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Jun 21 2023
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Black Mirror Review – Season 6 – Episode 3 – Beyond the Sea

Somewhere beyond the sea, a review is waiting for thee, 3.5 readers.

SPOILER ALERT: This is less of a review and more of a discussion, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go watch then come back and discuss.

It’s an alternate version of the 1960s, one where the technology for people to control robot replicas of themselves with their minds while their real bodies are asleep is possible. Astronauts David and Cliff (Josh Hartnett and Aaron Paul) are on a six year mission aboard a space station, so they use their replicas to carry on their lives back home on earth with their families.

The co-workers couldn’t be any more different. David loves culture and conversation, living in California with his family, he reads heavily, draws, paints, and goes to movies where he holds himself out as a hero to passersby who recognize him from the news.

Cliff is quiet and reserved, prefers the great outdoors, having moved his wife, Lana (Kate Mara) to a remote home in the wilderness. Chopping firewood and physical labor, tending to the property are his pursuits.

From time to time, the duo return to their physical bodies aboard the space station to take care of space business. During one such return, a Manson-like cult lead by Kieran Culkin in a scary bit of acting, breaks into David’s home and murders his family, payback they said for embracing the unnatural, i.e. allowing the robot version of David to be part of their lives.

Aboard the space station, the real life David is horribly broken, mentally and physically, forever psychologically damaged by the crime. He witnessed it through his robot body and even lost it during the murders, so now he is stuck in space, unable to return to earth via robot replica.

Feeling bad for their friend, Cliff and Lana agree to allow David to spend some time on earth using Cliff’s replica. At first, this is a welcome delight for David as he’s happy to just be on solid ground again, to see nature, to talk to people, to do anything outdoors really.

Ah but trouble ensues when David talks Cliff into allowing regular visits to earth via robot Cliff. Dave, while in Cliff’s bot body, starts falling for Lana. Lana is cultured, loves reading and the arts, and David pleads with her, pointing out that they have much more in common than she ever could with Cliff.

For a while, it seems as though David and Lana might fall for each other, and they might very well run off, leaving the real Cliff to suffer alone on the space station. As mentioned often, running the station is a two man job, so anyone left their on their lonesome will perish.

But Lana remains loyal. In fact, she’s outraged that David would abuse the trust they gave him when they allowed him to borrow Cliff’s double. She gives him a piece of her mind, and aboard the station, Cliff gives him another verbal tongue lashing. No more Cliff replica visits to earth for you, David.

SPOILER ALERT

The mission continues in space for awhile, until one day, David manages to swipe Cliff’s double while the real Cliff is busy. He does so briefly, but long enough to murder Lana and the couple’s young son. Real Cliff discovers this when he returns home in his double to find blood soaked walls.

Back aboard the station, David sits at a table, seemingly unremorseful by what he has done. He kicks out a chair, inviting a visibly angry Cliff to sit and talk. The implication is that David got his revenge for being rejected and chewed out, and knows he has Cliff painted into a corner because if Cliff kills David, he essentially kills himself for as we know, running the station is a two man job.

It’s up to us to imagine what happens next. Maybe Cliff is stuck working on the station for four more years with a psycho he despises or maybe he loses control, doesn’t care, avenges his family by killing David.

What lessons do we suss out? A) Sometimes the right thing is the unkind thing. Don’t trust people. Don’t let them into your life. Don’t let them borrow important stuff, especially your robot body. You think you’re being kind but you’re inviting trouble. Feel sad for someone who has been hurt, but save yourself.

B) Tech can put us in unnatural states to be avoided. You can’t be in two places at once and expect to take care of both parts of your life successfully.

C) Appreciate what you have. There are times when it feels like Cliff didn’t quite appreciate what he had with his family but sadly, knew what he lost when he lost it. Cherish your loved ones and go out of your way to protect them.

Other thoughts:

#1 – I thought it was unlikely that David would do what he did, given he went through the horrible murder of his family, felt bad about it so wouldn’t want to bring that pain to someone else. Then again one might say he was so broken that he was driven to do it by insanity. In the end, Black Mirror always brings a scary, horrific ending.

#2 – Aaron Paul does his best acting since Breaking Bad. Cliff seems like his usual moody, sullen guy baseline, but in the moments where he’s David, he captures David’s artsy pretentious mannerisms well.

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Jun 20 2023
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Black Mirror Review – Season 6, Episode 2 Loch Henry (2023)

Get ready to pucker your butts in terror, 3.5 readers.

