![]() ![]() Intercut with Mia’s story is another one: a woman ( Kiran Sonia Sawar) works for an insurance company, investigating claims. The next day, she checks out of the hotel (paying for the porno on the way out) and goes home to her family. Using the room service cart, she brings her ex-boyfriend’s body down to the garage, gets in the car, and disposes of him. (This is the most utopian bit of the episode.) He’s okay - it’s just his arm that’s broken - but seeing a man hit by a vehicle rattles Mia, who pulls down the shades and watches from between the slats. Mia can barely believe what she’s done, but she moves quickly, shoving the body under the bed, ordering room service so as to have a cart at her disposal, and flicking on a pay-per-view porn film, reasoning that the record of the in-room transaction will provide cover for her if she needs an alibi.Īt the same time, though, a man outside on the street is hit by what appears to be a self-driving pizza-vending truck. (The sound his neck, or maybe his windpipe, makes when it snaps is among the more disturbing sounds I’ve ever heard.) ![]() He’s inexorable, though, so Mia makes a snap decision: She shoves him to the floor and chokes him until he dies. He promises to keep her out of it, but she says “they” can trace her anyhow - and exactly what she means by that soon becomes clear. It turns out the ex-boyfriend got sober almost 10 months earlier, and in pursuit of making his amends with those he’s hurt, he’s going to write a letter to the family of the man they accidentally killed. It’s her ex-boyfriend, the one with whom she shares the dark secret, and they haven’t seen each other in a few years. After giving a talk at the conference, she gets a knock on her hotel room door. (It appears to be in Reykjavik.) She has a son and a husband and a chic haircut and a lovely home. Mia is now a star architect “not just of buildings, but of communities,” a man says, introducing her at a conference. Andrea Riseborough in “Crocodile,” the third episode of Black Mirror’s fourth season. The man’s dead, and Mia’s boyfriend - terrified that he’ll be sent to jail for manslaughter - convinces her to help him put the body in a sleeping bag, weigh it down with rocks, and drop the corpse along with the bike into the water. They’ve hit a man on a bike, and they stop, stunned. Suddenly, a body hits the windshield, cracking it. The episode starts out with Mia ( Andrea Riseborough) and her boyfriend ( Andrew Gower) dancing in a club and taking some kind of drug, then cuts to them driving through the pristine Icelandic landscape, sharing a joint and singing. In “Crocodile,” an accidental death leads to a chain of intentional ones Hillcoat is good at stark brutality that packs an emotional wallop - and “Crocodile” has that brutality in spades. It’s a good match for director John Hillcoat, who in addition to the post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy adaptation The Road also made The Proposition, a brutal Western and the only one I’ve ever really loved. The episode is written by series creator Charlie Brooker, and though Black Mirror always feels like a latter-day Twilight Zone, this is one of the more Twilight Zone-y episodes I’ve seen, especially in its ending, which is both a twist and a punch to the gut.īut most of “Crocodile” plays out like a slow-motion nightmare, where you can see the next beat coming just before it happens, and then have to sit and watch in horror as it does. That tracks with the episode, which returns to a favorite Black Mirror subject: the ways our lives would be changed if our memories were suddenly available outside our own heads. In Black Mirror season 4, humanism triumphs over nihilism - but only barely ![]()
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