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Supercar Gautier posted:Is there even anyone who liked Playtest? It's just a stack of 50 twists, each one nullifying the last and some of which repeat themselves. Instead of being a "What are the social ramifications if this tech works as intended?" story like the rest of the show, it's just about stuff going unpredictably and meaninglessly haywire. Playtest is like my second favourite episode. It's just a good existential horror story that manages to subvert the genre while still being unsettling and scary. Like, "sceptical protagonist isn't scared at first but then they get scared!" is an old saw in horror, but Playtest extends Cooper's cynicism and genre awareness far past where that normally goes, and justifiably, because he believes he's in a game with a constructed narrative and rules, so he's capable of talking himself out of being scared of giant spider monsters. It's only when the "game" begins to mess with his perception of what is real and distorts basic causality, rather than showing him simple grotesque, that he begins to break down. I really like it. The idea of being trapped in a nesting series of false realities, desperately trying to wake up but being unable to tell if you ever have, is terrifying. I also like Cooper as a protagonist. He's such a good guy who doesn't at all deserve what he's going through, he's super good natured and kind to everyone he meets, but he has this one kernel of guilt in him that his dying hallucination ferrets out and magnifies to titanic levels. I think it's telling and subtly tragic that he imagines a personality for Katie, the person guiding him through the test who he only speaks to for a few seconds in real life, that's extremely friendly and warm. It's his natural assumption that other people are just Good, contrasted with the fact that we later see that Katie is really cold and clinical and doesn't care about his death at all.
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Jan 5, 2018 12:56
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Xenaul posted:That exactly what it does though. It doesn't find globally perfect match, but simulates pairing between app users in a proximity, and then provides the match score. This is just anthropomorphizing simulation much in way Tron did. THose are not even full Cookies since their personality clearly modified, e.g. they never question the wall, not really, never work, never question money etc etc, it is just bare basic compatibility test, who knows how it holds up duress of analog world work, obligations, having to apart and other stressors. the problem is dating apps don't and would never work that way and the rest of the episode is actually a good exploration of the dating app life up until the terrible reveal.
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Jan 5, 2018 14:36
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For my money the best of this season are USS Callister, Metalhead, and Black Museum. Hang the DJ is cute and has great chemistry between the lead characters, but the premise doesn't really go anywhere I found interesting, and it doesn't make very much of its potential for existential weirdness. Crocodile is beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, but the actual script is just a boilerplate crime thriller without very remarkable writing. "The baby was born blind!" reminds me of the twist ending from a 50s suspense comic, and feels pretty tacked on in that same way. Arkangel is chronically forgettable and doesn't take its premise far enough for me. Again, beautifully shot and acted, though.
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Jan 5, 2018 14:49
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Android Blues posted:Playtest is like my second favourite episode. It's just a good existential horror story that manages to subvert the genre while still being unsettling and scary. I agree, I think playtest is a very expertly constructed horror piece. I remember watching it a few days after seeing the new IT movie and thinking it was way more effective at actually being scary, without really being any more explicit.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:08
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:drat, that wasn't my impression at all. Stupid because she wanted teddy bears and waited to see if her van buddy was dead? Here's the list: 1. Stopped the car for a full ten seconds to see what was going on with the whole murder dog chasing her friend. 2. Recognized that she should be quiet then went on a long rambling one-way speech on a radio. 3. Ran to a house to find keys for a car to escape, proceeded to hang around the house for no reason after finding the keys. 4. Stared full face into a dying dogbot that she wasn't sure was dead yet, a dogbot that has proven several times over to be unbelievably dangerous. And then of course the over-arching stupidity of getting herself and two innocent survivors killed over a crate of teddy bears. They tried to infer some stuff with her walking around the house. Obviously she had some sort of nice family life before the apocalypse. Probably had kids that died and that was part of her motivation to go out and get the teddy bears. I'm just saying that was all lost in her unrelenting gently caress ups which were coupled with the bot being nigh unstoppable.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:14
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Doltos posted:Here's the list: It stabbed her in the leg, she probably couldn't have gotten away from the tracking flechettes even if she'd known to expect them. Also this is actually an excellent moment because it implies that the protagonist and her group of survivors have never even heard of one of these things being destroyed before, and so naturally they have no idea that they repeat the flechette burst on shutdown. That's exactly the kind of nasty a thing a military hunter-killer drone would do, and it hammers home just how massive a feat she's performed by destroying one in the first place. It also contextualises the death of her friend at the start of the episode: the instant he got a faceful of trackers, he was doomed, and if she hadn't just been clipped, she would have been too.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:26
