Throughout its five seasons and several special episodes, Black Mirror has gifted us with some of the most disturbing stories on television. Or, at least, it has left us thinking for a while after the release of the final credits. We put ourselves in the shoes of the British Prime Minister and his ‘affair’ with a pig to save the life of a young girl in the episode ‘National Anthem’. We also saw how an army of robotic bees were in charge of killing any internet troll in ‘National Hate’. And we toured the museum of horror and its many examples of torture in ‘Black Museum’. But, of all of them, the episode that most distresses us in the series is ‘Shut Up and Dance’ .
I refresh your memory. Alex Lawther plays Kenny, a very shy 19-year-old who works in a coffee shop. We see that he has trouble relating and that he is a misfit. One day he comes home to discover that his computer is infected by malware. You try to delete it by installing a program, but what it does is give access to your webcam. Thus, they record him masturbating with some images from the internet and Kenny becomes the victim of a hack . For the rest of the episode, we see how he is capable of doing anything to prevent hackers from exposing that compromised video. The viewer discovers the truth in the last minutes of the episode: he is a pedophile and had child pornography on his computer .
We discovered that the writers did not add the pedophilia plot until the last minute. Actually, the episode was going to be about the power of hackers to control our lives . Kenny was going to be a regular kid who gets harassed by internet trolls, but introducing him as a consumer of child pornography changes everything. From being someone fragile and easy victim, he becomes a predator and a despicable being. And all with a single line of dialogue.
At the end of the episode, after seeing the protagonist being able to rob a bank so that the images do not come to light, another man in the same situation ( Paul Bazely ) reveals that both are victims of blackmail due to the sexual content of their computers . Kenny kills the other pedophile trying to hide his truth, but it’s too late. She receives a call from her mother, hysterical for having discovered that her son is a pedophile.
‘Shut Up and Dance’ is an episode of the third season of the series and is written by Charlie Brooker and William Bridges himself . We still do not know when we will have a new batch of Brooker’s dystopia, but you can already see on Netflix Fuck 2020 , a documentary about everything that happened in the last year, in addition to the many original series of the streaming platform .