Black Mirror Season-Finale Recap: Clone Wars

Where are we all at with season seven? It’s been inconsistent, to say the least, but that has always been true of Black Mirror, especially after the first three seasons. Four bad-to-just-okay episodes in a row is not an inspiring sign, though, and there’s just a strong whiff of familiarity that suggests the show really is starting to run out of ideas, even if it’s still able to produce something as poignant as “Eulogy” every once in a while.

At least the season was saving its best for last. In fact, “USS Callister: Into Infinity” kind of makes you feel like Charlie Brooker neglected the other episodes a bit just to put all his time and resources into this feature-length finale — not just 76 minutes like the original “USS Callister” but a full 90. We’ve come to expect budget and style when it comes to this show, but this is on an epic scale.

“Into Infinity” is a sequel to an episode that dropped in 2017, but the script (by original writers Brooker and William Bridges as well as Bisha K. Ali and Bekka Bowling) does a good job integrating exposition into the story through dialogue and flashbacks. Programmer Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti) was an important character in “USS Callister,” but the true focal point and hero was her digital clone, existing on a locked-off server on the hard drive of CTO Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons) along with copies of CEO James Walton (Jimmi Simpson), intern Nate Packer (Osy Ikhile), and employees Karl Valdack (Billy Magnussen), Elena Tulaska (Milanka Brooks), Kabir Dudani (Paul G. Raymond), and Shania Lowry (Michaela Coel). After blackmailing the “real” Nanette into stealing their DNA samples from Daly’s home to prevent further cloning, the clone crew flew their ship into a wormhole and escaped into the real multiplayer VR world of Infinity while Daly got trapped in his modded version and died in real life. It felt like the beginning of a dangerous new adventure.

All of these characters are back in some form in the sequel except for Coel (for scheduling reasons). And it’s rough out there in the world of Infinity, where recent price hikes are forcing Captain Nan and her crew to steal players’ credits for fuel and ammo. They’re attracting quite a lot of attention from pissed-off users, especially for their lack of player tags and the fact that they’re capable of bleeding in a bloodless game. This never-ending quest is becoming unsustainable owing to the imbalance in stakes here; most players can respawn at will, but these ones only have one life. Shania learned that the hard way.

Months have passed since Daly’s death, but Nanette still feels guilty even though she wasn’t responsible. One day at work, she sees a little tribute to Daly, set out by Walton to impress the young New York Times journalist (Extraordinary’s Bilal Hasna) there to interview him about the Infinity bandits and Daly’s illegal DNA digital cloner spotted in body-cam footage. After listening in on the meeting, Nanette offers to help identify the bandits using Kabir’s complaint log. In her research, she sees a recent report from a player named Pixie. Her video playback confirms the identities of the bandits: a clone of Packer and a clone of herself (whom I’ll just call Nan from now on).

Nanette explains the entire situation to Walton, recapping some of the events of “USS Callister,” and the two team up to enter the game and track down their clones. They figure out how to find Clone-Walton (or Walt) around the same time Nan realizes he’s alive; he incinerated himself a few months back but respawned as a new player on a new planet when trace amounts of his biological matter came through the wormhole. Nan is particularly intent on finding him, given that he’s the only person who can access the game’s source code at the Heart of Infinity. They could build another sectioned-off universe of their own and be safe from the millions of players who want their blood.

Walt has been living a feral life on a rock planet, befriending a rock (in more ways than one, judging by the hole in the back) à la Cast Away and looking more like Rickety Cricket than Liam McPoyle (the Jimmi Simpson performance I always come back to). Out there, the two Nanette-Walton pairs meet and return to the Callister, where they catch each other up. Nanette is impressed by her clone’s confidence and capability, forged by the traumas of working under Captain Daly and the recent challenges of leading a band of outlaws. Nan, meanwhile, is resentful and jealous of the life Nanette gets to have on the outside. Milioti makes the two versions immediately distinct with her body language and expressiveness, and it’s never difficult to keep track of who’s who.

