She seems horrified at the thought that she could do what she did. The Victoria we know has no memory, no idea she’s done anything wrong. Even still, Victoria’s error happened long before we meet her. While we typically are given a reasonably sympathetic protagonist, Victoria is someone who we discover we should hate. This episode throws us completely off our game, asking moral questions that feel, in many ways, too real even for Black Mirror. While much of Black Mirror acts as a cautionary tale against technology that advances too far, the most high-tech part of “White Bear” is the cell phones visitors use to intimidate Victoria. Characteristically, Black Mirror doesn’t offer any obvious answers, no sense of conclusion, nothing to take from the episode except more questions. Over the episode’s end credits, we see the employees and visitors of White Bear Justice Park preparing to terrorize Victoria another day.Īnd that’s it. She is paraded, strapped to her chair, through the crowd of people shouting death threats at her before her memory wiped for the next day of punishment. Victoria, learning about her past from a blank memory, is clearly in distress it’s evident that, without her memories, she deeply regrets what she’s done. Since she reveled in being witness to Jemima in anguish, she now undergoes daily psychological torture, met only with witnesses (the general public) who recording her suffering. While her fiance killed himself in custody, Victoria was labeled a “uniquely wicked and poisonous individual” and sentenced to a punishment proportional to her crime of filming Jemima’s death. In an info dump/twist combination, the audience learns alongside her that she and her late fiance abducted and murdered a little girl, Jemima ( Imani Jackman), who is remembered by the symbol of her white bear. Victoria, as we come to learn her name is, was not the hero of this story. No longer in an action-packed situation, our hero now seems to be an unwilling guest on some sort kind of twisted game show. She’s pushed into a chair and strapped down as her ally and pursuers bow. The walls open up, and she’s met with cheers and applause from a faceless audience. But when she pulls the trigger, confetti escapes instead of a bullet. Her foes are almost victorious, but, after getting out of a few tight spots, our hero finds herself on the right end of a shotgun, pointing it at one of her pursuers. The episode feels like one long action setpiece, with our hero and her ally narrowly escaping a few anonymous violent people who are attempting to protect the signal transmitter. Much like us, she’s struggling to figure it all out as she goes along. Our protagonist, one of the few people not controlled by the signal, begins the episode with no memory: no understanding of who she is, where she is, or why she is there. The presence of these hypnotizing devices can easily deceive us into thinking that “White Bear” is yet another cautionary tale against being too attached to technology, but this episode’s intentions are far more unnerving. The controlled follow her around, recording her actions while she desperately begs for their help. The episode follows a woman ( Lenora Crichlow) attempting to take out a signal transmitter which is controlling those around her via their device screens. “White Bear,” the second episode of the series’ second season, marks one of these divergences. But every so often they switch it up a little. The show, whose name refers to the reflection we receive from a phone or tablet screen turned off, typically deals with what could happen if we let technology get out of hand. With sympathetic protagonists who feel like they are continually subjected to the worst possible outcome, Black Mirror often feels like a train wreck that you can’t look away from. The anthology series deals with different characters, settings, and realities, producing a variety of horrifying outcomes for its protagonists, many of which don’t feel too out of reach from our own lives. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Black Mirror, you know it’s a show that refuses to be easily dismissed.
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