YMMV / Black Mirror: Black Museum

Black Mirror YMMVSeries FourUSS Callister — Arkangel — Crocodile — Hang the DJ — Metalhead — Black Museum

• Complete Monster: Rolo Haynes is the owner of the titular museum and a manipulative sociopath who deliberately tricks people into participating in dangerous experiments. In his first anthology story, Rolo tricks a man into installing an implant which drives him to insanity, culminating in Rolo's pawn brutally killing a homeless man. In his second outing, Rolo fools a loving couple into sharing their consciousness to save the wife from a coma, ruining their relationship and eventually transferring her mind into the body of a stuffed monkey to amuse himself. Convincing wrongfully convicted murderer Clayton Leigh into giving Rolo his post-death consciousness by promising to help Clayton's family, Rolo turns him into a freak-show exhibit for sadistic and racist guests to enjoy forcing him to relive his execution over and over and over again.
• Critical Dissonance: The episode had a lukewarm reception by critics. On the other hand, fandom likes it a lot - it is the 4th highest ranking Black Mirror episode on IMDb.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The Peter Dawson's tale ends with him in a coma... and having a large, visible erection. Rolo then admits that he completely made the last part up.
  • Jack's new girlfriend threatening Carrie into acting like a regular stuffed animal? Uncomfortable. The girlfriend essentially threatening a stuffed animal by pinning it against a wall, realizing that Carrie can't properly respond and awkwardly making her reply in one of her two possible phrases? Oddly hilarious.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: So Nish deletes her father's consciousness and traps Rolo forever, all ends well, right? Well, hundreds of copies of Clayton are trapped in trinkets too and there is no way of tracking and destroying them all. And their fate is arguably worse than Clayton's in the museum (who at that point was just left alone). But at least Nish destroying the Black Museum means new copies of Clayton won't be made? Also Carrie is still trapped in the stuffed monkey.
  • Carrie is at least with someone who understands her situation. Also, Nish offhandedly mentions old people being uploaded "into the cloud," meaning there may be a way to get her consciousness to San Junipero.
• Fanfic Fuel: Nish knows how to Brain Upload and has Carrie's monkey in her possession at the end of the episode. Will she upload Carrie into a different form? Or will she send her to San Junipero?
• Harsher in Hindsight: This episode shows all of the brutal and ethically dubious technological leaps required to create the technology used in the blissful and non-cynically positive San Junipero.
• Memetic Mutation: "Karl Pilkington predicted Black Mirror"^Explanation On two separate episodes of The Ricky Gervais Show, Karl once pitched a movie about someone implanting their deceased partner's consciousness in their mind and predicted that one day, a device could allow doctors to feel their patient's pain to perform better diagnoses. Fans noted that the Jack and Dr. Dawson storylines were quite similar to these.
• Narm: Carrie getting hit by a truck. It comes barreling right out of nowhere, at full speed. Carrie wasn't even on a road, it seemed like a sidewalk strictly for pedestrians; how did the truck even get there?
  • Given that the incident was Rolo telling the story to Nish, it could have been comic exaggeration on his part, similar to Dawson's Raging Stiffie a few minutes earlier.
• Retroactive Recognition: Letitia Wright as Nish, nowadays better known as Shuri in Black Panther.
• Spiritual Successor: To White Christmas — three unrelated stories about digitizing human consciousness and the treatment thereof are brought together by the final twists. "Cookies", the centerpiece technology of that special, are namedropped, with Rolo implying that his tech was a prototype to their development.
• The Woobie:
  • Carrie was rendered comatose due to a car accident, uploaded into her boyfriend Jack's mind, forced to watch him falling in love with Emily, had her consciousness transferred into a stuffed monkey for her and Jack's son Parker that could only communicate through two phrases, and was eventually forgotten about and given away when Parker got tired of playing with the toy. The law forbids her from being deleted and put out of her misery, so she's been stuck in a glass case in the Black Museum, still alive and still conscious, ever since. Thankfully, Nish throws her a bone by giving her a front-row seat to her tormentor's suffering before destroying the Black Museum for good.
  • Clayton agreed to have his mind uploaded by Rolo in exchange for his family being provided for after his execution. What Rolo "forgot" to tell him was that a digital copy of him would be put in a torture chamber in the Black Museum for sadistic guests to force him to relive the agony of his execution countless times. And it's implied that he was framed for the murder he was executed for. His only consolation is that his daughter Nish Mercy Kills him at the end of the episode.
  • Nish as well. Her mother and father both died horrible deaths due to Rolo Hayne's actions.

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