Black Mirror: White Bear
Okay, so as soon as this episode got going it was easy to guess there would be some sort of twist? We tried to work out what it was. My boyfriend guessed that all the characters were actually inside some giant computer program, and Victoria was a virus, and the hunters were just particularly stylish/creative anti-virus programs-
-he wasn’t that far off, actually.
Actually Victoria was a child-killer, or one half of a duo of child-killers- her boyfriend killed a little girl while she filmed it. Now she’s basically condemned to her own personal hell, locked up in the ‘White Bear Justice Park’ and running for her life everyday from crazed killers and senseless phone-carrying zombies filming her, before her memory is erased and she has to do it all over again. Wait, it gets worse! The Justice Park is open to the public, where visitors are encouraged to pick up their phones and follow Victoria around at a distance, filming her terror. Later they get to hurl things at her while she’s behind glass. There are kids there, too, so this is obviously considered a fun family day out-
Ouch.
Definitely a response to the discourse on the death penalty that pops up whenever something really bad and involving a child happens in Britain. Victoria wasn’t actually punished with death, but at the end we see her begging for it. The actors involved in the Justice Park (lulling her into a false sense of security before trying to kill her, chasing her with masks and chainsaws…) seem to be enjoying themselves a little too much. There’s a stall where people can buy blood-covered sponges to throw at Victoria. (For £2.) At what point has she been punished enough? Probably never, no-one seems like they’re going to stop anytime soon and it must be a pretty good moneymaker.
So yes. All very…line-blurry. And the details of what Victoria actually did to the girl were left pretty vague, it seemed like her (now dead) boyfriend actually commited the crime and she ‘just’ filmed it without intervening. Will people eventually get tired of watching her cower in terror and they’ll move a new criminal in? Will she eventually just die from the terror and the stress? (Lenora Crichlow deserves all the BAFTAs for this, by the way.) What exactly was Victoria’s relation to her victim, since she was apparently close enough to her to film her playing happily in a house once?
I remember ages ago I read an interview with Martin Freeman where the Bulger killers were brought up for some reason, and he said he’d have stoned those kids to death given half the chance. If you know about that case, you probably know that’s not an uncommon reaction, but it’s what I was thinking of during this episode…that park got everyone to join in with the stone-throwing, and they all seemed pretty happy about it…