“If you want dystopia, look out of your window!” Black Mirror is back – and about the Tech Hell | Black mirror

CHarlie Brooker thought about death and he is not happy about it. We are at the Shepperton for USS Callister: In Infinity, the continuation of the Space Opera 2017 from his terrible tech anthology Black Mirror. “The line -up does not seem to have aged at all,” he grumbles, “while I’m an angry old gentleman.”

In this seventh season there is a more reflective, almost nostalgic tone. The Episode Playding looks back on Brooker’s early years as a gaming journalist in a Bandersnatch-Adjazent series of computer-induced madness. Paul Giamatti deepens the laudation in his memories when he literally enters decades of photos; Gas light parabola bête noire forces siena Kellys chocolatier to expect young people; Hotel Reverie plays Emma Corrin as Matinee Idol from the 1940s, who falls in love with Issa Raes Modern film star, who plays her white, male love interest on a AI remake of a vintage romance.

“A lot of technology is used to experience things or bring back to the present,” admits Brooker. “It was not aware of it, but then I have a lot more past than the future. There are probably more social comments and emotional or vulnerable episodes. That does not mean that we do not go any disturbing places or deliver these shaking frost, but people come to Black Mirror, who can expect that we can be surprised, so you can do exactly what you want. Your window. You don’t necessarily want to see anything: things get worse. “

The Brooker, who was full with zoom (Hone) and Roblox (his sons, now 13 and 11) during the pandemic, opted for the sidelines in favor of other genres for the sixth season, especially for the bleak horror of Mace Day, Demon 79 and Loch Henry. This year brings a return to what Brooker calls “Trad” Black Mirror: science that could still define our life.

Nowhere is this clearer than with common people, an allegory of private health care and the concept of the “Enshittification”. Chris O’Dowd agrees with the revolutionary, life-saving treatment for his wife (Rashida Jones), but over time the excessive price leaves her in the fool, although aftercare becomes worse and Jones becomes a pop-up display. Likewise, Callister: In infinity. In the first episode Coding genius Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons), the DNA used his employees to catch their clones in his multiplayer game Infinity, where he could torture and abuse them at will. After an uprising, which was cited both of real and virtual versions of Cristin Milioti’s programmer Nanette and reluctant to avatar the poisonous CEO Walton (Jimmi Simpson), Daly was killed and the cloned crew ventured into a universe that we did not now not present the paradise.

“You are survival scraps in a minute for a minute,” reveals Brooker. “Everyone else is a player in a game who will blow out idle when they see you while the clones can bleed and die.”

While Plemon’s absence on the set of the Callister Bridge can be felt, comfort comes in the form of Simpson, dirty, deer and playful as a lumbar sport, which reveals both the real buttocks and the prosthetic scrotum. Back in his trailer, fully dressed and tidy, Simpson is happy about the effect. “It made sense because Walton withdrawn everything. He is a fool, so throw in a few ox (sic) and lock them up how a giggle is integrated. I am here for every view you want. I would be a cook for Charlie if that would make him happy.”

Simioti is shared by Milioti, whose plans for a Callister Repreprise with Brooker from Covid, strikes and scheduling conflicts derail. In the meantime, their performance has made them a star as fabulous monstrous Sofia Falcone in the penguin. “I filmed these two weeks after wrapping the penguin, so it felt like I was bouncing into a whole new world,” she says. “Sofia and nanette – both! – certainly felt very different from embodied.”

The Star Trek of JJ Abrams is inspired in the aesthetics of Infinity as the Shatner era of the great acting and sexual objectification that the touchstone of the original episode was. Everything is a little shiny. An LED wall has replaced the green screen for the windows of the ship, so that the actors can react to the picture in real time when they flash. The teleporters shine, the controls react (dials can be packed, joysticks seized and lever for this hyperwarp effect are overthrown to the front) and the sliding doors really go to the Whoosh – at least when Milioti is nearby.

“It is an incredible feeling to experience your own brain,” she says with a laugh. “A 3D printed room laser has something that makes it eight years old again. It is so difficult not to make the sound so that I have done it all the time.”

Black Mirror has always scattered Easter eggs into his many worlds Brooker, whose only returning character of evolution, was Philomena Cunk, reacts to the indictment with Mock Incrednuity: “We have never repeated ourselves, so it is actually a very new thing to write the further adventure of the crew.

USS Callister is the only black mirror that was seen by Brooker’s sons so far after he was late that this “relatively benign” episode was actually “nightmare fuel in her brain”. It was also broadcast when the news of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse broke and it was one of the most cautious episodes in Brooker in combating the Incel culture in games and beyond.

“We do the toxicity discussion in this episode,” says Jessica Rhades, Brooker manager. “There is a scene in which a figure that sees itself as a nice person cannot see any other version of itself. She speaks for a nice culture with a real understanding of the isolation of someone and asks at the same time: Why should her loneliness and anger dictate what happens to my body?

Simpson, a dilapidated player, has in cerebral futurology with the dark matter of Westworld and Apple TV+. “I never get tired of making science fiction,” he says. “Everything can happen and everything is relevant. In Callister, Charlie looks what it means to be: whether we are defined by it, how we treat others, their perceptions of us or something like a soul.”

“What would it mean to run a complete copy of you to run this universe?” Adds Brooker. “Experience real emotions? Do you earn our empathy? We will be more and more concerned when AI is becoming more demanding. We are already projecting a lot on it and it will be a point, presumably where it will qualify as a living being.”

Milioti sounds caution. “We have warned so much art that could happen, and now it happens. I understand the advantages of some AI, but because it was designed by us, it will be faulty. Sometimes it means that it creates a stupid summary of the summary of a film. In other times, you will be in the way it wants to be destroyed how to destroy yourself with the process. All costs and profits are more important than humans.”

Is the fault of this age of fear at the feet of technical brothers in Infinity? From Muschus to Bezos, they certainly seem to share Daly’s little complaints and Walons Venal.

“There is definitely an element of it,” Brooker agrees. “But it is just a big business and the centuries -old money and the power supply. The optimistic part of me, which is admittedly undeveloped, would like to believe that people with malicious intentions do not get into things. And it frustrates me when people describe the show as a warning about the use of technology. Dealing with new circumstances.

As a family man, Brooker – “the most sensitive father I have ever seen” has a little more skin in the game. “When I play too open, my sons become secret in this stuff,” he shrugs his shoulders. “Fortunately, they are not stuck in the Andrew Tate world of the algorithms, who spit out shit, but I’m worried that they are sitting on YouTube and then before they know …” he says. “I have installed all the parental controls that you can do, but it is more that I have difficulty keeping up with the strange things to bring out. I thought at that time, I think.”

It could be worse. You could see your father’s manual work again. “When one of my sons was about six, he came back from school and said:” Dad, do you make a show named Black Mirror? “And I went: ‘Yeeeees … What do you think, happens in the black mirror?’ He said, “Is it where a man loves a pig?”

Season seven by Black Mirror is on Netflix April 10th.