Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 6 Recap – Hated in the Nation

A woman is waiting outside a room, anxiously drinking her coffee. A guy calls for her and tells her to enter the room. Inside the courtroom, a judge asks her questions. Karin says, “I first got involved on the 15th.” Karin goes home. She brings out everything she bought from the market and makes something to eat. She watches the news on television. The news says 20,000 people have signed the petition to fire Jo Powers because of a controversial article she made about Gwen Marbury.

Jo Powers walks on her way home. Before she opens the door, a delivery guy approaches her and gives her a package. The delivery guy tells her it’s from a bakery and is dedicated to her. Jo accepts the package and enters her house. She opens the package and rolls her eyes once she sees the message: “Fucking Bitch.” It must be from one of her haters. She gets champagne and a knife to cut the cake and eat it. She checks her messages online. She has so many hate comments because of her article, but she chooses to ignore it all.

Karin is still watching television while eating ice cream. She receives a text message, so she immediately goes to the emergency operation. A woman meets her, and she introduces herself as TDC Blue Colson. She will be Karin’s shadow. Karin asks who the victim is, so Nick tells her it is Jo Powers. Nick tells her Jo Powers received many hateful comments online, and there has been a petition to close down her blog. They enter the room and see Jo Powers’ neck is slit. Blue checks Jo’s profile and says that hate comments for Jo still come in. Karin tells Nick what he has to do. Nick leaves. After checking the whole room, Karin and Blue leave the area. Blue asks Karin if she thinks the husband killed Jo. Karin says she’s keeping her options open. Karin tells Blue she will drive her home.

On their way, Karin asks Blue questions about how she ended up in their department. Blue tells her the Rannoch case made her leave digital forensics. She tells Karin she thinks she can make things better in the field. Karin tells Blue she’s still young and full of optimism. Blue says maybe Karin is just too old. Karin stops in front of an apartment complex and drops Blue.

Karin arrives at work. She sees Nick and Blue looking at something. Blue tells her she asked Nick to show her Jo’s house CCTV. Nick tells her no one entered the house. The only people inside were Jo and her husband. Blue tells Karin her theory about the rear patio, but Karin indirectly dismisses her theory. Blue goes back to her table. Blue starts to research the hate comments given to Jo Powers over the past 48 hours. Nick tells them Jo’s husband is already conscious and ready to talk about what happened.

Karin and Blue go to the hospital to interview Simon, Jo Powers’ husband. Simon tells them what happened to Jo. He tells them he heard Jo screaming from upstairs, and when he went to her, she was walking around her room, talking and babbling something while clutching her head. She then stopped and started clawing her skin. She smashed her head hard on the desk and pushed him over. She saw a bottle smashed on the floor, so she picked it up and started cutting herself. He tried to stop her, but she cut her throat.

While returning to the car, Blue tells Karin the husband seems convincing, and maybe there are some drugs on the cake. Karin tells Blue that the Toxicology is checking out the cake. She tells Blue they will go to the person who sent the cake. The girl who sent the cake tells them she did send it. Karin tells her the price of the cake is not cheap. She tells them she’s not the only one who paid for the cake. She adds that she knows Jo is already dead. She asks Karin and Blue if they saw what Jo wrote — horrible things. The cake was a form of freedom of speech. Blue assumes she wished Jo was dead. The woman denies it, but Blue shows her the post where she said, “Death to Jo Powers.” She tells Blue it was just a joke, and she doesn’t know who started it. Karin receives a message from Toxicology. They tell her the cake is clean. While walking out, the girl who sent the cake says she didn’t do anything.

Karin tells Blue that Simon will be discharged the next day. They will be arresting him for what happened. Nick tells them everyone is pissed with Tusk because of what he did with the kid. He is also receiving a lot of hateful comments. He meets with his friend who offers him good shit. Suddenly, he feels something extremely painful in his head. He gets sent to the hospital immediately, but he still dies. Shaun goes to check Tusk’s body.

Karin and Blue visit the laboratory to check the autopsy of Jo Powers. The doctor tells them he found a thing deep inside Jo’s brain. He gives it to them. It looks like a bee. Blue says it is an ADI, an autonomous drone insect from the Granular Project. The insect made its way to all humans’ pain center, throwing the pain levels off the scale. It gets so painful that someone will do anything to make the pain stop.

Karin and Blue meet Vanessa Dahl. They also meet Rasmus Sjoberg, the head of ADIs. Karin asks him to tell them about their bees. He tells them the bees have a sensor. The ADIs make their own decisions, and they also reproduce. Rasmus asks them what’s the real reason for their visit. Karin tells them they think one of their ADIs is the reason for one of the unexplainable death.

Rasmus checks the bee and confirms it’s one of their ADIs. Blue asks them what if someone hacks an ADI and controls it. Rasmus replies that the ADIs have military-grade encryption. Rasmus is still explaining, but Karin interrupts and tells them what Rasmus has just said doesn’t sound impossible. Rasmus shows them the hive of bees they have all over the country. Blue enters Jo Powers’ postcode. Rasmus checks the ADI near Jo Powers’ house. He shows them a recording of what happened. Suddenly, he sees something odd. He tells them that when an ADI leaves a hive, it switches to another. But at that time, the specific ADI did not have a hive to switch to. Blue tells him someone might have spoofed a hive and tried to control it. Rasmus still says it’s impossible. Karin tells him to trace who did it. Then Rasmus tells them it would be easier if he had no audience. Karin asks for his number. She tells Vanessa they need a list of all the Granular staff who had access to the system.

Karin and Blue return to their headquarters. Karin tells Nick to check the Granular personnel records. Nick tells them the NCA already knows it. Shaun Li from the National Crime Agency introduces himself. Karin asks him what he is doing there, so he shows them that there has been more than one case of ADI. He shows them the clip about what happened to Tusk last night.

