This isn’t exactly a recap, but it contains spoilers.
Black Mirror is great. For me, this rewatch has confirmed that the series is what I thought it was when I first saw it: some of the best TV I’ve ever seen, consistently thought-provoking, challenging, and emotionally affecting.
But “The Waldo Moment,” the last episode of the second series, is—and I say this without reservation—garbage.
It’s about Jamie, a comedian who’s come to voice a popular TV character named Waldo, a blue dog operated remotely through video game controls and a microphone. Waldo’s basically a vehicle for insults, sort of a CG Triumph the Insult Comic Dog—but when Jamie’s producers decide to make Waldo go political, Jamie discovers that the character’s got more legs than he’d ever dreamed. Soon, Waldo is a political sensation, mounting an almost-successful political campaign for the House of Commons as his creator looks on in horror.
It’s a retread of a well-worn plot: what would happen if someone actually started telling the truth about politics? Not the most compelling what-if, when you consider that this already happens on an almost nightly basis: it’s called The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, and (until recently) The Colbert Report. Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and now Larry Wilmore are both funny and perceptive about our political system—the problem with “The Waldo Moment” is that Waldo is simply neither. His humor consists mainly of dumb insults and dick jokes that make the audience neither laugh nor think.
Waldo gets the attention of some very powerful people, and soon Jamie’s sitting down at a meeting with the American “Agency.” They want to take Waldo worldwide, rolling the character out “like Pringles” as a product to appeal to the masses and push political outcomes beneficial to…well, that’s not entirely clear. I suppose there’s a lot going on in this scene, but I was too busy rolling my eyes at the lazy satire to bother figuring it out.
Ultimately, Waldo doesn’t win his bid at political office, and—controlled now by one of Jamie’s producers—Waldo begins inciting mobs to basically throw shit at politicians in public places. It’s so dumb. Dumber still is a completely unearned coda in which we jump forward in time to discover Waldo at the head of some kind of dystopian police state in which Jamie’s homeless. Nothing we’ve seen up to this point in the episode indicates that Waldo has that kind of power.
Black Mirror is generally bleak, but “The Waldo Moment” was the first time that I thought Charlie Brooker’s pessimism might be misplaced. There are a lot of problems in the world, but a lack of intelligent political satire just isn’t one of them. I simply can’t see a character like Waldo getting any kind of real political traction, or even popularity with audiences who just want a laugh. I’m more optimistic than that. If anything, political satire of the Stewart/Oliver/Wilmore variety has made those who come in contact with it more informed and civic-minded, not less. (Perhaps the state of political satire is much worse in Britain and this all really landed with its original audience; I don’t know.)
Where the episode almost stumbles into significance is in Waldo’s rant at a debate, in which Jamie angrily expresses the rage and apathy that often attend the electorate’s perception of the political process. There is a legitimate mystery here—why, in an age in which we are more connected and more informed than ever before, are we also more apathetic about politics than ever before? Or, more pointedly: why don’t more people vote? Who are the ones who don’t show up? What do they want? What could they rally behind?
There’s an intelligent hour of television to be made about those questions. But “The Waldo Moment” isn’t it.
Thanks for watching this one so I don’t have to, Andrew! Enjoyed the other 5 though (when I wasn’t cringing).