SPOILER ALERT: This is less of a review and more of a discussion, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it, then come back and discuss, although trigger warning, this is probably the scariest, twisted episodes of the series.

Are some scabs better off left unpicked?

You’d think so. The gavel comes down. The suspect is judged guilty. The high-profile case is over and all the TV cameras leave town. Years later, the horrific crime that rocked a community becomes but an eerie footnote in local history.

But with the rise of streaming media, there’s an overwhelming demand for true crime podcasts and documentaries, especially since everyone is trying to be the next Sarah Koenig, she the mother of all true crime podcasts, Serial. Over the past decade, Netflix has become home to a seemingly endless supply of true crime docs. You could pop them on and never watch them all in your lifetime. Well, maybe you could if you never had to work, drink, eat or poop, but you get the gist.

Enter Davis and Pia. They’re film students from London, he a Scottsman and she an African-American living abroad. (Samuel Blenkin and Myha’la Herrold). They’ve returned to Davis’ hometown of Loch Henry to produce a documentary about an egg collector. Pretty bland stuff but hey, at least they can practice their camera work and score an easy A.

Or so they thought. Whilst visiting Davis’ friend, barkeep Stuart (Daniel Portman in his best role since Game of Thrones’ Podrick), Pia inquires why such a beautiful town, full of picturesque landscapes isn’t rife with tourism.

Much to Davis’ dismay, loudmouth Stuart spills the beans. Once upon a time, the town was indeed a tourist spot, that is until the late 1990s when town scumbag Ian Nadair was discovered to be a maniacal serial killer who kidnapped tourists, then dragged them to a secret lair where he tortured and murdered them.

Davis even has a personal connection to this sad tale. His father, Ken, was shot in the shoulder while attempting to arrest Ian. While Davis is proud his father is a hero who brought a madman to justice, he is sad the wound, while not immediately fatal, led to an infection that killed his old man, leaving him without a dad at a young age. So sad was he that he never told Pia this story.

Pia meets Davis mother, Janet, an old woman who is the epitome of sweetness, going out of her way to welcome the couple with homecooked meals. Though she is overly pleasant, there is a clear pallor of sadness and at times, she laments how the vile madman ruined her life by taking her husband from her, leaving her to raise a young son all on her own and now leaving her alone in old age.

Blah blah blah. Against Davis’ protestations, Pia declares that THIS is the story they should be telling, so screw that egg guy. Advised by a streaming media exec to find new dirt on this story long considered old news, the trio go about town digging (Pia and Davis for their film project and Stuart because the greedy little bastard hopes renewed interest in the town will bring paying drinkers to his long dormant pub.)

And boy howdy, do they ever find new dirt. There are some fake outs, some twists and turns, an occasional insinuation that Stuart’s crusty old father Richard (John Hannah) might have been involved, but one night, while Pia is editing tape (she prefers the grainy look of old video cassettes to digital media), she finds, to her shock and horror, an old camcorder recording of Davis’ parents, Ken and Janet, torturing a young couple that had been reported in the news long ago as missing.

I can tell you, I felt that disgusted feeling as I saw a young Janet dawn a creepy mask and saunter into the room in a skintight outfit, dancing about and wielding a drill, spinning the bit menacingly at the tied up hostages. And I gotta be honest, 1990s rap group’s K7 old party in the club standard, “Come Baby Come” will always freak me the eff out whenever I hear it, because now I associate it with Davis’ parents dancing around to it on grainy home movie footage while they torture people.

I’ll leave the plot there. More horrors ensue. In the end, Davis loses his girlfriend and mother (Pia dies by accident while running away from now elderly Janet, while Janet, fearing discovery, hangs herself, but not before leaving out a stockpile of new evidence for Davis to find.) The poor lad does get an award, but as the show closes, we can’t help but think he would have been so much happier if he’d just made his silly little egg collector movie. He’d still have a mother. He’d still have a girlfriend. He’d still bask in ignorant bliss, believing his father was a hero cop who took down a serial killer (not a scumbag who shot his accomplice to pin it all on him before he could tell on his accomplices) and his mother as the strong old gal who put on a brave face for her son’s sake all these years.

Critics have complained this episode, as well as a few others in season 6 have little to nothing to do ith the horrors of technology, as is the show’s theme. However, I’d argue that streaming media did indeed lead to an increase in public interest in true crime documentaries, and any schmuck who aspires to become a story teller can simply grab a camera and a mic, interview townsfolk who remember a creepy case, pierce it together with old news footage and voila, a documentary is born.

