When i saw a few episodes from the earlier seasons it was nauseatingly gory and alarming instead of Dystopian. The Black Mirror series, i felt, was meant to scare people on how irresponsible use of technology will destroy the fabric of humanity. The latest season seems to be a much-diluted version when it comes to the disturbing reality of the future and has a lot of human emotion mixed in as the base theme. The very first episode made me wonder at how realistic the possibility of such a scenario happening and, in some cases, how it is already happening!!
There is a happy couple, an engineer husband and a schoolteacher wife, who are trying hard to get pregnant and suddenly the wife is diagnosed with a fatal disease, which is albeit uncurable by present day medication. There is an up-and-coming startup who offers an experimental treatment at a limited cost which the husband readily agrees to. Initially, the monthly subscription for the treatment is a bit manageable, but the side effects being the wife feels drowsy all the time and sleeps for hours together. Happy that she survived the ailment but suffering silently over the additional shifts he has to take, the husband goes through the motions of his life monotonously. They visit the clinic that offered them this treatment for consult where in the agent says, the software installed on the brain of the patient requires maintenance and the patch runs for several hours and oversleep is an expected side effect. To overcome the maintenance window, the agent suggests them to go for a plan upgrade. The husband reluctantly agrees. Soon after the wife suddenly starts spouting meaningless quotes about products and services, which scares not just the couple but also the parents of the kids in her school. When they revisit the agency, they confirm that the product comes with promotional ads and to overcome the ads they need to opt for a higher plan which is expensive. The husband resorts to dubious means to get the payment settled and even though the attempts may seem outrageous the scary reality being how close to real life it has become in present day world!! With all those antics in the names of reels by insta influencers and YouTube "celebrities" the action taken by the husband is hardly surprising and it says so much about the society we've got accustomed to !!! Eventually the monthly subscription bill takes its toll not just on their personal life but also on their professional lives as well, all of which culminates in a tragic ending.
When they started these series years ago, the makers themselves wouldn't have realized how much of their stories would be mirroring real life and how soon reality will catch up with what was proposed as fiction!!! I shudder at the thought of other stories in this series wondering how close or how far we are from seeing it happen in our own time!!!
Comments