I feel like this episode maybe doesn’t get its due for being as harrowing as I found it to be because it has a more fantastical setting and also a twist ending that is sure to disappoint a lot of people. But for me, I found this to be probably the best episode since Fifteen Million Merits. The simple story is that of a young man dodging his own emotional issues surrounding his father’s death and his estrangement from his mother takes a job testing out radical new gaming technologies and . . . things go awry. The episode is definitely really scary in a gonzo horror kind of way; the jump scares are pretty silly, but they work and also they’re SUPPOSED to be silly, so they work two times over. But as the episode progressed I found myself getting more and more disturbed and a lot of this is because of how long the episode takes to get us inside the head of the main character and his emotional struggles. Wyatt Russell’s absolutely perfect performance is a big, big part of the emotional punch of this episode. He’s given really good support from Hannah John-Kamen as a sly reporter and Wunmi Musaku as a game company employee, but this episode rests on Russell and he carries it brilliantly. His performance is unhinged, raw and terrifying. Black Mirror tends to get really excellent performances from its actors and this is one of the best, in my opinion. I found in particular the last five to ten minutes of the episode to just be a really tough, haunting ramp-up to an incredibly disturbing ending and Russell’s ever more and more intense performance is a big part of it. But, look, can I just tell you that I went and talked to my mom after this episode ended? Not even kidding. Something about that element of the story just really resonated with me and I found the ending to be incredibly grim. The notion that Cooper has waited too late to get his relationship with his mother fixed is extremely painful to me and the idea that the last thought that goes through his mind before he dies is that failure is troubling to me on a downright existential level. I mean, this episode really shook me to my core and I’m still thinking a lot about the big question this episode poses for me: what’s the last thing you’ll ever think of? What if it’s a regret? What if, when it all comes down to it, the last thing you have in this life is a regret, a failure? I mean, best pick up the phone, right? Best start mending those relationships now, right? Add on to that the added truth that Cooper’s mother is going to have to live the rest of her life never having closure on their relationship and never even know the truth about how he died. And then there’s the fantastically plotted part of the twist, which is that Cooper essentially kills himself with his own phone; his mother ultimately becomes the weapon that kills him. The irony of this really, really landed with me and the way the episode treats that reveal as almost a dark joke (after all, it is just a game) made it even more disturbing and horrifying. This is grim, grim stuff. I think this kind of thing has started affecting me a lot more as I’ve aged; that makes sense, I think. Different things scare me now and it seems like that’s probably a good thing; once upon a time, that freaky spider-hybrid would have been the most disturbing thing in this episode for me, but not anymore. This episode unsettled me really deeply and profoundly and I think it’ll stay with me longer than anything else from season three. This episode is Black Mirror at its best. 4 stars.
tl;dr – harrowing, intense horror-driven episode gives superficial scares, but also packs a deep existential punch; dread-soaked, painful and genuinely terrifying. 4 stars.