But will these documentarians be repulsed by the new dirt they dig up? Is it better to let sleeping dogs lie?

STATUS: Shelf-worthy though I have to say, I felt so dirty after watching this one. I do like John Hannah, always have since he played Evie’s con man layabout brother in the late 1990s Mummy movies starring Brendan Fraser, so I’m glad his character wasn’t the killer after all.

Kudos to Netflix. Between episode 1 Joan is Awful and this one, the streaming service really was a good sport about letting Black Mirror kick the crap out of them this season.

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Jun 18 2023
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Black Mirror Review – Season 6, Episode 1 – Joan is Awful

It’s the Twilight Zone style show for the social media age and it’s finally back after a long hiatus.

BQB here with a review of episode 1 of the long awaited sixth season.

SPOILER ALERT: This isn’t so much of a review as it is a discussion so if you haven’t seen this yet, go watch it then come back and talk.

3.5 readers, if you’re reading this then chances are, you’re a nobody. Don’t feel bad. Most of us are and the good news is there’s a lot of safety in anonymity. Unlike the rich and famous, we can get away with a lot because no one cares about what we do.

But what if your favorite streaming service were to suddenly decide that your hum-drum life makes for good TV? Such is the case for Joan (Annie Murphy) a middle-manager at a tech company. Like all of us, she had dreams once, but now she just spends her days doing her corporate board’s dirty work, firing beloved employees for no cause just to increase profits. She feels dirty about it but finds no solace in her fiance, who she views as bland. Yet, she feels damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t, for she also has an ex wild man boyfriend who she enjoyed but ultimately understands that he’ll bring disaster back into her life.

And so, poor Joan feels trapped in the mundane when one day, she turns on Streamberry, a thinly veiled Netflix replacement, to discover a show about her life with the great Salma Hayek playing her with all of her dirty laundry hung out to dry. All of her indiscretions, infidelities and immoralities are laid bare for the world to see and oddly, in record time. The show churns out episodes so fast that it seems like no sooner does Joan do some inappropriate act that she thought no one saw that sure enough, that inappropriate act is streaming for the world to see.

After her lawyer investigates, Joan discovers that part of the terms and conditions of the long contract she signed when she signed up for the streaming service was to give the company all rights to make a show about her life. Through AI, the company is picking subscribers at random, following their lives via their cell phones and home cameras and creating computer generated shows about them. No writers or actors are needed. AI just takes scenes from subscribers’ real lives and provides dramatic flourishes, while actors have signed away their CGI rights for profit.

That’s right. Salma Hayek isn’t playing Joan. CGI Salma is and real Salma thought it would a quick buck to sign those rights away. In the hopes of grabbing Hayek’s attention and getting her to put the kibosh on the show, the real Joan starts doing horrendous, unspeakable, darkly comical things to the point where the real Salma doesn’t want her likeness associated with such depravity.

Shenanigans ensue as the real Joan and real Salma team up for a clandestine attack on Streamberry’s AI computer server and I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

This is a rare light-hearted episode of black mirror. Usually, the show is quite dark and gut punching, as characters suffer irreparable damage and loss, forever doomed to experience terrible consequences. This one is actually quite funny.

“Absurd” I thought. CGI replacing real actors? That’ll never happen. Then I went to see The Flash last night and a CGI Henry Cavill did a brief cameo as did a CGI younger version of Nicolas Cage. CGI past versions of actors from DC superhero films from long ago also stopped by. So apparently, yes, Hollywood is looking for ways to make content with computers at a cheaper rate than what they have to pay real live humans.

And low and behold there’s a writer’s strike underway, with one of the chief complaints being that human writers are worried about being replaced by CGI writers. Could a CGI writer write better fart jokes than a human writer? Time will tell.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Credit to Netflix as with this episode, they basically admit that they invented the model of churning out unenriched crap at a rapid pace, content for the sake of content, just give viewers a neverending stream of new stuff to watch without worrying if its any good.

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Nov 23 2020
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Black Mirror Review – San Junipero

Oooh, heaven is a place on earth, 3.5 readers.

SPOILER ALERT! This is an episode where you can’t dive too deep without giving away spoilers so if you haven’t seen it, you should join the rest of the web surfing public and not read this blog.

OK, now that the people who have seen it or don’t care about spoilers are present, let’s discuss.

