Well, a few things to get out of the way before I begin. First, the episode I'm gonna talk about, that you probably already guessed from the picture, isn't considered the best. Indeed, the episode I liked most is currently ranked seventh on IMDB. Second, I only watched the show up to the third season, which obviously means I haven't watched all the episodes to know for sure that this is the best one. Third and last, this article comes more or less in continuity with another which I previously wrote, also not very laudatory of the show, which you can, if you want to, read here.
The episode I wanna talk about in this article is [303] Shut Up and Dance. The first thing I found interesting about this episode is that, in a show about very futuristic technology, it has no futuristic technology. As far as I can remember, all gadgets featured therein are real and currently available. So without the usual tech gimmick, what does the episode hinge on? Well, the theme here is blackmail. It's all centered around the idea of hacking a person's devices, accessing their private information and using it to one's advantage, although the advantage gained appears to be strictly chaotic. It's a scary idea and one with lots of serious implications on privacy and morality, most of which we don't really get an answer to, both in the episode and in real life.
Our main character for this episode is Kenny, a mild-mannered young man who works at a fast food restaurant. He goes about his normal routine, cleaning dishes and booths, dealing with unpleasant banter from his male co-workers and ignoring attempts to break the ice from his pretty female co-worker. He rides his bike home and upon arriving he is immediately startled because his laptop isn't on his desk. His sister had apparently broke hers and was using Kenny's to download movies. Not being very tech savvy she instead filled the computer with viruses. Kenny recovers the computer, installs an anti-virus, puts a lock on his door and says goodbye to his mom who, for some reason, is single and nervous to be going out on a date. I make mention of that detail because I find it to be a recurring theme in Black Mirror, this thing of adding details that don't really amount to anything except maybe paving the way for fans to come up with some unsubstantiated theories. Don't get me wrong though, I love a good wild take but there has to be something to hold on to, we can't just reinterpret the whole thing based on a throwaway comment or an after-the-fact revelation. Anyway, after a while of watching TV with his sister, Kenny gets bored, goes upstairs and decides to masturbate. Thing is though, the anti-virus program he previously installed was in fact spyware. Kenny was being watched the entire time...
Immediately after he receives a threatening email containing that video of him. Whoever is on the other side is blackmailing him, forcing him to obey seemingly random commands. At first, Kenny hesitates, he considers giving a fake phone number, he tries to offer money, but nothing works. They don't want any of that, they have their own plan. And then, long story short, Kenny goes along with it, becoming very concerned about the possibility of the video being leaked. For a while it's understandable but the demands become increasingly mad and dangerous. Kenny soon finds himself living the worst day of his life... But he's not alone. Along his trials he meets other people playing their part, all of them fellow dancers trying to protect their own secrets. But one of them in particular Kenny somewhat befriends, and that is Hector, a married man who was staying in an hotel room awaiting an escort. He becomes part of the dance, or becomes activated as they say, and goes along with Kenny. And the main demand the pair has to obey is to rob a bank. Kenny plays the robber, Hector plays the getaway driver. Afterwards, they split up. Hector goes to destroy the car and Kenny goes to the drop-off point. Upon arriving there, Kenny meets another man who activates a drone to hover over them, filming them. He asks if Kenny brought the money... for the fight. They are to fight each other to the death for the amusement of whoever is behind the camera. The winner gets to keep the prize money... But that doesn't really matter, Kenny doesn't care about that. What he cares about is protecting his secret.
So now we're all thinking – is Kenny seriously gonna fight a man to the death so as to protect his secret? He is, and we finally get the true revelation as to why, and that is because during Kenny's embarrassing video he was actually watching something illegal. With that in mind it finally makes sense why Kenny would get involved in that dance, why he would actually rob a bank and then fight a man to the death... His first reaction is to draw the gun he used during the robbery, but then he tries to commit suicide, only to discover the gun is either a fake or unloaded. The fight then begins but the episode cuts away from it. Instead we get a sequence of all the other dancers reaching the end of their performance – we discover that the woman from the beginning of the episode, the one who planted the getaway car, was a CEO who had sent out incriminating emails containing racist remarks, the man who delivered the cake containing the gun is now being chastised by his family for being some kind of deviant, something which the episode doesn't really clarify, and Hector is confronted by his wife who now has full knowledge of his trysts. It would appear that, though the dancers did exactly what was asked of them, the hackers revealed the secrets anyway, just because. And after all that we return to Kenny, looking distraught and bloodied, but alive. As he walks out of the woods he receives a call from his mom who's in utter shock at the revelations. Kenny can't even respond, he just turns away when the police arrive, but, unable to run, so consumed by the shock and exhaustion, he is immediately apprehended. The end.
