LONDON — The fourth season of British tech-horror television show Black Mirror is expected to take on some new themes this year, including phones “talking, thinking, or doing some other bullshit,” according to producers.
“I’m really excited for the season,” said show creator Charlie Brooker. “The final episode in particular, I think, is astounding: it’s about a smartphone gaining sentience and expressing its feelings. At least, that’s what I think it means. The whole thing is kind of convoluted.”
Initial reactions to the never-before-done premise of AI’s ability to feel emotions have been mostly positive.
“Phones having feelings? Yassssssss. Finally,” said Black Mirror message board moderator Jessica Cousins. “This entire season, I’ll watch the show wearing a hat, because that’ll make it easier to clean up the mess when my mind is blown.”
However, some fans of the show remained skeptical.
“So the phones are supposed to have feelings like me?” asked longtime Black Mirror fan Jake Welch. “Does that mean the phones could, like, judge you, or make fun of your naked body? Because I don’t like that, and don’t want to think of a world where that can happen.”
Black Mirror’s production staff seemed to feed off the hype for the new episodes.
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“We’re doubling down on the idea that phones are bad,” said producer John Tickle. “The past three seasons, we hammered that pretty hard, but this season, we’re going even harder on that basic point: smartphones are shit for you.”
With the intense pressure of creating a show routinely called “brilliant,” the staff outsourced some of the scripts for individual episodes.
“We wanted to get the real good shit,” said Tickle. “So we audited a Bay Mills Community College freshman philosophy class. Those kids had some just insane ideas about our relationships to our phones and fake news in social media that we’d never even considered.”
Black Mirror producers also announced that the fifth season will be heavily influenced by a Tales From the Crypt VHS boxset that one of the interns found in their parents’ attic.
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Article by Grant Stiles @lasersandpizza.