The first half of this episode seems like a simple friendship story. Two young women, Yorky and Kelly, meet in a seaside tourist town, San Junipero, in the 1980s. Their friendship grows into love, i.e. the romantic variety but sours as Kelly avoids commitment.

SPOILER – by the second half, we realize San Junipero is a simulation. Everyone is either dead or dying in real life. The dying get a free, limited trial to see if an afterlife in the sim is what they want, while the dead have already signed on.

Ultimately, the love story becomes a will they or won’t they as they meet again and again during their free trials. They want to and yet their are issues in their real lives that hold them back.

The main takeaways. It would be great if some kind of simulation like this would be invented. Though as we see, it doesn’t take away from all of life’s problems, but it could give us that piece of mind we need to know that life doesn’t end at death and all our learning, struggling, working, growing…all that experience isn’t lost when we go.

Perhaps the most realistic thought is to enjoy youth while you have it and try your best to extend it. Eat your veggies. Exercise. Stay off the bad food and alcohol and cigarettes because when the body goes, it goes. The contrast between the real life oldsters and their simulated young bodies is something else, and it truly is sad what time does to the human body.

The good news? If you don’t dwell on all the complications, this episode has a rare happy ending for Black Mirror.

The bad news? If you’re like me, this episode will make you feel super old. I was a boy in the 1980s, a teenager in the 1990s, and a young adult in the 2000s and apparently, each time period are now considered as nostalgic places for the elderly and dying to visit in simulated space.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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Nov 22 2020
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Black Mirror Review – Hated in the Nation

Couldn’t find a Netflix trailer so see this Ending Explained video instead.

Spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen it, look away. It’s ok, I have a total of 3.5 readers so I can lose up to 2.5 and still have a full reader. It’s just hard to talk about this episode without delving into spoilers.

Death has become a hashtag. Whenever the Internet folk post a name along with the hashtag #deathto they are voting for that person to be killed under mysterious circumstances, with the name that receives the most votes becoming the victim of the day.

Two days and two victims – a journalist who wrote a scathing, unkind op ed about a handicapped rights’ advocate and a rapper who mocked a young fan’s tribute dance to him, dashing the kid’s dreams on live television.

Detective Karin Parke (of Boardwalk Empire fame) has seen it all and is breaking in her young partner, Blue Coulson (Faye Marsay). Along the way, they team up with British government agent Shaun Li (Benedict Wong of Doctor Strange fame.)

At first, the episode is a slow burn and feels a bit like an episode of Law and Order set in England. As we learn the killer’s method, it picks up the pace.

Spoiler – robot bees! Yes, it’s the future and robot bees have replaced the usual kind, apparently due to a lack of hot and steamy bee on bee intercourse. An entire company has emerged to produce robot bees, setting them to work on the UK’s pollination needs, each robo-bee buzzing from one flower to the next, deliver the special yellow dust along the way.

SIDENOTE: Listen people. We need to save the bees to save the plants and save the world. If you know any bees, please encourage them to engage in a lot of indiscriminate bee on bee fornication to prevent a nightmare world where robo-bees take over.

Like Alfred Hitchcock’s birds, Black Mirror’s robot bees take on a life of their own, buzzing and stalking the prey programmed into their little bee minds by the killer. Many harrowing scenes of people narrowly escaping bee attacks ensue.

Overall, the robo bee concept is interesting and sadly, may be needed one day if all these male bees can’t build up their confidence and start hitting on all these lady bees. Wait, there’s just one Queen Bee right? All the male bees go to work and then return to the hive to service the Queen Bee’s needs? Yikes.

Also, it’s a meditation on when Internet anger goes too far. People are stupid. They do dumb things. They say dumb things. Much of this stupidity went unnoticed back in the day but now that the Internet preserves everything, people often engage in a social media pile on, spewing all kinds of vitriol toward someone who they believe has crossed a line. Sadly, this leaves no room for a person to apologize and seek redemption.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy, mostly because of the bees. I do remember enjoying Boardwalk Empire back in the day and thought it was cool to see Nucky’s GF in the present day.

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Nov 22 2020
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Black Mirror Review – Arkangel

BQB’s Black Mirror marathon continues.

It’s not easy being a parent. This is the understatement of the year.

You want to protect your child, extend their youthful innocence for as long as possible – shield them from everything and yet, the more you shelter them, the less resilient they become.

You don’t want them to scrape that knee yet they won’t learn to not run around like a goofball until they get that scraped knee. It is indeed quite a slippery slope. Maybe the best you can do is safeguard them yet as they grow up, hope your lessons take hold and they make wise decisions or at least learn from their mistakes.

