As an anthology show, “Black Mirror” can be watched (or rewatched) out of order. Each episode tells a standalone story, and it only requires an hour of your time. As creator Charlie Brooker once wrote in The Guardian, “The series was inspired, indirectly, by ‘The Twilight Zone,'” and, “The ‘black mirror’ of the title is the one you’ll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.”
While many series rankings tend to favor “San Junipero” as the best “Black Mirror” episode, “Fifteen Million Merits” has always stuck with me, in part because of that ABBA earworm, “I Have a Dream,” which we hear Hannah John-Kamen (“Ant-Man and the Wasp”) performing. Her character is a pop star, lifted up as an example of a dream come true for the masses, after winning an “American Idol”-like talent show called “Hot Shot.”
“Fifteen Million Merits” begins with a basic screenwriting no-no, the most overused story opening you’ll ever see, whereby the protagonist — in this case, Bing — wakes up to his alarm. Yet the alarm is part of a wall of black mirrors in his high-tech room, which is really more of a claustrophobic cell. This is where Bing “lives,” if you could call reluctantly watching porn and playing point-and-shoot video games in bed really living (in the “Ikiru” sense).
Commercials for “Hot Shot” interrupt Bing’s gaming, and if he wants to skip them, it costs him credits. In fact, everything he consumes, even a small glob of toothpaste or hand soap, reduces his overall balance in real-time. This is just one aspect of the episode that has begun to feel even more relatable of late than it did back in 2011.
