bestiality became part of mainstream political discourse for a few years, then everyone decided talking about that wasn't going to make things much better.
For lots of people, especially the young, the reveal that the government could be turned into a piece of performance art on the whims of a single man was a heavy disillusion moment. The government suddenly seemed flimsy, and lacking in dignity. The Prime Minister had, to put it bluntly, fucked a farm animal. What makes him so special?
S2E3: Waldo Moment
In 2022, the Tory MP of Stentonford and Hersham resigned over a twitter scandal involved inappropriate correspondence with a teenage girl. This triggered a by-election in which the two main candidates were the Tory's Liam Monroe and Labour's Gwendolyn Harris.
Then a blue cartoon bear entered the race and, so say some political commentators, changed political discourse forever.
Waldo was a CGI bear "played" by an actor using motion capture. A popular feature on a late-night comedy show, Waldo was known for crude humor which he used to mock politicians and authority figures. The showrunners decided, for a laugh, to enter Waldo in the by-election as an independent candidate. They drove around Stentonford and Hersham in a van with a television screen on the side, broadcasting Waldo.
At first, Waldo targeted Liam Monroe, subject of a former interview. The van would appear at public events hosted by Monroe and heckle him until he left. It wasn't particularly biting satire, Waldo mainly made dick jokes at Monroe's expense.
But for some reason, people actually wanted to vote for Waldo. Not many, but still. Then, at a televised debate, "Waldo" gave a surprisingly impassioned speech, decrying both sides as fake and out of touch, saying that it was career politicians who had driven people away from politics. The crowd ate it up, and Waldo went viral overnight. In polls taken the day after the debate, Waldo had overtaken the LibDem candidate to gain third place.
Waldo was a magnet for protest voters, the disillusioned and disenfranchised, and the smug centrist crowd. In the following election, he may not have won, but he came second to Liam Monroe by a mere 3,000 votes. Monroe took his seat, Harris moved on to another constituency, and the voter base stayed interested in Waldo.
A few people were troubled by the fact that, more than once during the campaign, Waldo had encouraged people to throw punches (and shoes) at protesters and other candidates. It was just a joke, surely, and if anyone took his egging on seriously, well, that was on them, right? Nevermind that people seemed so eager to lash out...
Meanwhile, as they were packing up after the campaign, a certain three-letter government agency approached the network that owned the rights to Waldo. Waldo was a unique tool, one that could attract attention better than any human candidate, and one who was proven to undermine establishment candidates with the precision of a political assassin. With some work, Waldo could be retooled to deliver any political position, or undermine any candidate, in a way the people would eat up. And the agency had some opportunities in mind in South America...
S3E3: Shut Up and Dance
In 2023, a wave of blackmail targeted several British citizens. Some of them were ordinary people, though one was a CEO. The hackers had collected extremely damaging personal information on them - some had solicited the services of prostitutes, some had expressed racist opinions in private correspondence, quite a few had viewed child pornography. As all the victims stood to suffer greatly if that information got out, they were willing to do whatever it took to keep it quiet.
After the string of thefts, bank robberies, and murders was over, the information was released anyway.
Public opinion was deeply divided. On the one hand, here was a person or group of people stealing personal information and releasing it in a harmful way, and the government had been unable to stop it. Many citizens grew paranoid, there was some general panicking, people tried to bury whatever dirt they had. On the other hand, though...the victims were solicitors of child pornography, racists, and adulterers, and generally were of the asshole brand of victims anyway. Was it really so bad if justice had been taken into the hands of ordinary citizens? It's not like the government had caught the child pornographers themselves, and that was actually illegal!
The British government looked at the reactions, tightened control of the Internet (while taking a few notes on the hackers' methods), and a few sociologists commented on the rising tide of sympathy for mob justice in the UK. Laptops without built-in webcams became popular for a while.
S3E6: Hated in the Nation
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, in order to combat colony-collapse syndrome among honeybees in the British Isles, the government contracted the technology company Granular Corp to construct a host of minute drones armed with artificial intelligence to replace the bees and pollinate the fruits and flowers of the British countryside. This saved the Isles from an ecological collapse, and was hailed globally as the next step in environmental and technological advancement. What very few people knew was that one of the conditions for funding the project was that the bee drones be allowed facial recognition software in order to help the British government's ever-expanding surveillance state. With this, they were able to stop terrorist threats, track down criminals, and even find missing persons, without the general public ever knowing about most cases.
In 2023, disgruntled Granular Corp employee Garrett Scholes quit after his girlfriend, another employee, attempted suicide after being harassed with death threats online.
In 2024 the Game of Consequences began.