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TomViolence posted:Maybe the dogs have glitched into full-blown berserker machines bent on extinguishing all life on the planet. That wouldn't be keeping with the themes of BM. The thing with Black Mirror is that the technology itself isn't the problem, it's how people use and abuse it. A robot malfunctioning isn't a problem that comes about due to human nature spoiling advanced technology, it's just lovely technology that doesn't work right.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:35
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If memory serves she had to scale the walls to get into that house. The gate didn't open until the dog unlocked them. She likely couldn't get the car out until the dog was already in the house(and it wouldn't start anyways when she tried.) During her dumb as poo poo radio transmissions she did make comments about finding medical supplies, but considering she was leaving blood trails for most of the episode it wasn't crazy for her to try and hide out for a time.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:36
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Slime posted:That wouldn't be keeping with the themes of BM. The thing with Black Mirror is that the technology itself isn't the problem, it's how people use and abuse it. A robot malfunctioning isn't a problem that comes about due to human nature spoiling advanced technology, it's just lovely technology that doesn't work right. You could make the argument that building a semi-autonomous killdrone with advanced tracking capabilities is in itself an abuse of technology, and anything that follows from there is ultimately a human fuckup to begin with. That seems to be pretty much the moral thesis of the episode, insofar as it has one.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:40
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Horizon Zero Dawn had a much better story idea of "what if drones, but too much" than Metalhead. Because HZD at least did some loving worldbuilding to tell us why the robots were created and why they rebelled.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:42
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WampaLord posted:Horizon Zero Dawn had a much better story idea of "what if drones, but too much" than Metalhead. not every story needs a huge, developed world behind it. sometimes it's nice to have that, but sometimes it's cool to leave it open and just wonder why things are they way they are as well. that's what i liked most about that episode.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:47
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Like, it's very much a story that is acutely aware of how warfare might change and deform in the near future, that's why the dog looks like a Boston Dynamics unit instead of a Terminator-style killer robot. The underlying message seems to be, "look, if we build an artificial soldier that kills people without requiring human input or even oversight, that could have horrible humanitarian consequences". There's no guarantee this is even a full scale apocalypse. This could just be the aftermath of a foreign country waging war on the country where this takes place, leaving the dogs behind, as others in the thread have suggested, like unexploded landmines.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:47
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Lovechop posted:not every story needs a huge, developed world behind it. sometimes it's nice to have that, but sometimes it's cool to leave it open and just wonder why things are they way they are as well. that's what i liked most about that episode. 
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Jan 5, 2018 16:49
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also it seems like if you live in a world with killerbots, you should be better prepared against them like, a bucket of paint reduced the threat of the thing by 90%, they should have one around whenever they go outside or a basic plastic welder mask or some poo poo to protect against the majority of the tracker burst
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Jan 5, 2018 16:53
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Lovechop posted:not every story needs a huge, developed world behind it. sometimes it's nice to have that, but sometimes it's cool to leave it open and just wonder why things are they way they are as well. that's what i liked most about that episode. This is where we have to disagree hard. I need something, anything to latch onto. loving one line about the dogs or who the kid was would have helped a ton. I'm not saying I need a "huge, developed world" but you need something more than what we got. It's like they went out of their way to purposefully cripple their story. But this is just a problem I have in general with stories that don't actually tell you anything and expect you to make up your own story in your head.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:54
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WampaLord posted:But this is just a problem I have in general with stories that don't actually tell you anything and expect you to make up your own story in your head. the story was in Maxine Peake's character and her situation of having to try to overcome an almost unstoppable, unrelenting enemy. it became kind of a personal story in this aspect, rather than a story about society as a whole or anything. where the dogs came from and what their story is doesn't matter too much to me. the enemy could have been anything at all. also, i think since this episode was kind of based on old horror/monster movie guidelines, the less you know about the 'monster' the more terrifying it is. every time the dog did something new i was sort of like 'what the gently caress, it can do that?' the mystery made it a lot more interesting to me in that aspect. however, i do also think that the dog is very lovable and sweet and cuddleable and i'd like to pet it and tell it i love it
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Jan 5, 2018 17:07
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Lovechop posted:the story was in Maxine Peake's character and her situation of having to try to overcome an almost unstoppable, unrelenting enemy. Yea, and I've seen that story a million times, in every slasher movie. At least the slasher movies usually give you some backstory as to how the slasher came to be.
