Flaws of ‘USS Callister’, Black Mirror:S4E1

USS Callister ( Black Mirror:S4E1 ), despite all of its flaws that I am going to mention, is one of the best sci-fi video (movie? story?) I have seen. This is what makes the flaws harder to handle. There is some significant potential missed here.

Plot summary

The plot is amazing and is explored in a beautiful manner. Daly is a socially awkward genius nerd coder who gets sidelined (bullied?) by people technically less capable than him, in a company he cofounded. He is the brain behind an immersive online video game which you can play by pasting a small VR chip on your forehead, which transports your senses to the game world. But Daly has his own private version of the game, based on a star trek like show that he is obsessed with, inhabited by the copy of the consciousness of all his coulleagues he does not like. The coulleagues retain the memory of their real life untill their respective consciousness was copied. Daly, the captain of a spaceship, can log in and out of the game anytime he likes it while his coulleagues are trapped permanent residents of the game. Yet, they play along with the plot and premise of the game because Daly has complete power over them in the game and can make them suffer indefinitely without the suffering killing them. This is Daly’s way of coping with any his coulleague who he feels has wronged him.

The flaws

Now getting to the flaws of the episode. Although the repurcussion of the plot is explored beautifully, the story is plagued with LAZY writing, which makes it difficult to take it too seriously. I will give example.

• When Daly creates a copy of a person’s consciousness for the game, as I said before, the copied person remembers about their past life uptill the point the copy was made. And how does Daly achieve this? Just from some DNA samples from the person! Now, I can imagine that the DNA may encode how the person will look, although I am dobtful about even this. BUT, DNA simply does not encode the memories of the person. Writing cannot get lazier. They could have made it logically sound by having Daly replace the personal VR chip of the person in question with a modified one, which sends the estimated weights and biases of the user’s neural network to Daly’s computer. So, over a couple of days (weeks?) of use, all the terabytes of neural data is slowly transfered to Daly.
• An update to the game manifests itself as a wormhole which the crew uses to attempt suicide and avoid the prolonged torture. Wormhole? Seriously? I know they need to dumb down the technicalities in a visual manner so that even laymen can understand it, but this is simply cliche. I think there are more logical ways for the crew to commit suicide. They already blackmail a real life person to delete the DNA samples from Daly’s fridge to prevent him from creating another copy of themselves. They could have asked the same person to simply wipe Daly’s hardrive! Instead, they put a wormhole and a cat and mouse chase scene. Moreover, entering the wormhole enabled them to get to the online version of the game, escaping Daly. Well, again, same can be achieved through different manner.
• Their brilliant plan, as I mentioned, is to have their DNA samples in Daly’s possession to be destroyed, so that he cannot recreate them. BUT, they are already digital. 0’s and 1’s. How do they know that Daly would not keep a backup of their code somewhere? Lazy writing! Also, what prevents Daly from getting their DNA samples again? He did it once for each of them. He could do it again. But this I can attribute to oversight of the characters rather than a plot hole. Maybe. The characters are terrified of Daly, so if they decide to revolt, they needed to be absolutely sure that they would not be facing Daly again.
• After their ship moves to the online version of the game, even the characters not present in the ship are able to escaoe. How? Why was Daly not able to escape?