Marie (Rosemarie DeWitt) wants to keep her daughter, Sara, safe. After an incident where she briefly loses sight of her kid at the park, Marie signs Sara up for Arkangel, an implant that reports everything and anything about what Sara is up to directly to Mom’s tablet.

There’s good news. Mom can monitor daughter’s health. Put her on supplements as needed. Mom can block out anything that is scary, i.e. that scary dog in the neighbor’s yard just becomes a blur.

However, the as the years past and the more protective Mom is, the less able to comprehend the dangers of the world Sarah becomes. Ultimately, you don’t want your kids to see violence and yet, until they see one kid shove another kid and cause a boo boo, they don’t learn to keep their hands to themselves.

All this control and lack of learning about the world seems like a powder keg a brewing and how it will explode…well, you’ll have to watch.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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Nov 22 2020
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Black Mirror Review – Nosedive

We’re living in a social media world, 3.5 readers, and Bryce Dallas Howard plays a social media girl.

This is by far the best episode of Black Mirror, such that if they had added a half hour, they could have released it as a feature length film. It’s dark, yet also funny and sadly, given the direction we are headed in, the one I would dare say is most likely to happen.

Bryce plays Lacie, a hard working, cheerful young woman who lives in a world where society ranks everyone based on a social media app. People have an implant that allows them to look at anyone and see their ranking number next to their head and they can add or delete stars on that person with their phone. Ultimately, every interaction you have with another human is a chance to move up or down in the world.

Lacie is a respectable 4.2 but she dreams of becoming a 4.5. You see, the higher your ranking, the more access you have to life’s perks – i.e. promotions, opportunities, open doors and so on. If she can be a 4.5, she can secure a loan needed to move into a luxury condo complex, one where she’d be able to go to fancy parties, meet trendy people, perhaps even meet a fantastic mate and better yet, she won’t have to be room mates with her dopey 3.7 brother anymore.

When Lacie is asked to be the maid of honor at her highly ranked childhood friend Naomi (Alice Eve), her reputation consultant (yes, people pay big money for advice on how to move up their rankings) advises this is her chance to send her numbers sky high. She immediately goes to work on her speech, hoping to dazzle the wedding party into throwing plenty of stars her way. Her brother reminds her that Naomi was a terrible friend but Lacie doesn’t care. She wants that damn condo and who can blame her. It does look like a fabulous condo.

And so, Lacie sets out on what inevitably becomes the cross country trip from hell, one that makes “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” look like “Roman Holiday.”

When her flight is cancelled, she makes the mistake of shouting at the airline clerk, a move that causes the police to attach the ultimate punishment – no, not jailtime. She is put on “double damage” meaning for the next 24 hours, any rating she receives, good or bad, counts as half.

As she attempts to make the long drive, one mishap after another happens, causing her mood to worsen and of course, this leads to one star sapping encounter after another with multiple jerkwads with itchy rating fingers.

Worse, as her social rep plummets, she is afforded less opportunities and thus, her travel amenities become crappier and crappier. The great irony is that the less stars she gets, the less craps Lacie gives, and her ability to tell people to eff off becomes her superpower in a world where everyone is going out of their way to impress everyone.

You might laugh and think this is impossible, but aren’t we all ranked in a way by social media? Don’t we dream of building that idyllic life, the one we can snap photos of and rub in our friends’ faces online? Hell, in some businesses, the number of followers you have is a bankable commodity.

Not to give it away, but while it is standard for all Black Mirror episodes to have a bad, depressing ending (and this follows suit) this is the closest this series gets to having a happy ending…or perhaps a humorous ending. It is still, when you think about it, unhappy.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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Nov 22 2020
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Black Mirror Review – Bandersnatch

I’m not sure why I wasn’t impressed with this, other than because I did Netflix’s Interactive Kimmy Schmidt episode long before trying this one. Had I tried this first I might have been impressed with the overall ambition of this project. This is Netflix’s first “choose your own adventure style” film after all.

The year is 1984 and young computer programmer Stefan has snagged his dream gig, developing a video game based on the novel “Bandersnatch” by an author who went insane and murdered his wife. OK, so the developing the video game is the good part of that gig and the other part, obviously not so much.

With your controller in hand, you guide Stefan through a series of choices, ultimately sending him down a rabbit hole of conspiracy fact and fiction, questioning whether concepts like time and reality even exist as the young lad gets driven further and further into madness.