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Jan 5, 2018 17:10
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Android Blues posted:It stabbed her in the leg, she probably couldn't have gotten away from the tracking flechettes even if she'd known to expect them. She killed it by dumping paint on it then bashing it with a rock. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say other survivors have killed those things before. They just happen to be very hard to kill and a lot of them.
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Jan 5, 2018 17:25
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I think it's interesting that Metalhead is getting 10x the discussion that Callister is getting, even though we'd probably all agree on which is Better. I wouldn't want a full season of "insert your own world building" but it's fun to have an episode where all we can do is wonder. 15MM was the same way to me. Nobody complains that there wasn't a lingering shot of a newspaper clipping explaining how world War 3 led to their secure underground bunker powered by bikes. Maybe there was no world building because there is no World anymore? Just desolate dog country. Bleak as hell and in black and white because dogs can't see color. I love the interpretation that they're landmines, and even though the Event is long since past, they're still making the world uninhabitable. Did anyone else watch Metalhead with an armchair tactician? My buddy was being super annoying and whining that "why didn't she just bring a big soup pot from the kitchen and throw it over the robot after she shot it"
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Jan 5, 2018 17:26
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Doltos posted:She killed it by dumping paint on it then bashing it with a rock. No, she shot it with a shotgun twice.
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Jan 5, 2018 17:28
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The dogs usually have guns so going at it with a paint can and rock is a bad idea when it will just shoot you. I also don’t think they’re from a war. They just replaced security guards in a world where killing thieves is okay, presumably because society was collapsing and it was the only way to stop them
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Jan 5, 2018 17:31
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WampaLord posted:No, she shot it with a shotgun twice. Or whatever
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Jan 5, 2018 17:34
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There's not that much to discuss with Callister. I guess you can talk about how the structure of the plan ends up exactly mirroring star trek plot points (sacrificing someome in the engine room like in WoK and Abrams trek 2, unironically navigating an asteroid belt, trippy deletion visual effects, probably more but I am not very familiar with Trek) and how pretty coder lady actually gets to live the fantasy the CTO wanted throughout the episode and afterwards. But there isn't really any part that's out of place or demands explanation.
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Jan 5, 2018 17:37
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Yeah, that's my point, really. An episode like Callister, with a nice satisfying ending, and where every question is answered with both a show and a tell, is fun but sterile. I had a better time watching Callister than watching Metalhead, but if I had to spend an extra hour talking about one of the episodes it'd definitely be Metalhead
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Jan 5, 2018 17:53
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Doltos posted:She killed it by dumping paint on it then bashing it with a rock. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say other survivors have killed those things before. They just happen to be very hard to kill and a lot of them. Here's how the dog got destroyed, start to finish: - Fell off a cliff while inside a spinning car that ricocheted off the cliff wall several times. This damages its arm and makes it unable to climb or use its gun. If it could do either, it would have killed Bella easily while she was hiding in the tree. - Bella exhausts its battery by pestering it with sweets in what is honestly a pretty superhuman feat of endurance, patience and quick thinking. Even though she has no flechettes in her and she makes it a fair distance away, it's still able to track her when it recharges. - Bella throws paint on it to obscure its vision. It can still track her by sound. - Bella finds a shotgun, something that would be rare if this takes place in Britain, and manages to shoot it point blank, reload, and shoot again while it's stabbing her in the leg with a knife. That's an astonishing amount of work, trauma, and good luck to take care of one of these things. If it wasn't for the car wreck at the start of the episode she would just have been summarily shot in the head moments after her friends or whenever the dog caught up to her later.
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Jan 5, 2018 18:02
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Lovechop posted:the story was in Maxine Peake's character and her situation of having to try to overcome an almost unstoppable, unrelenting enemy. it became kind of a personal story in this aspect, rather than a story about society as a whole or anything. where the dogs came from and what their story is doesn't matter too much to me. the enemy could have been anything at all. I don't think there is anything that explicitly specifies that drone dogs are "fully automated" As a matter of fact didn't someone mentioned that the reason it went into "deep sleep" during the tree stalking sequence was because operator had to step away? It is basically insurance adjuster style independent contractor security guard running it. Hence why it mostly relies on enhanced sight and trackers.
