Daly revels in undermining and tormenting the crew, making the stakes of any mutiny exceedingly high. This initially backfires, and when Lowry tries to protect Cole from Daly’s wrath, he turns her into a hideous, alien monster. But when Daly copies a new programmer, Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti), the fragile dynamics of USS Callister are disrupted.ĭespite the intelligence these people boast and the torture they’ve gone through, it’s Cole who inspires them to try to escape, devising a complex plan that relies on sending an SOS to her real-life counterpart. Raymond), and Walton - try to play by Daly’s rules in order to spare themselves the torture he gleefully and inventively doles out. Uhura from Star Trek), Elena Tulaska (Milanka Brooks), Nate Packer (Osy Ikhile), Kabir Dudani (Paul G. The digital co-worker clones turned pawns - including the main bridge crew Shania Lowry (Michaela Coel playing a lovely rendition of Lt. Making matters worse, they don’t have genitals. They’re sentient beings with all the memories of their real-life counterparts, up to the point where they were copied into the game, essentially trapped in order to be kissed, dressed, and tortured based on Daly’s whims. But these aren’t mere digital creations of Daly’s co-workers - they’re digital clones formed from DNA he swiped from coffee cups and other trash they left behind in the office.
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Daly is actually the disgruntled, socially awkward creator of an extremely popular virtual-reality game called Infinity who feels ignored by the women he’s drawn to and mistreated by his cocky co-creator James Walton (Jimmi Simpson).Įverything witnessed in the first few minutes is a secret, personalized patch of the Infinity game Daly created for himself, in which the adoring crew members are versions of his real-life co-workers. Kirk into pop-culture fame back in the 1960s.
The captain of the USS Callister, Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons), re-creates the staccato line readings and wry machismo that William Shatner used to launch Captain James T.
The chirps and sighs of the gadgets, the narrow-aspect ratio, softly lit interiors, candy-colored palette, technobabble, and mid-century Americana nods in the costuming make it immediately clear that Brooker is referencing TOS. “USS Callister” begins as a blatant riff on the style and ethos of Star Trek: The Original Series. But it also has two distinct endings that help build toward its critique of the noxious, oft-violent aspects of white masculinity in fandom and the storied franchise it skewers.įirst it’s important to understand the intersecting story lines of the episode. “USS Callister,” the feature-length season-four opener he co-wrote with William Bridges, relies on a blend of technological cynicism, grim moodiness, inventive science fiction, and a few twists in its closing moments, a structure that has become the template for many a Black Mirror episode. This story includes spoilers for the season-four premiere of Black Mirror.īlack Mirror writer-creator Charlie Brooker has never met a twist ending he didn’t love.