Season 5 of “Black Mirror” is Rarely ranked among the best in the showBut it contains at least one underestimated jewel: “Strocking Verse”. This is the episode of the video game where two apparently close guys accidentally end up having a digital business. This episode is inspired by Episodes outside the previous competition like “The whole story of you”, “ In that he understands that it is not enough to have just a premise of cool science fiction; You must also have a convincing character trip that seems real whatever the social criticism you are trying to do.

In “striking vipers”, the disorderly relationship between Danny (Anthony Mackie) and Karl (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is so clumsy and riveted that you can easily forget a major hole in the premise of science fiction of the episode: why would a VR combat game come with a hyper-realization sex option? Showrunner Charlie Brooker has no real answer to this question, but he at least offered his explanation to the idea.

“The germ of the idea came from the fighting game” Tekken “,” Brooker explained in a 2019 interview. If you’ve heard two guys play “Tekken” or “Street Fighter”, it looks like a sadomasochistic sex scene. They go ‘oof, ahhh, argh, yes, yes. “It turns out that video game fights are in Charlie Brooker What tennis is to director Luca Guadagnino: A very practical metaphor for sex itself.

Brooker added in the interview that his favorite player “Tekken” to play, just like the Kangaroo Roger of Boxing, a character introduced into the second game “Tekken” in 1995. The fact that the series of games has an option to play as a kangaroo also seems notable. Karl mentions a polar bear fighter at some point, although he does not use the polar bear for combat purposes either. One wonders if the famous Karl line, “IF – was a polar bear and I still could not get you out of my mind”, was originally supposed to be a kangaroo, but the writers decided that “the polar bear” seemed funnier. (Although it should be noted that you can indeed play like a polar bear in “Tekken” too.)

Charlie Brooker’s love for video games has entered the show in many other ways throughout the series. It was part of what inspired him to write the episode of season 3 centered on the video game “Playtest”, the episode of season 4 “USS Callister”, as well as the interactive interactive episode focused on the game “Bandersnatch”. Brooker also worked as a video game journalist, a profession he gave to the main character of “Playinghing” and a minor character in the suite “USS Callister” “in Infinity”.

Brooker’s love for video games also influenced the social commentary of “Into Infinity”, an episode that could easily have gone for easy and cheap photos to players but Instead, chosen to represent them affectionately. “I trust people who play much more games than people who watch sport,” said Brooker about the episode. He had noted earlier: “It is not the intention to say that the game is violent or all this kind of shit that tends to grow in the media.”