![]() ![]() Without bees to pollinate plants, the plants would die, taking life on Earth with them. The moment “Hated in the Nation” won me over. The deeper I got into season three of Black Mirror, the more I started to realize that the show is, on some level, about a series of worlds where the apocalypse has come and nobody’s realized it yet. Truth be told, I was a sucker for “Hated” from the second that first little drone bee crawled around on a flower. “Hated in the Nation” doesn’t have to push nearly as far as you might expect to go from “social media outrage cycle” to “literal swarms of insects killing people.” Black Mirror is about worlds that have ended already - they just don’t know it yet (The constant underlining is a Black Mirror problem consistent across all seasons.) The idea of a social media swarm using a hashtag to single out various people for death, only to have the bees actually carry out that death, is a great example of how much power the show can gain from simply making some of its more outlandish ideas literal.īlack Mirror is about seeing how far technology stretches human emotions. But as with the alien virus–carrying insects of The X-Files, “Hated” gets a great deal of mileage out of the sheer alien horror of a giant swarm of insects.īut the use of bees also strengthens the point of Brooker’s script without constantly underlining it. I mean, yes, they’re technically robotic drones built to look like bees and fulfill their pollination functions, in a near future where colony collapse has led to far fewer bees around the globe. And there’s just the simple grossness of someone’s brain being short-circuited by a bee drone.īut let’s face it: The X-Files comparisons stem largely from the fact that the episode is focused on bees. ![]() There’s the strange sadness of the closing sequence, with all of those doomed victims slowly realizing their own fate. There’s the mounting dread of Parke and Perrine trying to defend a victim from a swarm of robotic bees. Flipping that believer/skeptic dynamic to tech-savvy/virtual Luddite is a very Black Mirror way of reinventing a tired trope.īut there’s also the way the episode is scary - and scary in a bunch of different ways, no less. Here, Macdonald plays Karin Parke, a grizzled veteran (how wonderful to have Kelly Macdonald playing a grizzled veteran), while Marsay is Chloe Perrine, a tech-savvy younger officer who is more comfortable with computers than Parke is. But essentially every critic I’ve talked to about the episode has compared it to The X-Files, due primarily to the episode’s very Black Mirror take on the Mulder/Scully, believer/skeptic dynamic. Watch out for robotic beesīlack Mirror creator Charlie Brooker apparently hoped “Hated” would be his take on Nordic noir, the Scandinavian drama trend that has given us, among other series, The Killing and The Bridge. And some of it is the nicely inconclusive way the episode ends, with the investigation still technically in progress.īut if I had to guess what drew me into “Hated in the Nation,” it was probably the bees. Some of it is probably the nasty closing twist (which we’ll deal with in a moment). Some of that is surely thanks to its crackerjack cast, which includes Kelly Macdonald, Faye Marsay, and Benedict Wong. ![]() ![]() (She dies just a few minutes later.)Īnd yet I enjoyed “Hated in the Nation” more than any season three Black Mirror episode not named “San Junipero.” The episode is overlong, at 90 minutes, especially when you can more or less predict much of what’s about to happen in the very first scene, as you watch a woman’s Twitter feed fill with hateful invective directed at her. This article is a recap of Netflix’s Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation.” There are spoilers and discussion regarding the episode’s plot. ![]()
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