Black Mirror - White Christmas

The “incredibly handsome” (as my buddy at works often says when discussing him on Mad Men) Jon Hamm is Matt, cooking food on the stove of some wintry cabin seemingly in the middle of some snow-covered nowhere for the tortured Joe (Rafe Spall), concealing something. Matt is very interested in getting Joe to talk…there’s a reason behind this but Matt has that million dollar smile and prying charm that might just get Joe to open up and confess his soul. Matt’s got quite a story to tell, also. He’s responsible for the “control” of a type of code on a chip that incorporates the personality and quirks of whoever it is surgically implanted into. Also Matt had a “service” on the side which utilized the “Z-eye” device, implanted for various reasons, including “point of view” (those his clients see, Matt and his select group of “peepers” are privy to as the eyes work as a type of recording camera) and obscuration when a remote control puts a “mental block” on another, removing the ability to see or hear the person using it. When a nerdy client is attracted to the wrong young woman at a work party (he doesn’t work there as Matt indicates, through his specific pickup expertise, that these kinds of functions are ideal for the possibility of getting laid), lured back to her apartment, encouraging her to “listen to the voices” (not understanding that she really hears voices requesting her to be homicidal!), succumbing to a poisoned drink that kills him; Matt doesn’t report the murder because it would indict him and his salacious enterprise. Joe then, through persistent urging, frees his burdened soul to Matt by speaking about the wife that left him, pregnant, using the mental block that eventually led to him being banned from going near her (he tries his best to just approach her and she won’t allow it). She abandons him and her own career, going to live with her father. So every Christmas, Joe parks his car a piece from the home and looks at his wife and [presumably] daughter, longing to be a family. Well, when she perishes in a train accident, Joe grieves and then goes to see the daughter he’s never been able to visualize (the mental block extended to his child, a terrible sentence to accompany not seeing his wife) outside the block. He’s in for quite a surprise and fully understands why his wife did indeed leave him. She had quite the secret and this involved a friend of his! Well, Joe doesn’t react to well and makes the mistake of swinging a snowglobe in the direction of his former love’s father. Clever use of technology to tell a number of stories involving optical devices in terms of voyeurism, punishment, and servitude. The idea that code can literally create a presence copied from an actual person and be used to serve, influence, and manipulate is foretold imaginatively and profoundly. Like how the coded copy of a vain woman is tortured through the use of time while “imprisoned” in a pod thanks to Matt who has her doing nothing for a month or Matt getting a confession not from the actual criminal but the code implanted in him; these are examples of how technology advances “quality of life” (the copy serving the person it come from) and criminal interrogation. Hamm brings the engaging personality even as he’s proven to be a real sleaze while Rafe gives us a lot of anguish. Seeing through the perspective of the code as it is being surgically plucked from the head, and the bodily copy looking up at Matt as if he were God are really impressive. And Matt guiding a nerd through the process of picking up a lady, investigating those in his line of sight through their own histories in order to keep his client from failing shows the technological advances of the future that might not be so far away.