Black Mirror (Fifteen Million Merits)
“Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which ARE, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.” –Egæus, from Edgar Allen Poe’s “Berenice”
Two episodes in and “Black Mirror” already knows how to play us. We’re waiting for the boot to drop because we know it is going to hurt, and the cruelest trick it plays is to delay it, until the wait is greater torture than that boot. Its best trick, though, is that it goes on, as life does. We hurt, and we survive, despite ourselves and our nature.
8