Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror has gripped us with a range of imaginative dystopian worlds, technologies, and ideas. Some of the concepts the show present, however, are harder to chew than others. Here is a list of our Top 5 darkest Black Mirror technologies and why they got under our skin. Spoilers alert.
The “cookie” in “White Christmas”
The technology extracts a copy of a person’s consciousness and puts it in an egg. Once inside the egg, it is up to the user to decide the “cookie’s” experience and how long they are in there for. At the end of the episode, Joe’s “cookie”, who we have been watching the whole episode, is set to experience 1000 years per minute. The idea of thousands of years in isolation is maddening to even ponder.
The memory wiping machine in “White Bear”.
The whole episode is shocking but a technology that wipes your entire memory so that you have to experience the same day over and over indefinitely is frightening in itself.
Robert Daly’s game simulation in “USS Callister”.
What is terrifying about this technology is that the conscious duplicates in the game all start off unaware that they are duplicates and assume themselves to be the original. Once in the game, their fates are entirely in Robert’s hands and he is not always a benevolent creator.
The eternal torture in “Black Museum”.
In terms of horror factor, this is probably the darkest technology. Visitors of the museum can execute Clayton on the electric chair then take home a keychain containing a duplicate of his consciousness, trapped eternally in his final moments of agony. It’s a man-made hell on Earth.
The resurrected boyfriend in “Be Right Back”.
Some of the other technologies might be more extreme, but there is something incredibly unsettling about the technology that allows you to purchase a humanoid version of your deceased partner. The technology uses the digital trace of the deceased to recreate their speech and personality – only there is nothing inside.
