Black Mirror - White Christmas

So I know I’ve made a big jump from commenting on the episode “National Anthem” to then start talking about “White Christmas” but I saw “White Christmas” last night and I felt compelled to share my thoughts. I’m watching all the episodes in chronological order and I’m currently at this point in the series.

I won’t give a synopsis of the whole episode because I’ll take it for granted that you, as the reader, have already seen White Christmas. I’ll just get straight into my raw reactions while watching.

This episode seemed long. Maybe because so many things happened, I don’t know but it felt like it moved from Act I to Act II then finally Act III. It was still good but it felt twice as long as an episode like White Bear or even the previous episode.

White Christmas did a great job weaving together its story and I would say it’s really three or four stories in one.

Once the show introduced the concept of the “cookie” implant I already figured that one of the two men in the cabin or both of them were trapped inside a virtual prison. The rest was putting the peices together.

The most surprising part of the whole episode for me was the Asian child. This might sound funny but it wasn’t because the main character was stalking a child that ended up not being his. It just so happened I had never seen any show or movie up to that point where a white woman had an affair or illegitimate child with an Asian guy. Didn’t see that coming !

After watching “White Christmas” I ended up in a real life debate about which episode was darker, White Bear or White Christmas? I thought White Bear was more disturbing while the person who I was watching it with thought White Christmas was more unsettling.

This was the point I made. The most disturbing aspect of White Christmas is the solitary confinement and mental torture of the cookie consciousness being left to pine away for months or years. The show did a very good job having us, the viewers, empathize with the cookie consciousness to the point that we view them as real people. I chose to see them as computer codes. These cookie consciousnesses are not the people they are copied from. So if you eliminate the element of humanity from the cookie people it’s not that bad. It’s about as bad as being inhumane to a video game character or an avatar.

Now in the debate I had, the person said “what if the cookie consciousness is the real consciousness?” , what if what is extracted is not a copy but the real thing? What if what is left behind in the body is the copy while the real consciousness is taken away?

I thought that was an interesting point. What I realized is that after the cookie consciousness is extracted the show doesn’t give any examples of personality from the original person. We are only left to empathize with the cookie consciousness. So I couldn’t address that.

In the end, I still stick with my original point about White Bear being more tragic and dark than White Christmas. If I could determine the authentic humanity of the cookie consciousness then I would say that White Christmas is the darker episode but that’s my take.