This is all very reminiscent of the Innie-Outie conflicts in Severance, except far more straightforward. Before the identity questions get too weighty, though, Walton interrupts the chatter to fire a laser gun around wildly and eliminate none of his targets besides, eventually, Clone-Karl. Nan blasts him out of the game for the time being, and a freaked-out Nanette follows him to chew him out and leave the office. Then, out of nowhere, she gets hit by a van, leaving her comatose and brain-dead in the hospital.

It’s a big loss, all things considered, but it leaves Nan once again in the true protagonist role, confidently traveling to face down the eternally 12-years-younger version of Daly guarding the source code. Back in the day, Walton purchased the DNA cloner so that he and Daly could create and enslave this digital copy, housing him inside the code to work endlessly and build out this gargantuan world. At first, the clone doesn’t seem as bad as the Daly we remember; he’s sympathetic to Nan’s story about that monster. But he shows his true colors quickly after she makes her request for a safe, private server, presenting her with a terrible dilemma: Does she want to save her crew or return to her counterpart’s body and merge consciousnesses to live a normal life again? (In Severance parlance, this is reintegration.)

Trick question! He was just fucking with her; he can do both. But his use of the phrase “copy-paste” sets off alarm bells for Nan, who refuses to leave a version of herself in this isolated place to become his slave. Her resistance does not go over well with this overgrown child who desperately wants a companion. He even pulls the same twisted trick the prime Daly did in the original episode, taking away Nan’s mouth with a snap of his fingers. Nan manages to stick him in the head with his Bargradian cutlass, though, and thankfully her mouth reappears.

While all this is happening, the Callister crew is dealing with problems of equal urgency. Walton briefly pops back into the game to knock out his doppelgänger and pose as the humbler, friendlier Walt. Everyone sniffs him out pretty quickly, but he manages to invite along every player they’ve ever robbed, leading to a dramatic space battle that delivers grandiose thrills the same way “USS Callister” committed to being a love letter to Star Trek for a while there.

The Daly clone’s death activates a kill switch, and suddenly the Heart of Infinity is collapsing, and the whole game with it. Luckily, Nan finds the correct disk just in time to save the crew from getting blipped from existence, and Walton gets the fatal-content-error screen that indicates the game has been deleted from the server entirely. He gets what he deserves, as we see in the flash-forward to his getting arrested after three months on the run.

As for the Callister crew? Well, Nan was able to return to her old body after all. But in a Being John Malkovich–esque turn, the rest of the crew now also resides inside Nanette’s brain, with the big central screen displaying whatever she sees. She’s working on fixing this problem, in theory, but they’ve worked out an oddly comfortable arrangement where Nanette grants them time to watch The Real Housewives of Atlanta in exchange for privacy when she needs it.

“Into Infinity” might not quite reach the heights of its predecessor when it comes to bending minds and pounding pulses, but it’s honestly not far off. Besides, that was an all-timer in the Black Mirror canon, a high bar to clear. This sequel actually does a pretty remarkable job maintaining the same relentless pace despite the longer length and the absence of any distinct theme as consistent as that episode’s exploration of entitlement and masculinity. I still think that Brooker is too obsessed with clone rights and with populating nearly every story with digitized or AI-generated characters that are indistinguishable from real humans. But this episode, possibly more than any other installment since season four, shows that the series is still capable of hitting it out of the park. What a relief.

Final Reflections

• Apparently the clone of Tulaska had to switch back to her alien skin because of her eczema.

• The Metallica scene is amusing, but I particularly like the massive ship “staring” at them.

• Simpson does a really great job in this episode, just like in the first, and he has such great, off-kilter deliveries for weird, fun lines. Case in point: “Want me to kill your clone and then you kill mine?” “What? No.” “Oh my God, you’re right. It would be so much more cathartic if we kill ourselves.”

• Funny throwaway moment: Walton curiously feels inside the (likely sticky) hole in Walt’s rock buddy.

• It feels like a bit of a stretch that Daly could return Nan to her body from within the game, but whatever.

• The clone of Packer is apparently leading the ship now, completing his arc from intern to captain. Good for him, though there’s not much captaining to do right now.