Hiding the phone from a loved one over breakfast. Driving an electric car to wherever. Joan Tait is the Change Squad Leader who is afraid that the coffee machine is not good enough for her to consume its outputs. Messages flash across her phone about her being missed and loved; while she spends the next moment firing a staff member who clearly knows more about the bigger picture than her middle management.
It is a striking reflection of the corporate contemporary while also being a parody.
In a world filled with anxiety, Joan seems to embody much of it in the early scenes of this episode, and everything feels "normal"; until she goes to a psych. Then she gets home and there's a show to watch - Joan is Awful.
It's her life. Its uncanny.
Turns out she agreed to the whole thing, and we've got an occasional fourth wall shattering Black Mirror episode. This isn't up to the normal scratch of "Black Mirror" quality that I seem to remember from the previous seasons; but it is a subtle stab from the Writer's Guild to the very heart of entertainment as a service.
I say this with the benefit of hindsight and allowing my broad consumption of various media to intermingle and marinate with one another in my mind, and its a proud view point.
It feels pretty B-Grade towards the end, and feels like it was massaged by human hands to make it feel like it would quickly resolve instead of really dig into the issues of expectations of privacy, and what you're really agreeing to in Terms and Conditions, and if these are really enforceable.
The house arrest anklets will just have to wait to decide that, I imagine.
It is just going to be a matter of time until our social liberties are defined by the "fun" services and products that corporations supply. If it isn't manufactured or sanctioned by corps with a monopoly, then you can't do it for yourself.
Imagine a world like that, because it is coming, and this episode acts as a cautionary tale to that very end.
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