It started as a hashtag campaign, twitter users were encouraged to tweet #DeathTo followed by the object of their hatred. This seemed innocuous, and plenty of people used to to attack subjects of public scorn. Then, on the day a journalist who had mocked a disability activist's suicide got the most #DeathTo mentions, she was found dead in her apartment, apparently having killed herself after being wracked with extreme, uncontrollable pain.
The next night, the "winner" of the game was a rapper who had publicly mocked a child fan. He was rushed to the hospital, apparently in unimaginable agony, and when placed in an MRI machine, one of Granular Corps' bee drones was ripped from his brain, where it had apparently lodged itself, killing him instantly.
British Intelligence stepped in at this point. On the third night, the "winner" was rushed to a government safe house, but the bees swarmed it, bypassing the police and intelligence agents guarding her entirely. One burrowed into her brain and died.
Meanwhile, analysis of the bees' code had revealed a manifesto embedded there by Garrett Scholes. His intention was to teach people that their actions have consequences, even online. Analysis of the manifesto led to a safe house where a hard drive was recovered. On the hard drive were the names of the 387,036 people who had used the #DeathTo hashtag, identified through the very systems the government had implemented over the last few years.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Tom Pickering was in the lead for the Game of Consequences that day. British Intelligence agent Shaun Li made the decision to pull the plug on the drones. For a moment, every drone in the British Isles went down. Then, they reactivated, completely out of the government's control, and went after their new targets.
Over the next week, every member of that list of 387,036 people was killed. In their homes, on the streets, in their places of business, in front of friends, family, strangers. It was the greatest act of mass murder in modern history, one of the darkest days in the history of the United Kingdom, and a profoundly traumatizing moment, far surpassing the Prime Minister's humiliation three years earlier. As with Carlton Bloom, Garrett Scholes had escaped justice, this time fleeing the country months before the Game of Consequences began.
Some unpleasantness followed.
S2E2: White Bear
From 2022-2023, the nation had been engaged in a nationwide manhunt for the missing child Jemima Sykes, following impassioned pleas from her parents. The only clue was her white teddy bear found two miles from the family home, which became an enduring symbol of the hunt.
The nation became invested in the case, which is why it was so shocked when Jemima's body had been found burned in the local woods.
Eventually the evidence did out. Jemima had been tortured and killed by Iain Rannoch while his fiancee Victoria Skillaine filmed it. The videos were discovered on her mobile phone[1], and the two were taken into custody and given a swift trial in 2023.
The punishment, the judge said, would be proportionate. Iain Rannoch would hang himself in his cell, escaping justice, so thought the public, as others had before. In the riots that followed, the public demanded Victoria Skillaine face the full brunt of public justice.
The government saw their chance. After the Game of Consequences, faith in the government was at rock bottom, even though the appropriate scapegoats had been hung out to dry, after very public hearings where the guilt was laid out for all to see. Despite those responsible being sacked, the government had still demanded the use of the bees for surveillance. A distraction, they decided, was necessary.
The past five years' trauma, they privately decided, could be unleashed on Victoria Skillaine. What followed was the construction of infamous White Bear Justice Park.
Every day, Skillaine's memories were wiped using the latest in neural technology[2]. Then, she was set free in an enclosed suburban neighborhood, hounded by staff and visitors with cameras, who came to record her panic and confusion. This was repeated, day in and day out, again and again. The public kept coming. Here, finally, was the outlet for the past four years of terror, and outrage, and frustrated attempts to find justice in a cruel and incomprehensible world.
The solution, the British public had found, was to inflict those feelings on one single public scapegoat.
[1] The agent who cracked Iain Rannoch's hard drives would later go on to help unravel the trail of Garrett Scholes' code. After the Week of Terror, she left the country, apparently intending to go into hiding to avoid the guilt she must have felt.
[2] Chillingly, the by-product of the latest augmented reality video game platform developed by a Japanese gaming company.
- Location
- Puerto Rico
Then this scapegoats will chnage when the goverment divide the population to be roacches expanding the park used to serve as tool. And purge undesired genetic pool.
S03E01 through stars count on their profile could be how they categorize the roaches and the undesired.
And when achieved that goal they implement The History of our lives tech to be a more ideal.
S03E01 through stars count on their profile could be how they categorize the roaches and the undesired.
And when achieved that goal they implement The History of our lives tech to be a more ideal.
Last edited:
- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, maybe not so clean-cut. Men Against Fire and Nosedive are about American soldiers abroad and take place in America, respectively. It's a different cultural development. Men Against Fire also mentions a great war, and Nosedive's rating system is based on the augmented reality contact lenses we see in multiple other episodes.
In addition, Men Against Fire mentions the roach are weeded out based on genetic abnormalities, the ratings system doesn't seem to be government enforced.
But at that point it gets harder to draw direct cause and effect between episodes as I've done here.