This isn’t exactly a recap, but it contains spoilers

1. The world may think I’m foolish

I’m thinking about what happens when Bing closes his eyes. How the screen knows, somehow, that he’s not watching. How it turns bright red, accompanied by a tone of torturously increasing frequency until Bing opens his eyes again and lets the images flood back in.

It’s a horrifying scene, more disturbing in its way than the way Alex’s eyes are kept open in A Clockwork Orange—and one that makes sense to anyone who’s ever seen something on the Internet that they can’t unsee, anyone who’s ever lost an entire weekend to a Netflix binge, anyone who’s ever felt the need to go on a “social media fast.”

The screens are everywhere, that’s the point. They’re the last thing you look at before you go to bed, the first thing you look at when you get up in the morning, and in between—in the monotonous waking hours that most human lives consist of—you meet with a progression of screens, images that keep on coming whether you want them to or not.

Part of the brilliance of “Fifteen Million Merits”—and it is brilliant, a masterpiece of speculative storytelling—lies in the organic way it unveils its world. Only at the end does the final piece click into place. The bleak picture that emerges is a society of mindless drones, spending all day on bicycles to earn merit points that buy everything from food to toothpaste to TV shows to the ability to bypass pop-up ads for porn. And the only way out of this dull, slave-like existence is to go on a reality show called Hot Shot and compete in front of three judges for the chance at fame—the chance to entertain the bicycle drones they leave behind.

This is dystopian satire at its finest—and yet it seems almost reductive to call “Fifteen Million Merits” satire. What the episode does, ultimately, is use the conventions of the dystopian genre to paint an impressionistic portrait of the emotional and spiritual cost of living right now.

The world of “Fifteen Million Merits” isn’t real. But it feels real. Bing’s world is ours, and his struggle is ours as well: the struggle to remain human, to see only those things we want to see, to resist the irresistible mass identity creeping in through our eyeballs and instead seek something inside ourselves that is completely our own. An identity, a soul.

A voice.

2. They can’t see you like I can

I’m thinking about the song Bing hears in the bathroom, the song Abbi sings on Hot Shot. Abbi says she learned it from her mother, who learned it from her mother before her. It’s a vestige of the before, of a time long ago when things weren’t so inauthentic, so artificial. The song feels like something real.

We recognize the song as Irma Thomas’s “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand),” a song that is actually about what it symbolizes in the episode: a transcendent love that the rest of the world can’t compute. Bing and Abbi, we’re meant to believe, have found something real in a world of pervasive irreality; they’re lovers in a society that’s forgotten what love is. Abbi’s performance of the song on Hot Shot, for instance, certainly seems real. There’s an innocence to her singing that seems unforced and wholly unperformed, and when she delivers the key line in the chorus she smiles back at Bing, who’s waiting in the wings backstage.

The moment serves as a sort of climax to the first part of the episode, which has presented itself as a sweet story of love in a drab dystopian setting—but it’s also the moment the episode changes gears and reveals its romance to be, in fact, a tragedy. The judges like Abbi’s singing, but they like her body more—and so she reluctantly agrees to join Wraith Babes, the porn channel whose constant advertisements Bing spends thousands of merits every day dismissing.

And so the song comes back a third time—but now, a drugged-out Abbi is singing it on a sex video Bing is forced to watch (the images keep coming), and maybe the song is Abbi’s way of blocking out the shame of being packaged as a commodity for the masses, and maybe it’s mocking Bing for thinking that he’d found something real, and maybe it’s both and maybe it’s neither but it hardly matters either way because the point is that the system took something beautiful and wonderful and destroyed it forever, and Bing understands something now that he didn’t before:

Show us something real and free and beautiful, you couldn’t. It’d break us, we’re too numb for it, our minds would choke. There’s only so much wonder we can bear, that’s why when you find any wonder whatsoever you dole it out in meager portions, and only then til it’s augmented and packaged and pumped through ten thousand pre-assigned filters, til it’s nothing more than a meaningless series of lights, while we ride day-in, day-out—going where? Powering what? All tiny cells in tiny screens and bigger cells in bigger screens and fuck you. Fuck you, that’s what it boils down to is fuck you.

Bing delivers these words in a speech—a rant, really—to the Hot Shot judges. And I suppose you could say this moment of awful clarity ends up being Bing’s salvation.

Or is it his damnation?

3. But anyone who knows what love is will understand

I’m thinking about the final shot of “Fifteen Million Merits,” the one where Bing stands in front of that giant window looking out onto the forest. The strains of Irma Thomas’s “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)” comes on one more time, and it’s then that you wonder—what kind of love are we talking about here, exactly, Bing’s love of orange juice and awesome views? And what are we being asked to understand, Bing’s selling out for a bit of comfort and enjoyment in life?

At the beginning of the episode, a previous Hot Shot winner was shown on screen talking about how much she enjoyed her beautiful view of the outside, a view she’d never have had on the bike. And looking back, it suddenly seems very likely that our inscrutable Bing had on some unconscious level wanted the same view all along. That maybe he didn’t love Abbi so much as he loved the idea of the authenticity that she represented, and that as much as he craved authenticity the mere performance of authenticity would have sufficed just fine, thank you. Maybe he bought into this Hot Shot stuff a little too much all along. I mean, wasn’t he just a little too insistent that Abbi should go on the show? And when he himself went on the show, didn’t he call himself an “entertainer,” his speech “a kind of performance”?

That’s exactly what Bing’s revolutionary ideas become: a weekly performance doled out to keep the drones happily droning—and it’s here that I begin to think about all the real-life forms of revolutionary authenticity that the system has absorbed and repackaged as commodity. From Dada to punk to guerrilla street art, authentic expressions of anger against the powers that be have a tendency to exit through the gift shop. As our technologies of mass communication have accelerated and proliferated, becoming ever more efficient at catering to and containing every human need, the process of turning a revolution into a commodity has sped up accordingly.

But perhaps there’s a sliver of hope, because I’m also thinking about a minor character, unnamed as far as I can tell—a girl who at the beginning of the episode teaches Bing how to get an apple from the vending machine and seems to be interested in him, if not romantically then as a friend at least. I’m thinking about how by the end, she’s the only one whose hands are clean, who remains on some level pure, her personhood untouched by the System. She’s the only one we don’t see buying into the values being offered on the screen: she never buys any accessories for her Dopple, she never watches the game show of overweight people being shamed or plays the video game of killing the fat underlings. All she does is play violin and watch the scenery fly by. And when she watches Abbi and Bing on Hot Shot, the look on her face says that she’s the only one who really knows what’s going on—that the reality show is simply the means by which people are turned into products. Bing doesn’t notice her, but he should: because she seems know something, and she understands more than he ever will.

It’s a small sliver, perhaps, but in a show as bleak as Black Mirror, you take what you can get.

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