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Scribbles About TV: Black Mirror S1 Ep 2: 15 Million Merits

Okay... so this episode is a little bit more what I've come to expect from Black Mirror I guess... so had I watched the episodes in order I think this would maybe make more sense to me than The National Anthem... which I reviewed last week. This is a complete dystopia in a really real and kind of beautiful way... I just kind of liked how they showed everything.

So this episode kind of just puts us in the world with little explanation... to me it seemed like a world that was obsessed with fitness and looks. It showed people in this confined space with no windows or anything to really see or do except these giant screens that everyone is forced to watch at all times. I think they get "merits" which is their form of currency by riding an exercise bike and they mostly use merits for food or to skip over advertisements... which actually costs them more than their food. They also don't really interact with anyone... most of their emotions are seen through Avatars similar to the Wii Me's or the Bitmoji's. And those sort of show a version of themselves that are literally more animated than their regular selves. So they show a girl pouting in real life and in the game its almost severe stink eye.

Anyway our main character in this is a man named Bing, who kind of goes against the system a little bit because he skips ads and he wants more to life than this existence that they have. And he meets a girl named Abi that he kind of has a crush on... and he ends up spending pretty much all his merits on a ticket for her to enter a singing competition. Sometimes people wait months to see a judge for the singing competitions, she saw judges right away and they immediately dismissed her as a mediocre singer and they say that she would do a lot better on Judge Wraith's channel... which is advertised as "The hottest girls in the worst situations." And that drives Bing crazy and he eventually gets back on the singing competition... but he has a different sort of act that involves speaking his mind.

Sooo... I liked this episode at first... now that I feel like I'm sitting with it a little bit more... it was good it was just kind of all over the place. I thought it was going to focus more on the singing competition and what happened to the girl for not succeeding in that competition because that sounded bad... it was still good... I really liked Daniel Kaluuya in this episode... he played Bing- you might know him as Chris in Get Out... he's just a good actor and I can see how this character was sort of like what happened before he got cast in get out. It was very cool.

So overall... I'd maybe give this 3 and a quarter stars... idk if it's quite four stars because... idk I just thought there could have been some better character development and it wasn't quite what I was expecting... but it was still a good episode overall and it's probably a very classic episode of this show... I just don't know if I can say I liked it as much as the first episode.

Allright! Hope you guys liked this review!

Byeee!
-Shannon

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