Warning: The next comprises spoilers from the “Black Mirror” episode “USS Callister: Into Infinity.”
There’s a motive “Black Mirror” shouldn’t be identified for ongoing tales, says its British creator Charlie Brooker. “I tend to kill everyone or leave them too depressed to function at the end of my story,” he says. “Sequels can be tricky.”
However within the seven years because the anthology collection’ Emmy-winning Season 4 episode “USS Callister” galvanized followers with its humorous, thrilling, twisty rendering of digital human doubles trapped in a “Star Trek”-like sport universe, Brooker and his collaborators knew its story might be prolonged, previous the purpose the place meek programmer Nanette (Cristin Milioti) helped save her cloned self from sadistic sport designer Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons), left for lifeless. Concepts percolated, however so did pitfalls. As Brooker recalled, “There’s lots of corners you’ve painted yourself into, and story logic you have to navigate.” However maybe extra urgently, he mentioned, “If we’ve killed Darth Vader, what do we do?”
What arose was a feature-length follow-up, “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” premiering Thursday on Netflix as a part of “Black Mirror’s” seventh season. Taking the spaceship’s crew into a brand new journey of real-life and sport demise, the episode is constructed round a contemporary check of digital Nanette’s captaincy, and a villainous flip for Daly’s obnoxious enterprise associate Walton (Jimmi Simpson). Plus, provides Brooker, “We just knew, because of what’s unique about our video game premise, we’ve got to have the real world and virtual world meet.” He felt these narrative intricacies required a first-ever “Black Mirror” writers’ room to kind all of it out. “This was a different beast, quite complicated. So much fun but a headache to write.”
If the enjoyable of returning to acquainted units and costumes after years away got here with a form of “existential motion sickness,” Milioti jokes, navigating the exact choreography to behave in opposition to herself with specialised cameras offered its personal problem. “You really feel nuts trying to remain present with a memory of yourself, where your hand was, eyelines. It was fascinating and intense, like a dance. For two days, my brain was like an overheated modem.”
Simpson’s digital Walton (the great one) returns too, however in a caveman’s loincloth, which required some prefilming coaching. “I had turned into the full dad bod,” says Simpson, who calls the double-filming days toggling between seems “a full-on marriage of performance and technique. Television is not a film schedule. It’s designed to take up as little time as possible.” However the vitality, he says, with a lot of the unique crew returning, was “addictive.”
He loved real-world Walton’s megalomaniacal tech-bro flip as nicely. “The thoughtlessness and greed is turned to 11, and that was fun,” says Simpson. “People have said it looks like I’m always up to something, so I get to play villains. My mother doesn’t get it at all.”
Cristin Milioti, left, and Jimmi Simpson in “USS Callister: Into Infinity.”
(Nick Wall / Netflix)
Returning director Toby Haynes calls the unique “a perfect script, a neat potboiler,” however describes “Into Infinity” as “maybe the most ambitious ‘Black Mirror’ episode ever made.” If the unique’s cheeky replication of “Star Trek” was its defining aesthetic, this one’s faster-paced, action-meets-farce peril spurred a visible language crafted from gaming. “The guns, the design elements and the visual effects when people get fragged, that was all fun to explore,” he says. The cues of basic sci-fi have been nonetheless there — together with Nanette’s garb intentionally evoking Ripley in “Aliens,” and area fight evoking “Star Wars” — however Haynes additionally wished to lean into what makes these tales authentic. “It’s not pastiche anymore; it’s its own thing,” he notes, “ which is really thrilling.”
The sequel’s most tense inside-the-game face-off takes place in a digital suburban storage, that mythic place of tech origin, the place a wiser, more durable Nanette encounters a youthful, extra harmless Daly (a returning Plemons). Says Brooker, “We always wanted that juxtaposition, with the dynamic slightly altered. She needs his help, and he’s a complex figure. If we hadn’t done a good job, it would have been excruciating to cut from a space battle to two people talking.”
Cue Haynes, who knew introduce the door-opening second with otherworldly suspense: gentle, mist, a silhouetted Nanette. “I wanted this to be my Spielberg moment, building up to this godlike creep, and Nanette facing her abuser.”
The reunion with Plemons was a favourite scene of Milioti’s. “I like things that explore different facets of people,” she says. “She’s a different person, exhausted and in disbelief that she’s back dealing with this person, and you’re devastated by his loneliness, how badly he wants to connect and how that got twisted. There was so much to excavate. We shot for four days in a room. It felt like a two-hander play.”
With amped-up drama, comedy and motion this time round, Brooker is aware of he’s made one thing “quite mainstream” for his usually bleak, beloved storytelling outlet. “It’s almost family-friendly, apart from the language,” he jokes. “But it still has the distilled essence of ‘Black Mirror,’ those elements and ingredients. Hopefully people feel we did the first one proud.”
