Inside Black Mirror

by Charlie Brooker

There was a moment we cut out, where Monroe’s in the back of the car. He looks out, sees a Waldo poster and says, “He’s making the whole system look absurd. Which it may well be, but it built these roads.” And then in the script, the car immediately goes over a pot hole. Which was a nice little moment. It only got cut because it didn’t visually come across like the car was going over a pothole. It just looked like a mistake, as if the camera had wobbled.

What is sincere? The characters in this story believe, in the moment, that what they’re saying is true. It’s just that, in the next moment, something else is true.

In that version, Daly had to do two things: get the DNA and download the contents of your Grain. But it was just too much business. Eventually I went, “Oh sod it, let’s just say he gets their DNA and grows them all in a magic machine.” When Shania says, “Whatever, it’s a fucking gizmo”, that was me letting on that I knew it didn’t make sense, but still you see people complaining. I know it doesn’t make sense! It’s just that I don’t care.

I think it’s fair to say Jesse wanted to pay homage to Shatner’s Captain Kirk. It absolutely wasn’t in the script. He worked with a vocal coach for a few weeks to find the right cadence and watched a lot of Star Trek. I think he was even listening to audio clips of Shatner on set in between takes. I remember Jesse telling us that Shatner was a Shakespearean-trained actor and that he treated the Star Trek scripts as if they’re Shakespeare. Shatner took it all very seriously and very theatrically, and you could definitely see Jesse channelling that in Space Fleet mode. Jesse was incredibly generous and would say things to Toby like, “If you ever need me to turn up the Shatner, I can do that for you.”

By the time I’d finished with it, a lot of people thought I was utterly mentally ill, because I filled it with this hidden celebration of six years of Black Mirror. As you went into reception, I reused the phones from Nosedive as the museum guide devices. Along the corridor, a wall of screens showed historical footage of murderers, including the couple from White Bear. There was a print on the wall of Playtest‘s Harlech House and a dummy wearing the dress from San Junipero. Then there were the plaster-cast faces of the crew, plus military gear from Men Against Fire. Inside the museum, the smaller cabinets in the middle of the room included Playtest mushrooms, the bath from Crocodile, the scanning device from USS Callister and the White Christmas cookie-egg and headgear. One wall display had the beds from Men Against Fire with the dead bodies from Metalhead, in a set that looked like the cabin from White Christmas complete with bird-clock. We had Domhnall Gleeson’s body from Be Right Back in a padded cell. And then there was a bloated pig from Metalhead, next to a hanging man which was a recreation of the set from The National Anthem. The pig was eating sweets that Bella drops on the robot’s head in Metalhead. To be honest, I just went fucking mad.