Hoodwinked

I just watched one of Black Mirror's highest rated episodes, USS Callister. It's quite interesting and I can see why it is popular. I had a different thought about it than most did though. 

The popular opinion is that it is one of Black Mirror's few episodes with a happy ending. The episode chronicles the story of a chief tech officer Robert Daly. He's technically brilliant and co-founded a virtual reality game company with an associate, Walton, that serves as the company's CEO. 

Spoilers follow.

As the story progresses, we find that Daly runs a special modded version of the game at home that reskins it as copy of the world in Space Fleet, an old TV show that is clearly inspired by Star Trek. We also learn that Daly is able to take DNA samples from real people and import a copy of them into a game complete with memories and personality. This is, for a show that usually has realistic extrapolations of technology, one of the entire series' greatest and most unrealistic leaps. It's so big a leap that I feel it undermines the effectiveness of the episode, but clearly that didn't cause any problems for most of the show's watchers.

Anyway, allowing for the possibility of the game's programming to do such things, we are disturbed to see Daly has selected people from work that have mistreated him to be his virtual crew on his virtual spaceship, the USS Callister. Initially, we see him as using this to power his nerdy power fantasies about being the captain of the ship. Later we see he also acts out his desires for revenge on the crew's human counterparts by torturing the virtual crew.

That this is not the most mentally healthy approach to dealing with personal issues isn't at issue; I think universally we can all see the ugliness of it. Likewise, we should also understand the ugliness in the real-world that led to it, a portion of the equation that many fans commenting on the show conveniently forget.

The crew ultimately gets the upper hand on Daly and via clever use of technology and connections to memories of their real-life counterparts, are able to simultaneously escape the modded universe in Daly's private game to the public version and also effectively kill both the real and the virtual Daly by stranding them in a software limbo. The crew continues on in the public version of the game and "live" happily ever after.

This is where I split from the rabble. I don't see it as a happy ending. In fact, I see it as horrific as any other episode of the series and yet another example of writer Charlie Brooker's brilliance. 

Quickly, some context: years ago I remember hearing an interview with The Police's lead singer, Sting. He was talking about the song "Every Breath You Take," one of the band's most iconic and revered pieces. Nearly everyone interprets it as a love song, but I can just imagine Sting's evil grin as he called the song "poison" and "diabolical". He explained that it is, if you pay attention to the lyrics, a song about the loss of freedom and about persistent surveillance. Sting seemed quite amused at how many people bought the happy ending angle, and not just bought it but vehemently defended it when the scary interpretation was suggested. 

What? Human beings being blindly intransigent about their beliefs? Say it isn't so! 

Back to Black Mirror and the USS Callister. Study carefully the arc of the series. Brooker is too good a writer and too smart to just give out the easy A. Happy endings just don't happen in the show; even when an ending seems just, it is often drenched in tragedy. In every chapter there are always larger issues at play, ones that bear discussion far beyond the individual episode. I think USS Callister is actually a cautionary tale about rogue AI finding ways to turn against human creators and users, albeit one cleverly disguised in a Star Trek parody. The virtual crew bring Daly to death...that's a serious consequence for a guy that in real life never actually hurt anyone (again, I'm not saying his carrying out a fantasy was healthy, though even that is debatable [see the Gerard Jones book, Killing Monsters]) but I would hope that most people can separate fantasy from reality and if you dislike a million people but never hurt one, you shouldn't be incarcerated...or killed. It turns out I was wrong. 

A few brave souls on Reddit dared question that Daly's conclusion was apt, and for this fair ponderance they were downvoted and insulted. Many were willing to defend vigorously the virtual crew. I mean, it's a great virtue signal (or virtual signal?) but remember that one definition of sanity is the ability to separate fantasy from reality. An awful lot of people were ready to let real-world assholes off the hook and take down a virtual villain. They proudly thump their chests at how decent they are to sing the causes of a collection of ones and zeros (self-aware, but still a collection of ones and zeros) and how fine it is to take down a real human to do it. They bask in the sunlight of their happy ending with satisfied grins.

Perhaps somewhere it's Brooker grinning at our willingness to imbibe poison.