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Oh yes, the best TV Christmas specials are the ones that give you nightmares for months and have you hiding under the sheets/sofa, hey whatever you want to hide under! 🙂

The 2014 Black Mirror special “White Christmas” is actually my favorite episode of the whole series.

Written by series creator/showrunner Charlie Brooker, with the three part structure apparently inspired by Dead of Night (1945) and Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). The episode opens in a remote Arctic (?) cabin on Christmas Day where two men have been apparently cooped up with each other for five years, supposedly for committing some transgression(s) in the real world. Matt (played by Jon Hamm) starts out by complaining about how his companion Joe (played by Rafe Spall) is uncommunicative and breaks the ice by telling him of the roast potatoes he’s cooking for Christmas Day and then proceeds to tell him of this tech dating service he ran and uses an example of a particular client, Harry (played by Rasmus Hardicker), that he helped crash a company Christmas party at a pub/restaurant to pick up a girl.

This first story in the 3 parter was inspired by Brooker’s observations of people using Bluetooth devices in public and apparently talking to themselves and acting as if they were insane. And also obviously there is the whole idea of the group of guys in Matt’s dating service voyeuristically watching the POV of Harry (played by Rasmus Hardicker) in an online experience as he meets Jennifer (played by Natalia Tenner) at the party. Matt explains to Joe that he prefers office parties to depressing singles events because the women at the corporate events are sick of the male employees they’ve had to suffer with all year (“regulation office ass-clowns”) and that one of the tricks he employs is to have the client first approach the female friend or acquaintance of the target girl as a way to generate genuine interest. And the “horse story” that Matt has Harry use as an icebreaker is a variation of stories that real pickup artists use, and I think that it is brilliantly conceived by Brooker and is intriguing enough to be believable.

Joe asks if Matt continued to watch if the planned seduction was successful when the pair “got down to business” and he says “of course not” which of course is a total lie as he and his pals salaciously watched every single minute of it! 😋

Both Harry and Jennifer hit it off because they are both outsiders and Jennifer opines that “there is no such thing as real people” which ties in with the voices in her head. She mistakenly interprets Harry’s tele conversation with Matt as an example of her own condition and she then proceeds to kill them both with a poisoned drink. Matt’s wife Claire (played by Grainne Keenan) discovers Matt’s nefarious activities and proceeds to block him Facebook-style with the Z-Eyes (“zed-eyes”) tech device implanted in all of them. It is sort of a high-tech version of the British punishment of a person being “sent to Coventry”, that is being ostracized and ignored by the community in an attempt to isolate the miscreant. Matt admits that “silence can be oppressive.”

Matt then tells Harry that the pickup service wasn’t his real job. His real job, it turns out, involves creating “cookies”, that is virtual servants that are a digital clone of the client’s own personality, generated by a chip in an egg-shaped container (“eggs and toast”). He relates an example of a typical client, Greta (played by Oona Chaplin), who has a clone of herself created to run her household, and yes cook toast to her exact specifications.

But it is in the training that things get really nasty because when Greta’s clone refuses to cooperate Matt first gives her an accelerated 3 weeks of total isolation ( with no sleep! 😧) and then 6 months! 😵‍💫

Joe says that this treatment is cruel and barbaric (it is, of course) and Matt responds by saying that “it wasn’t really real so it’s not barbaric.” The line between “real” and not real is totally blurred here. And it brings up the whole notion of uploading your consciousness into a computer. Personally, I think that it would be exactly like it is presented here. In the unlikely scenario that somehow science and technology could produce a total instant physical clone of you, it would be a copy of you, not “you.” Your consciousness/”sense of I” wouldn’t suddenly jump into the new body; you would think and feel exactly like you always have. And if you died, that would be it, and your clone would go on living on its own trajectory. This scenario differs from the Ray Kurzweil scenario where he thinks you would go on living forever, or whatever. He is a very smart man but I still personally beg to differ. But the clone would be its own person and would suffer just like anybody else.

The choice of music in this sequence, the overture from Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie (La Gazza Grada), was distracting for me in that I always associate it with the scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex and his droogs encounter Billy Boy and his droogs in an abandoned theater assaulting a “weepy young devotchka.”

Matt does touch upon the fact that obviously Joe is as guilty as he is, and asks him: “Why are you here? No one ends up here unless things went totally shit out there.” He does get Joe to finally drop his guard and open up and tell his story. But Matt also says that their “friendly” conversation is “not an interrogation” which is revealed later to be a total lie, of course. Matt says that “it’s just us here”, echoing his B.S. earlier in covering his ass from the pickup service shenanigans.

Joe reveals that he is not as good a man as he seems and tells him how he found out that his fiancé Beth (Janet Montgomery) was pregnant and is horrified to learn that she wants to abort the baby. Eventually one of their “rows” results in Beth blocking Joe so he can’t interact with her because she is just a blurred gray silhouette with a muffled voice (and he appears the same way to her). But actually Beth does have the child and Joe is able to see her silhouette at Christmas time when Beth visits her father (Ken Drury). When Beth dies in a train accident Joe is able to actually see “his” daughter, who is revealed to be a product of an affair Beth had with their mutual friend Tim (Dan Li). In a confrontation with her father, Joe ends up smashing him in the head with a Christmas themed snow globe, killing him. The girl eventually ends up wandering outside in a snowstorm and freezes to death.

As he relates his tale, the kitchen in the cabin slowly transforms into Beth’s father’s house,Twilight Zone style, even including the strange “bird clock”. Matt suddenly reveals his true (slimy) self and reveals that their whole experience together actually was a seemingly prolonged but really compressed interrogation in which Matt plays the “good cop” to get a confession from Joe, resulting in a conviction and also becomes part of his plea bargain to avoid imprisonment for his pivotal role in Harry’s death. But he is then registered as a sex offender and his punishment is to be blocked by the whole world (brutal!☹️). In a possibly even nastier move one of the police officers sets Joe’s cookie to experience time at 1,000 years per minute with the glam rock band Wizzard’s “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” playing continuously on the radio. He asks his superior if it is all right to leave the settings as is for the weekend and she says yes since “it is Christmas” and gives a sadistic little smile. For poor Joe, it literally is Christmas every day for millennia, one “hell” of a punishment!

Blimey and Ho F*ckin’ Ho! 👿There’s a lot to unpack in this special episode. The themes it deals with are hot topics: isolation, lack of communication, blocking, consciousness, punishment in a just society, AI, privacy, etc. It is so on target and unnerving that Charlie Brooker should get a special Emmy and Bafta for this one episode. I realized that the names of the two leads are relevant in that the Christmas Nativity is mentioned in the gospel of Matthew and of course Mary’s husband is Joseph.

Jon Hamm is a fan of the show and asked to get a part in it. That’s pretty f*ckin’ cool! 🙂

And there is another genre crossover in that both Natalia Tena and Oona Chaplin have both appeared in Game of Thrones. Natalia plays Osha in GOT and Oona plays Talisa Maegyr in GOT. And I’m so stupid I didn’t recognize them at first. 😃

There are also a lot of Easter eggs in this episode. When Joe is flicking through channels on his TV he flashes past Waldo from “The Waldo Moment”, and a ticker mentioning “Michael Callow” from “The National Anthem”, and “Victoria Skillane” from “White Bear”. Beth sings “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is” at the karaoke (as I have mentioned in a previous blog, I now hate the song due to the overplay on this show). The symbol from “White Bear” appears on Joe’s cell door. And the Z-Eyes is similar to the device used in “The Entire History of You.”