Overrated and overhyped

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Season 4 ends perfectly. The acting is brilliant. The writing is flawless. You do not know what to expect. The twist in the end is fantastic. The episode has a few stories in one story and all the stories have a WTF moment. The shock factor of this show is awesome. Looking forward to more.

The fourth season of Black Mirror has not been what I hoped it would be - the quality of production is higher than ever, but the ideas and delivery thereof has been less interesting than before. The final episode though is a strong finish, helped by its 'anthology' approach. A British girl is charging her car and decides to visit the 'Black Museum' nearby. Inside the owner tells her about a series of tragedies with their roots in technological advances that he was involved in pushing - all which his main attraction awaits behind a curtain.The 'sideshow' feel to this episode allows it to be more entertaining than many of the episodes this season; the tales have a darkness but they are told well by Rolo to have humor between them and in their delivery. Each of them deals with technology to keep someone around or to have an extra connection to them - whether it is the consciousness of someone in a coma, a doctor experiencing the pain of his patients to help diagnose it, or a killer captured at the time of his execution. The individual stories are engaging and well told with enough to shock but not to break us out of the "camp-fire" setting of the museum.The final story allows for a strong finish/twist in the telling. The ethics of it are a bit all over the place to be sure, but it is also satisfying in how it tidies up a strong episode. Performances are strong from both Hodges and Wright, while the mini-episodes also have plenty of good turns from familiar faces. Each story and the overall story tells of letting go, and of not doing something just because you can - treating human and emotional things as pure science or data; and I guess in the context of that, the overall ending is easier to take because, as wrong as it is, it is also a natural extension of the same.

I was on guard the entire time watching this episode because I thought at some point, Rolo Haynes (Douglas Hodge) was going to do something nasty with or to the somewhat stranded motorist Nish (Letitia Wright). The tables are turned at the finale when Nish gets her 'revenge' against Rolo for turning her father into a virtual reality game, one of the premier attractions of the Black Museum. That was another bit of misdirection as well, the title of the story hinted at a racial component, but that's something that never really entered the picture. The three part format was reminiscent of Season Two's 'White Christmas', and now that I write about it, there's an interesting dichotomy there with Black/White. Pretty interesting, don't you think? Of the three stories, it's hard to tell which one was the most disturbing. One of the neat things about the episode was the way it wove elements of prior season stories into this one. As an example, widower Jack (Aldis Hodge) is shown reading a comic book adaptation of 'Fifteen Million Merits' in the second segment. There are more for astute viewers, and actually, that's one of the clever things about the series that writer Charlie Brooker does to keep viewers engaged and returning.

This may not be a 'Black Mirror' style, but this is one of the best episodes in this series indeed. The end was totally unexpected and that's why I gave it 10.