In this episode, the shortest of the entire series so far, Black Mirror pulls off an interesting experiment in storytelling. It sets out to tell an incredibly stripped down story and to do so with almost nothing in the way of exposition. In short, a woman flees from a robotic “dog” in a post-apocalyptic world. Who made these dogs? Are they performing as they should, as a kind of high-tech, incredibly brutal security system? Or have they malfunctioned and are in some way responsible for the grim fate of the world? None of these things matter, the episode posits; when one thing is chasing another thing, you can do without those details. And, while I know others disagree, I think the episode is right about that. This is a grim, unflinching, brutally violent and unsettling episode, a chase scene spun out over forty minutes or so. It’s shot in absolutely gorgeous black & white and the robot “dog” itself is a masterful creation. He’s a special effect, but he feels absolutely real, all the way down to the scratches and dings in its metallic body to the unsettling scuttling of its movements. This is a horror episode really and the dog is a perfect villain, unstoppable and merciless. I’m not a hundred percent sold on the ending which tries to wring some extra pathos from the story by revealing the Macguffin that our main characters were attempting to steal when they awakened the dog. It might have worked just as well, and been more in keeping with the stripped down narrative technique here, for the viewer to just never find out what the entire heist was about. But, even if it is a misstep, and I’m not entirely sure that it is, it’s a small one in the context of this masterful episode. In some ways, this is the show at its bleakest. There are four characters introduced in the first five minutes or so of this episode: one woman, two men, one robot. When the episode wraps up, all four them are dead, the majority of them from extreme head trauma. That about says it all. 4 stars.
tl;dr – brutal, unsettling episode is a stripped down chase scene that is intense, frightening and, ultimately, utterly nihilistic; an experiment that works like a charm. 4 stars.