"White Christmas"

I tend to not like Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror at his most nihilistically unpleasant, which has a tendency to bludgeon me to death with that sentiment instead of forming something that has a solid emotional and logical throughline, for it to be more truthfully shattering. Two exceptions though: "White Bear", and now the middle section (out of the three) in "White Christmas". It stars Oona Chaplin and the concept of 'Cookie', which is utilized in a story that is swift, fascinating, and very, very nasty, despite not a shed of physical violence to be found. This story if expanded to full episode length might be the best Black Mirror has to offer yet, although I can imagine it being so traumatic one might not be able to crawl out from under the bed for days.

Alas, it is bookeneded by an unremarkable first story, which has a very convenient ending, and the intriguing third one with a fairly haunting concept of Blocking, but which is utilized in a pretty nonsensical real-world context, in order to engineer that gotcha ending. Still, other series can only hope for its middling entry to have a high quality threshold like this one. B