Cristin Milioti and crew galivant around a brave new online world in an uproarious end to Black Mirror season 7. Here’s our USS Callister: Into Infinity review.
A John Williams-esque score swells as the camera tilts down onto a mono-climate planet. Two masked gang members, fresh from the bridge of their sleek chrome starship, threaten a group of teen ruffians sat around a campfire. A title card, in a font eerily similar to 2013’s Star Trek: Into Darkness, reads: USS Callister: Into Infinity, before one of the teens asks: “Did you see the Wrexham game last night?”
The finale of Black Mirror’s seventh season finds its creators having their digital cake and gobbling it down like a stim-pack. Combining bombastic sci-fi nerdery with a Destiny-inspired online world and a cheeky sense of humour, the show’s first out-and-out sequel might be a form of wish-fulfilment on the part of Brooker and co – but I’ll be damned if it isn’t an awful lot of fun…
The first Black Mirror episode to require a “Previously” montage, Into Infinity picks up just after the events of season 4 opener USS Callister, which saw Cristin Milioti’s Nanette and crew of clones newly set free on a procedurally generated universe after escaping the predatory private server of maniacal developer Robert Daly (Jessie Plemons). Turns out, this isn’t as fun as it sounds. Let loose in a world with 30 million real-world gamers and in-game currency required to stop them drifting into the void, the crew of the Callister are forced to ambush unwitting players and steal their credits to stay alive. And if they die in the game, they have no real-world bodies to go back to.
Read more: Black Mirror series 7 episode 5: Eulogy review
Meanwhile, the real Nanette is very stressed. Three months on from Daly’s death, a reporter from the New York Times is sniffing around for company secrets – like the illegal digital cloning device which trapped her avatar in the game. To stop her virtual self from being discovered and deleted for good, she teams up with the company’s evil CEO in the hope of finding a solution.
If the first USS Callister was a typically Black Mirror-homage to Star Trek, the second instalment finds inspiration from slightly further afield. It’s also the funniest the show has been in some time, refusing to take itself seriously even as the smart script avoids repeating the kind of sci-fi parody cliches which have sprung up in the intervening years. If the writing team (Bisha K Ali, Bekka Bowling and previous episode co-writer William Bridges are credited with the script alongside Brooker) had a lot of fun making this, it’s matched only by the fun we have watching the surprisingly tight narrative unfold. At 88 minutes, this is the longest episode in the season so far, but the time flies by.
In the end, Into Infinity provides a popcorn-friendly cap to a decidedly mixed season of the sci-fi anthology show. But the series’ proclivity to experiment with tone has hardly ever worked better than it does here – the result isn’t just one of the most flat-out entertaining episodes of Black Mirror, but probably the best Star Trek film we’ve seen since 2009. Brooker’s first sequel episode is a triumph.
Black Mirror is streaming on Netflix now. Check out reviews of the rest of series 7 here.
