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Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

I thought the first three episodes were brilliant. The rest are also good - San Junipero is quite enjoyable - but the last episode was somewhat underwhelming for me.

S3 is probably not as good as the rest of the series, but it's much better than anything else currently on TV, except for Westworld of course.

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I thought the last episode was great, although maybe slightly long. It was a good example of how a seemingly good piece of technology can be disastrous if a back door is put into it. Also it was a decent nod to Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds"

It might have been more believable if it wasn't just the work of a single person. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief because of that. I mean, we are on HN after all :P

I think my problem with it was how plot-driven the last episode ("Hated in the Nation") was. It ended in a way as if it mattered whether the cops catch the bad guy. I love cop shows, but the procedural bits here took time from all the interesting tech concepts that had been brought up. Another reviewer described it as feeling like an episode of X-Files, which I think is an apt way to describe it: Good, but not the kind of good that Black Mirror is uniquely positioned to deliver.

I understood "Hated in the Nation" to be taking the piss out of the standard cop show format, with their happy endings, flashbacks from the debriefing, master villain, etc.

Charlie Brooker has already thoroughly massacred the procedural format:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Touch_of_Cloth

I think in an episode largely concerned with revenge and justice it does matter, thematically, that at least one character is very driven to catch the bad guy, right up to the end.

Dirty self-reply here because it's too late to edit, but it has occurred to me that the ending is also indispensable to that character's arc.

And Mr. Robot, which doesn't get nearly enough threads on HN IMHO :)

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