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Jan 5, 2018 18:28
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Xenaul posted:I don't think there is anything that explicitly specifies that drone dogs are "fully automated" As a matter of fact didn't someone mentioned that the reason it went into "deep sleep" during the tree stalking sequence was because operator had to step away? It is basically insurance adjuster style independent contractor security guard running it. Hence why it mostly relies on enhanced sight and trackers. No, the reason it shuts down during the tree sequence is because Bella is depleting its battery by forcing it to wake up from sleep mode inefficiently. She waits until its systems are fully offline and then wakes it up so it wastes a bunch of energy rebooting. Then the sun rises and, since the dog is solar powered, its battery recharges and it's active again. I don't know where you got "an operator had to step away" from.
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Jan 5, 2018 18:32
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Android Blues posted:I don't know where you got "an operator had to step away" from. Because that was the original story before they decided to remove all world building from the episode. The quote has been posted in this thread before, but I can't be arsed to dig it up.
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Jan 5, 2018 18:38
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The fact that they can be damaged and ultimately destroyed makes them much more terrifying to me. These things are very close to a possible reality, as opposed to something like the T-1000. For me they get more scary as they get cheaper and easier to produce, not as they get more invincible.Xenaul posted:I don't think there is anything that explicitly specifies that drone dogs are "fully automated" As a matter of fact didn't someone mentioned that the reason it went into "deep sleep" during the tree stalking sequence was because operator had to step away? It is basically insurance adjuster style independent contractor security guard running it. Hence why it mostly relies on enhanced sight and trackers. They did scrap that scene though. Possibly to keep the automation ambiguous as well. I actually like the ambiguity of this episode because it can be interpreted in multiple ways and it offers views of different hellish futures.
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Jan 5, 2018 18:40
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It was an idea they played with and didn’t do. Not sure how you watch the episode and decide her running down the bots battery has anything to do with a human operator that’s never even hinted at.
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Jan 5, 2018 18:42
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Everything the dog does reads as totally automated. I would be stunned if this episode was directed with an operator in mind (writing doesn't matter).
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Jan 5, 2018 18:42
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Fans posted:It was an idea they played with and didn’t do. Not sure how you watch the episode and decide her running down the bots battery has anything to do with a human operator that’s never even hinted at. Of course, but I was just responding to the point of "Where the hell did you get the idea that it might have been human operated from?" It's a miscommunication due to the thread, not due to the episode.
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Jan 5, 2018 18:46
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Whoever said that Metalhead reminded them of a student film was exactly right. "do you get it? The teddy bears? Do you get it?? It's so HUMAN in an INHUMAN world!!"
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Jan 5, 2018 18:48
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I didn't really get what the bears were going for. (I don't know what human in an inhuman world means.) You'd think that the bears would normally be used to show how mistaken the characters were about how dangerous the dogs were but survival lady seemed to be well aware. Without context on whether the dogs were security or around for some other reason we can't really see it as an indication of the dogs' disproportionate response either. We already knew that what they were going for was at best morphine. Maybe it was supposed to be a reveal that the sick person was a child? Did we know that pre-bear? I forgot.
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Jan 5, 2018 19:01
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Android Blues posted:
Black Mirror - what if karma, but too much?
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Jan 5, 2018 19:02
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I feel like you could end every BM episode with Playtest's ending and it would be roughly as meaningful.
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Jan 5, 2018 19:07
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Last shot of Metalhead should have been a fat nerd in a generic cubicle somewhere spilling a Big Gulp on his Xbox controller in anger as the drone dog feed on his screen goes dark.
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Jan 5, 2018 19:09
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No I think it would be more BM to end with a color flashback to the near present and the attractive early-30s multiracial couple who thoughtlessly designed the dogs + their gorgeous modern apartment.
No Wave fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 19:12
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No Wave posted:I didn't really get what the bears were going for. (I don't know what human in an inhuman world means.) You'd think that the bears would normally be used to show how mistaken the characters were about how dangerous the dogs were but survival lady seemed to be well aware. Without context on whether the dogs were security or around for some other reason we can't really see it as an indication of the dogs' disproportionate response either. We already knew that what they were going for was at best morphine. Maybe it was supposed to be a reveal that the sick person was a child? Did we know that pre-bear? I forgot. Yeah, we didn't know that the sick person was a child until the bears reveal, so that's sort of what they're "for" I guess.
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Jan 5, 2018 19:22
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Well after she wears the dogs battery down in metalhead... why doesn't she throw her coat over it so it cant re-charge in the sun while she makes her escape?
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Jan 5, 2018 19:30
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