Black Mirror S03E06

An under 2000 character Review on Anthologies. Number 13, Black Mirror S03E06 – Hated in the Nation – Directed By: James Hawes – Written By: Charlie Brooker – Release Date: 10/21/2016. Originally Posted on 6/26/2020.

Black Mirror is a UK retelling, of sorts, of the Twilight Zone. Most of the episodes have to do with humanity or the dark sides of humanity in relation to modern society, technological advancements and media/social media sensationalism aka what I call “POOP Culture.”

The runtime on this episode is 89 minutes. For a season finale, this is basically a full-made for cable TV movie. AND… It’s good… In London’s near future, a police detective Karin and her expert-level IT sidekick, Blue, chase a string of mysterious deaths related to a social media hashtag that at the end of each day the one with the most-posted tags using the hashtag dies.

This one ties “fifteen minutes of fame” posts on all social media posts to autonomous robot bees that surround the United Kingdom and pollinate flowers due to the mass extinctions of bees around the United Kingdom. One of its programmers, while building the network, puts in a backdoor so at any time he can take complete control of the network and alter its programming. Very dangerous for one person to have all that control over something that can be perverted into killing mass amounts of people.

In fiction, this theme is plot pointed in pretty much every James Bond movie or Spy vs Spy tale. As our technology grows so will our ability to do either great good for humanity or to destroy it. This warning is a very different one. Not only does the hacker kill the highest person tagged but captures the IDs/Names/Coordinates of all people that used the hashtag.

At the end over 300,000 die. The story ends on a real dark note and serves as a warning. All these episodes do. This whole Goddamn show is about the warning of technological growth under the control of immoral humans. Or creating justice to immoral humans powered by this technology…