The story relies on some meta snark in that like a choose your own adventure novel, one where you can just flip back to the beginning if you screw up, it too can flip you back, sometimes to the last choice, sometimes to the start and the underlying answer as to how Stefan can wake up and get a do over is that time is not as real a concept as we think it is.

If you’re looking for overall answers to the plot’s questions, you’ll be disappointed, unless you want to do it all over and over again and maybe there’s a good ending. I never found one. I know Black Mirror is dark so an unhappy ending is to be expected but I thought I’d get an ending that at least tries to explain how all this nonsense is possible. You get various answers at various times and none seem to jive with each other.

So…it’s ok. Maybe something to do when you aren’t busy and if it went over my head, then so be it. I came, I saw, I tried and I felt it was a lot of build up that just doesn’t go anywhere no matter how hard you try unless there’s a special combo of moves I missed.

SIDENOTE: The option where you can choose to explain to Stefan that you are a person from the future controlling his moves through Netflix is funny, particularly when you choose the option to try to explain to a 1980’s person what Netflix is.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy (moderately.)

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Nov 20 2020
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Black Mirror Review – Crocodile

Memories, like the corners of my mind…is that how the song goes? Paging Streisand.

BQB here with yet another Black Mirror review.

Many years ago, Mia’s then boyfriend Rob did a horrible thing. Rather than go to the police, she assisted him in covering it up, making her an accomplice.

The years pass and Mia marries another man, has a child, a nice house and a great career, having managed to push the memories of that dark day to the corners of her mind. Alas, it all comes back when a guilt ridden Rob shows up at her door, telling Mia he won’t be able to live with himself unless he pens an anonymous confession.

And so, the vicious cycle of cover ups upon cover ups ensues as Mia does something terrible to cover up the cover up. As she is doing so, she witnesses a self-driving pizza truck hit a pedestrian (SIDENOTE: self driving pizza trucks sound like a good idea but only if a) they can be made to not hit people and b) if we can find alternate employment routes for the pizza delivery man and woman lobby)

Insurance investigator Shazia thinks the victim (he lives) of the pizza truck’s case is pretty cut and dry, but goes about her investigation with the assistance of a device that can record memories. She interviews various witnesses, recording the images they have in their minds of the accident, eventually realizing that Mia, according to witness recollection, had the best view of the incident.

Thus opens the proverbial can of worms for Mia. If she declines Shazia’s request to search her memories of the accident, the police will get involved. But if she helps, will she be able to bury her memories of evil doing and so that the machine will pick up only the memories of the pizza truck accident?

Overall, an interesting meditation on the power of memory, what we remember and what we forget and how there can be power in forgetting. When it comes to memory, can we ever be sure they are real?

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Nov 20 2020
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Black Mirror Review – The National Anthem

The plot of this seems like it should belong to a wacky, raunchy comedy but its played as a serious drama.

Princess Susannah, a much beloved member of the royal family, has been kidnapped. The kidnapper has but a single demand – that at 4 pm, the UK Prime Minister get on live television and have sex with…a pig.

Yeah, I know. At this point, you might think the entire writing staff should be fired but maybe not when you realize the whole episode is a commentary about a) the population’s inability to ignore trainwreck-esque spectacles and b) the control that social media has over political decision making.

At first, the UK is united in thinking that the PM should absolutely not do this. It would be too demeaning to himself, the office, the nation and if he does it, terrorists will be kidnapping prominent people every day just to make outrageous demands. Though Princess Susannah’s death would be terrible, it would be worse to cave in to this outrageous demand.

But as the day wears on and the government’s multiple attempts to rescue the princess are botched, the kidnapper retaliates by mailing the press the princess’ finger. Public emotions are stirred and they believe the government is now at fault for the princess’ predicament and as such, the PM should rescue her…by having intimate knowledge of that pig.

And so, the PM must make a decision.

Ultimately, this episode is so ridiculous and yet you can’t look away, wondering what the PM will finally do. It is all very absurd and hard to believe that the leader of any nation would actually consider whether or not to do this. It’s also hard to believe that the people of any nation would actually demand that their leader do this and yet…check out social media sometime and see the weird kinds of mental gymnastics people play when they want to take a position that is wrong or support a politician who has done something wrong or what have you.

In short, I can’t one hundred percent say that if this scenario played out in real life, there wouldn’t be dum dums on social media demanding that the prime minister follow through. Even worse, there would be government officials who actually listen to the dum dums.

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