Episode no. Series 3
Episode 6 Written by Charlie Brooker | Directed by James Hawes Running time 89 minutes | |
Original air date 21 October 2016 (2016-10-21) | ||
"Hated in the Nation" is the sixth and final episode of the third series of British science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. Written by series creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker and directed by James Hawes, it premiered on Netflix on 21 October 2016, along with the rest of series three. it is the longest episode in the series at 89 minutes.
Contents
The episode is a murder mystery, and follows Detective Karin Parke (Kelly Macdonald) and her new partner Blue Coulson (Faye Marsay) who, together with the help of National Crime Agency officer Shaun Li (Benedict Wong), try to solve the inexplicable deaths of people who were all the target of social media.
The episode was critically acclaimed.
Plot
Detective Chief Inspector Karin Parke (Kelly Macdonald) has been summoned to a hearing to discuss her involvement in a case of British national security. The scene then flashes back to the previous year, when journalist Jo Powers (Elizabeth Berrington) is found dead at home with her throat cut: an apparent suicide, though Powers was recently subjected to online death threats after she publicly lambasted a disability activist's own recent suicide. While investigating Powers' death, Parke meets her brilliant new junior partner, Blue (Faye Marsay). Parke initially believes Powers was murdered by her husband; he claims that she appeared to be going insane and swung a knife at him before killing herself.
The following day, a rapper named Tusk (Charles Badalona), who had also become a target of Internet hate for his callous treatment of a young fan, has a seizure, and is hospitalised and sedated. An MRI machine, used to determine the seizure's cause, magnetically pulls a metal object from Tusk's brain out through his eye, killing him instantly. Bizarrely, the object is revealed to be an Autonomous Drone Insect (ADI), a type of mechanical bee developed to counteract the acute collapse of the bee population; such artificial bees now fly freely throughout the United Kingdom, pollinating flowers. Jo Powers' autopsy similarly reveals an ADI lodged in the pain center of her brain, suggesting that she committed suicide to end tremendous suffering caused by the bee. Furthermore, Blue realises that both Tusk and Powers were targeted with a Twitter hashtag, '#DeathTo', applied to hated public figures. She soon links the deaths to a new website promoting a 'Game of Consequence' wherein Twitter users each day can vote to kill one hated public figure, by selecting the victim via the '#DeathTo' hashtag. Blue and Parke visit Granular, the company that created the ADIs. The head of the company, Rasmus (Jonas Karlsson), realises that the ADIs have been locally hacked. The case is now big enough for an officer of the National Crime Agency (NCA), Shaun Li (Benedict Wong), to become involved.
Parke and the investigation team find the next probable victim by locating the most detested person of the day on Twitter. They discover it is a young woman (Holli Dempsey) who took a photo simulating urination on a military war monument, thus attracting public outrage. The team drives the targeted woman to a safe house, but a huge swarm of ADIs blast through the windows and air ducts. The young woman dies in Parke and Blue's arms as one of the robotic bees climbs up her nose and burrows into her brain. Interestingly, the ADIs ignore everyone else on the premises. Noticing how precise the ADIs are at finding their target, Blue deduces that they use advanced facial recognition software, and this can only be possible if Granular has access to government records. Li reluctantly admits that this is true: the government is covertly using ADIs for mass public surveillance, which was the government's actual incentive to financially back the eco-project. Meanwhile, use of #DeathTo grows rapidly after the public learns the 'game' really does kill the most hated person in the country. The situation becomes critical as the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Ben Miles) climbs to the top of the 'most hated' list and becomes the next top target.
Parke interviews a former Granular employee who attempted suicide after receiving online hate of her own and whose flatmate, Garrett Scholes (Duncan Pow), also an ex-Granular employee, saved her after the suicide attempt. Parke is immediately suspicious of Scholes, with his remarkably strong connection to online hate experiences. Simultaneously, the ADI from inside Jo Powers' brain is discovered to contain a digital manifesto written by Scholes, which states that he wants to force people to face consequences without hiding behind online anonymity. Scholes is out of the country, but the manifesto includes a selfie taken on his phone, allowing Blue to trace his location six months ago. A raid on this former hideout commences, and Blue unearths a disk drive, which contains a system for controlling the ADIs as well as a promising 'deactivate' function. When connected to the ADI system, the drive downloads a list of everyone who has ever used the #DeathTo hashtag. The list contains the participants' names, faces, and phone identities. Parke works out that Scholes had merely used the publicly hated figures as bait; his ultimate plan is now to use the ADIs to kill the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people participating in the "game", as punishment for their own hatred.
Li triggers the 'deactivate' function to shut down the ADIs for good, though Parke suspects it is a trap and unsuccessfully warns Li that it might actually be a final command for the bees to kill their targets. It appears that the Granular company has regained control of the ADI system, but suddenly Parke's theory is proven correct, and, all across the UK, the ADIs proceed to kill the 387,036 people on the list. Returning to the present day, the scene shifts to Parke, now a public hate figure, explaining at the hearing that Blue went missing and is presumed to have committed suicide, holding herself responsible for the catastrophic loss of life. However, Parke later receives a text message secretly from Blue, who, still alive, has tracked down Garrett Scholes in a foreign, Spanish-speaking country. Blue's message to Parke reads "Got him"; as Parke smiles, Blue starts following Scholes in the street, likely to take revenge.
Production
This is the longest episode of Black Mirror, at 89 minutes. In an interview in October 2016, Brooker revealed that there were characters in the episode who could recur in the series in the future.
According to Brooker, the episode was inspired by "Scandi-Noir thrillers like the TV series The Killing and Borgen". The episode is also partly inspired by Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publicly Shamed (2015), about online shaming and its historical antecedents, and by a public backlash after Brooker wrote "Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr – where are you now that we need you?" in a satirical 2004 article about George W. Bush, in The Guardian.
Critical reception
The episode was acclaimed by critics, who praised its writing, use of Twitter, themes, acting, and final twist.
Suchandrika Chakrabarti of the Daily Mirror acclaimed the episode, giving it a perfect 5 rating and calling it "a huge achievement", stating " it's an illuminating, compelling watch, as Black Mirror does what it does best: telling us about human nature through the technology we wish for, but don't deserve". Digital Spy also gave a very enthusiastic review, considering the episode "a great example of how the show at its best can merge its heady high-concepts with more traditional storytelling to effectively hold that black mirror up to our own society". They highly praised the "once downbeat and low-key, and yet expansively devastating" climax, and called the episode "a feature length story that's captivating throughout".
Adam Chitwood of Collider noted that the episode was the "most thematically relevant... of this new batch, with a direct connection to the ugly side of social media and its lack of consequences." The Telegraph called the episode "an inspired, frost-fringed police procedural" and gave it a rating of four out of five. Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode a B+, stating "Black Mirror ends its season with a solid but unremarkable thriller". He criticized the length of the episode, despite recognizing that "at least the story has enough complications that it never felt empty."
In real life
On 11 February 2017, the website Science Alert published an article about researchers at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology working on remote-controlled pollinators using miniature drones.