Shaun tells them the ADI got out of Tusk’s eye socket while in the MRI. It battered the ADI also, so he asks for the ADI from Jo for analysis. Karin tells him the two victims have similarities: both were in the middle of an online hate storm. Blue does her research to look at the connection between Jo and Tusk. She sees they are both canceled on the internet hours before their death, and people tweeted their photos with the hashtag #DeathTo plus their names. Blue traces back the tweets, and she finds the hashtag’s first use was last weekend. Karin asks who did it. Blue tells them it’s automated, similar to spam. She shows them the avatar of the tweet — bees. Blue shows them the Game of Consequences video attached to each tweet. The video shows instructions about how to pick the next target. Blue tells them it’s an unpopularity contest. People will pick someone they don’t like, then someone who gets the most vote will be targeted and eliminated by 5 PM. The voting resets at midnight.

They see someone being targeted that day — Clara Meades. She posted her photo pretending to piss on a war memorial. Shaun tells them they must get her before 5 PM because the hashtag works. They trace her location. The police call her friend. Karin talks to her and tells her to stay where she is and to close her windows. Blue tells Rasmus she sent him her postcode and her GPS. She tells him to monitor the area. Rasmus tells her that he set a trap for the ADI if it will attack at that moment.

They arrive at Clara Meades’ house. The police have set a perimeter. Rasmus calls Blues and tells her he has picked up an attempted breach. He tells her one ADI goes offline about 800 meters from their location. Blue looks around trying to find the ADI controlled by someone. Karin, Shaun, and Blue take Clara to a safe house. Shaun tells someone on the phone they have not tracked the compromised ADIs yet. But without their knowledge, the compromised ADI attached itself to the rear hood of the car they used to get to the safe house.

While in the safe house, Rasmus calls Blue to tell her he can’t trace the specific ADI. Suddenly, he sees they have lost a whole hive of ADI, and thousands of them are close to their location. Rasmus and Blue lose connection. Rasmus tells himself that the hackers got the entire thing and are not in control anymore. Thousands of bees attack them. Rasmus sends a message to Blue telling them to get out of the area. They try to go out, but it’s too late; thousands of ADI bees break into the safe house. Even after doing everything to protect Clara, the bees still successfully kills Clara Meades.

Back in the courtroom, Karin tells the judge she had seen so many dead bodies before, but she didn’t see them die right in front of her, just that time. The judge asks Karin to describe Blue Colson’s reaction. Karin tells them she took it hard. Back at their headquarters, they discuss it’s not just one man controlling one ADI. Rasmus tells them whoever it is, they’re controlling the whole system, but he doesn’t know their specific location.

Blue tells them the ADIs have facial recognition because they only attacked Clara when she and Karin are also in the same room. Shaun says it’s impossible, but Blue disagrees and says it’s the only explanation. Rasmus tells them that the visual feed between each ADI and the hive is secure. He continues to explain that one of the government’s conditions for backing the project is for them to have access to the visual feed at times of “increased national security,” which Rasmus tells Shaun is most of the time. Shaun gets uncomfortable and tells Rasmus he went along with it.

Blue and Shaun get into an argument. Karin stops them. She also tells them that the public will know about what happened to Clara. Then soon, they will have another body. Karin asks them what to do next. Rasmus tells them that if he can work out how the hackers got in, he might reverse engineer it to get the control back. Blue asks him for the key to the ADIs onboard cache. Nick tells Karin he picked out some persons of interest. She asks Shaun if he wants to sit with them to interview Granular personnel, but he tells her he must go elsewhere.

News and social media have picked up on the #DeathTo trend reporting that three deaths have been linked to it. News reports the next target is Chancellor Tom Pickering. Blue attempts to pair with the ADI they have. Shaun reports to Tom and his team. Tom tells everyone to shut everything online. Shaun disagrees and suggests another way to help Tom — hide him in a bunker. Karin interviews Tess. Tess says she knows she did a wrong thing, but she doesn’t deserve to receive many hate comments. She tried to end it by slashing herself, but her flatmate Garrett Scholes found her. He saved her. Karin learns that both of them worked for ADI.

Karin tells Nick and Blue they must find Garrett. Blue is way ahead. She found a 98-page manifesto buried onboard Jo Powers’ ADI. The manifesto’s recurrent theme is: Garrett wants people to face the consequences of their choices. Blue finds out where Garrett is staying, so they immediately go to the place, but he is not there anymore. They find a hard drive Garrett left. Back at the headquarters, Shaun tells Rasmus to deactivate it. Rasmus finds a file and tells them it wasn’t there before. Blue finds that there are 387,000 IMEI numbers on the file. Karin realizes that the 387,000 is the number of people who used the hashtag — game of consequences. The real targets are the people. Karin tries to stop them from deactivation, but Shaun pushes the button. They thought it’s successful, but the bees start attacking everyone. Karin concludes her testimony by telling the judge that Blue has killed herself at a beach. Garrett is seen watching the live broadcast of the trial. He doesn’t know Blue is following him. She texts Karin through an encrypted number that she got him. Karin deletes the message. Blue continues to follow Garrett.

Our Thoughts

The internet is filled with people who think they know better than anyone else. It‘s good to have the freedom to voice your opinion, but to the point of wishing the death of someone is borderline insane, even if it is a joke. Did the 387,000 deserve to be killed because they were the ones who wished someone dead? Is it liberating for those who are still living? Do we really have true freedom? The answers to these questions can go many ways. But Garrett Scholes clearly points out that he wants people to face the consequences of their actions. He may be the culprit in this episode, but he might have shown us how cruel people could be because of their own agendas. Is he the real culprit, or is it the people who arrogantly desire someone to die?