Black Mirror
- TV comedy drama
- Channel 4 / Netflix
Dark sci-fi fantasy comedy dramas about our collective unease about the modern world. Created by Charlie Brooker.
Streaming rank this week: 28
Episode menu
Series 2, Episode 2 - White Bear
Further details
A woman, Debra (Lenora Crichlow), wakes in a house that she does not recognise and cannot remember anything about her life. There are photos of her with a man and another photo of a young girl on the mantelpiece - neither of whom she recognises. The TV is on and is playing a symbol that means nothing to her.
Confused and agitated, she leaves the house only to find a deserted street. Knocking on doors, no one answers. Sensing movement behind the curtains of the houses she looks up and sees a young family - the father is filming her on his phone.
A car pulls into the road and a man gets out (Michael Smiley). Debra starts to approach him until she sees he is a carrying a gun and pointing it at her. As she runs away a few people come out of their houses to film her. Running round the corner she stumbles into Damien (Ian Bonar) and Jem (Tuppence Middleton), who together with Debra seek refuge in a petrol station. The man with the gun tries to break his way in. A group of people have gathered outside and are filming this on their phones. As the glass shatters the man with the gun enters the petrol station and Damian tries to grapple with him. The girls make a run for it. They see Damien try to escape but he is shot and dies. Debra and Jem manage to escape.
Jem explains to Debra that this has been going on for months - a signal started being transmitted that has caused most of the population to become dumb voyeurs. This apathy has allowed others to do what they want and they have essentially become what Jem calls "Hunters" - out to get people like her and Debra.
During Jem's explanation, Debra is plagued by various flashbacks - they are becoming more and more regular and involve her in a car with the man and the girl, her assumed daughter, from the photos.
Jem and Debra set out to find and destroy the transmitter, to stop its signal. It is their only hope of finding a safe way out. Reaching the transmitter they try to set fire to it just as the 'hunters' arrive. Will they manage it and is this the end of their torment?
Broadcast details
- Date
- Monday 18th February 2013
- Time
- 10pm
- Channel
- Channel 4
- Length
- 65 minutes
Press
Pokémon Go + Black Mirror = dark comedy?
Fans of the spooky, Twilight Zone-inspired British sci-fi series Black Mirror might appreciate this dark bit of parody that takes one of the most disturbing episodes of the show, "White Bear," and mashes it up with the world we presently live in in which bizarre, zombified humans are all wandering around with their cell phones raised, seeming to record everything and randomly congregating in random places because of some rare Pokémon.
Jay Barmann, sfist.com, 19th July 2016Charlie Brooker has been kind to me in print, so I must be careful not to be too kind about him, lest people suspect that I am dishing out a quid pro quo. On the downside, his weekly show behind a desk (Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe, BBC Two) sometimes makes it look as though he wants to eat the desk in his anger at the world.
But his larger dramatic creations reveal a Swiftian intelligence that is quite unusual when translated into an updated, high tech, electronic (squrrk!) field. There is quite a lot of squrrk! in Black Mirror. He wants you to know that your attention is being zapped into lightning trips from one field of reality to another.
The main reality in the latest show seemed to be that a helpless young woman was on the run from dozens of zombie-type vigilantes: shades of A Clockwork Orange, Assault on Precinct 13, etc.
But (squrrk!) not so fast. Towards the end it turns out that she is really the victim of a deadly game. With her wiped brain - Brooker is fond of the idea of the human mind being annihilated by television - she is being made to experience the suffering she caused when she tortured a child. But did she? Are the organizers of the game (see, as Brooker undoubtedly has, The Game, with Michael Douglas) normal people like us, at last getting the chance to inflict a just punishment that the psycho criminal will actually feel? Or what?
Doubts remain as the soundtrack says squrrk! Brooker used to be a companion at arms for Chris Morris but it is starting to look as if he, Brooker, has a scope all his own, and more powerful for being less parodic. He doesn't just make fun of television, which even I can do. He can see the fractures in life itself, as Swift could. On top of that he has the great virtue of having seen everything and yet not being derivative. His desk-eating savagery is too heartfelt for that.
Clive James, The Mirror, 7th March 2013