Very interesting episode, very intense, rather than the usual gimmicky stuff, there's also great acting from everyone really, but especially from Alex Lawther who plays our protagonist. And Radiohead's music during the ending scene was a great touch. So why isn't the episode great too? I'd say there are two big reasons – one, the twist isn't written properly, and two, like I believe is often the case with Black Mirror, it's quite inconsistent.
During the episode we aren't privy to information on what the other dancers did, only Kenny and then Hector later on when he willingly admits it. In what is almost a bonding moment, he claims to love his family but admits that at times he needs a break from it all. I suppose in some ways his honesty warms us to his character and then, when Kenny says that he was caught on video, we have something of an ironic comedy moment when Hector diminishes it. Hector is in danger of losing his wife and never seeing his daughters again, but for Kenny it'd be just a bit of juvenile embarrassment. But Kenny can't see it that way and we can't quite figure out why on our first viewing... but that's the problem. The way you write a twist is by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs all throughout the story so that when the big twist does happen, we viewers realize that the truth was there all along, staring us right in the face. But what this episode does instead is it just springs new information on us. In retrospect, Kenny has two odd interactions and he keeps ignoring advances from the female co-worker, but considering how the episode develops, they end up seeming like retroactive inserts.
And that is because Kenny is inconsistent as well. He's paranoid enough to install a lock on his bedroom door to prevent his sister from using the laptop, but he's not careful enough to make his laptop password-protected? And why doesn't he already have a good anti-virus installed? And why does he install one without doing any research on it? And why is such a malevolent anti-virus the very first search result? And why isn't his webcam covered, especially when performing that deed? None of it makes any sense, it all seems to be written specifically so as to make the twist work. Kenny is paranoid about technology when it's convenient for the episode, but then again he's extremely lax and naive about it when convenience changes. My bet is that the writers, as usual, in going for shock value, decided to give the protagonist that sort of secret and then wrote the whole episode with that in mind. However, for the twist to have an impact, they also had to mislead and withhold information. A good twist is meant to mock you the entire time, it's not meant to shake things up just to shock you. And even if they wanted to go for shock value, they didn't do it right... They should have changed the age of Kenny's sister, the video should have been of the two of them casually watching TV, the scene would abruptly cut or it would shift to a red herring, and then only in the ending would we be informed of the full contents of the video. Maybe they did consider that but certain broadcasting implications got in the way, which is understandable. Then again, Law & Order: SVU did something similar and much more controversial with season ten, episode two.
And even the information we get is inconsistent... The blackmail Kenny is threatened with is the publication of that video, the hackers specifically and very concretely say that. As viewers, we are blatantly told that they had access to Kenny's webcam and thus filmed him. We are given no reason to assume anything else on Kenny's computer was compromised and we are given no reason to assume they had proof that during the video Kenny was watching what he was watching. Then again, we aren't given any reason to assume said information wasn't safe either, but I mean, if they had access to everything on Kenny's computer and found his email address, wouldn't they have found his phone number as well? And why did Kenny just automatically assume they had information regarding the contents of his computer without being given any reason to believe it? As far as I can tell, it's simply because if the hackers mocked Kenny with knowledge of the contents of his computer, everyone would have guessed the secret right away. And as a total sidenote, at the end of it all, the hackers send... a troll face?... Seriously? The episode aired in 2016 and, as far as I can remember, the last time I saw a troll face was in 2011... That's another sort of pet peeve. For this episode it makes sense that the hackers are never seen or given any humanity. It adds to the distancing and makes them all-seeing. But with the very first episode of the show they already did something similar, they made the perpetrator a total unknown with unknown motives... Leaving something to the imagination is a good thing but after a while I start to suspect that the writers just can't be bothered to, or are incapable of, fleshing out their more complex characters.
But still, as it stands, this episode, while it has its strengths, is sadly hindered by the fact that it is written retroactively so as to make the reveal shocking, it's reverse-engineered to shock us with the ending. Much like with The Entire History of You, the writers found a great story but took it in a bad direction, something which, more than anything else, sadly resulted in a whole lot of wasted potential.
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