Abstract
“Black Museum,” the fourth season finale of Black Mirror (2011–), establishes for the first time that all the episodes of the series are in fact taking place in a single narrative storyworld. This chapter thus reads “Black Museum” as Black Mirror’s first articulation of its overall series mythology: the development and enslavement of artificially intelligent minds called “cookies,” digital copies of human minds whose rights and freedoms are incredibly precarious and a site of ongoing political struggle. “Black Museum” tells us the story of one of the main architects of this sociotechnological regime, as well as the story of the young black woman who seeks him out both for revenge and to liberate the enslaved cookie of her deceased father; the episode thus unites Black Mirror’s typical meditation on the emergence of transhuman technologies with new questions of anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle. The episode is also singular in the context of Black Mirror for its complex but overall happy ending, exemplifying the strange notion of “hope with teeth” that China Miéville argues is necessary for utopian thinking in the present.
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Notes
- 1.
A handful of episodes seem to buck this general pattern of negativity, however ambiguously; excepting the ostensibly upbeat endings of episodes like “USS Callister” (04.01), “San Junipero” (03.04), and “Hang the DJ” (04.04), which each appear more complicated upon reflection, the primary mode of counterexample to this claim is not unqualified victory for the characters but rather compensatory delight in vicious revenge, as indeed happens at the end of “Black Museum,” or in “Hated in the Nation” (03.06). I return to this question of endings in my conclusion.
- 2.
Many “guides” to the shared universe of Black Mirror can be found on the Internet, originating from both before and after “Black Museum”; two especially useful ones for me in the creation of this chapter were Indiewire’s “‘Black Mirror’ Easter Eggs: How All the Episodes Connect in Charlie Brooker’s Dark Universe” (Nguyen, 2018) and Den of Geek’s “Black Mirror’s Shared Universe Is Confirmed - Here Is What It Looks Like” (Bojalad, 2018).
- 3.
Fantasy Island introduces mystery about the nature of Mr. Roarke’s (Ricardo Montalbán) abilities and powers, ultimately veering into the supernatural. Magnum, P.I. began to play with the idea that Higgins (John Hillerman) was actually Thomas Magnum’s (Tom Selleck) mysterious employer Robin Masters. Quantum Leap began devoting particular attention to intersections with Sam (Scott Bakula) and Al’s (Dean Stockwell) personal histories as the series went on, as well as began devoting more and more attention to character speculation about the true rules and rationales governing Sam’s displacement in time; the series even introduced an “Evil Leaper” as potential ongoing antagonist in its fifth and final season.
- 4.
The paradigmatic discussion of this sort of fan theorization, with Star Trek as its key example, remains Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (2nd ed., 2013). The way fans led the move to understand Black Mirror as a shared universe, with Charlie Brooker finally acceding only much later, might well be seen as a contemporary parallel to the fan-led development of Trek’s backstory.
- 5.
There have long been rumors of a possible sequel to the classic season three episode “San Junipero,” as well as discussion of a possible sequel episode or even spinoff series to “USS Callister”—but as of Bandersnatch (2018) no episode of Black Mirror has directly followed on any other.
- 6.
There are, additionally, nondiegetic connections to other episodes: the white lab rats on whom the telepathic implant is tested are named Kenny and Hector after the protagonists of “Shut Up and Dance” (03.03), while the gas station at the beginning of the episode is called BRB Connect, a likely reference to “Be Right Back” (02.01). See Tallerico.
- 7.
There are at least two possible exceptions to this claim: both “Fifteen Million Merits” (01.02) and “Metalhead” (04.05) seem to take place in dystopian distant futures featuring radical social changes beyond even what is seen in “Black Museum,” and generally speaking seem incompatible with developments depicted in the other episodes. But both are ultimately revealed to be fictional texts within the Black Mirror universe; a character in “Black Museum” is seen reading a 15M Merits comic book, while “Metalhead” is revealed to be a video game in “Bandersnatch.” “Bandersnatch” itself has an ambiguous relationship to the shared Black Mirror storyworld, befitting its multiple-paths structure—and it is perhaps noteworthy that although it was released as the next episode after “Black Museum,” it is actually the first chronologically, taking place mostly in the mid-1980s—and so the pair taken together bookend the full span of Black Mirror’s storyworld, from the recent past to the near future.
- 8.
That Haynes is sensitive to this heat, while Nish is not, presages the reversal at the end of the episode.
- 9.
Here again the episode seems to want to wrestle with its own racial dynamics; Jack, Emily, and the woman Jack checks out in the elevator are all black, while Carrie is white.
- 10.
Notably, Haynes says he wanted to get a celebrity cookie at first, but there were too many rights and royalty issues—so he settled for a convicted murderer instead.
- 11.
It is not actually explained why the keychain machine would function this way, as opposed to producing a keychain of only Clayton’s cookie, or indeed of both of them together (or, for that matter, being unable to function at all after the modifications to the program Nish has made). Essentially we are asked to take it on faith that this revenge plot can be executed in a way that does not require Nish to create yet another suffering digital version of her father, or at the very least attribute the result to her technical genius.
- 12.
A second viewing reveals that almost all of the episode can be read differently in light of these revelations, from the moment Nish explains to Haynes that “My dad lives out here; it’s his birthday, so my mom just wants to surprise him.” Likewise, Haynes’s Crypt-keeperesque introduction of the Jack/Carrie narrative with “You ever have one of those relationships where you just can’t get someone out of your head?” results in a wry smile from Nish that looks entirely different once the reality of her situation is revealed.
- 13.
As the internet proverb goes, if you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
- 14.
Indeed, the immediately preceding episode of the series is “Metalhead,” in which a similarly desolate landscape proves apocalyptic in precise accordance with the usual genre convention.
- 15.
That is, the dystopian narrative typically contains within itself the seeds of utopia; this might be the explicit context of the plot (as in the classic dystopian narrative, the fight to overthrow the dystopian regime) or more implicitly a warning to the present not to allow the dystopia to emerge. The anti-utopian narrative, in contrast, does not imagine true progress as being possible; it shows even the most good-hearted and noble attempts to reform society turning sour. See McAlear.
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Canavan, G. (2019). Hope, with Teeth: On “Black Museum”. In: McSweeney, T., Joy, S. (eds) Through the Black Mirror. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19458-1_20
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