Black Museum (Black Mirror)

Nish (Letitia Wright) is driving across the desert, presumably in the United States. While waiting for her car to charge, she visits the remote Black Museum. The proprietor, Rolo Haynes (Douglas Hodge), explains backstories to the museum's crime-related artefacts, starting with a hairnet device. Rolo previously recruited people for experimental medical technology. In a flashback, Dr. Peter Dawson (Daniel Lapaine) agreed to test an implant that made him feel the physical sensations of the person wearing the hairnet, to help him diagnose patients quickly. After experiencing a man's death, he became aroused by his patients' pain. Developing a masochistic addiction to it, he started mutilating himself for pleasure and eventually murdered a homeless man after forcing the hairnet on him, which caused him to fall into a coma. In the present, the air conditioner is broken, so Nish offers Rolo water. Moving on to a toy monkey, Rolo describes how he convinced Jack (Aldis Hodge) to transfer his comatose wife Carrie's (Alexandra Roach) consciousness into part of his brain, so she could experience his physical sensations and communicate with him. Jack and Carrie became aggravated by their lack of privacy and agency, respectively. Rolo offered Jack an ability to "pause" Carrie. Months later, Jack un-paused her, and they eventually agreed for her to be un-paused on weekends only. Jack began dating Emily (Yasha Jackson), who wanted Carrie to be deleted. Rolo transferred Carrie to the toy monkey, which could feel sensations and say two phrases ("Monkey loves you" and "Monkey needs a hug"). Carrie and Jack's son Parker was soon bored by it. The monkey technology became illegal due to the limited emotions available, so Rolo was fired. The museum's centerpiece is a holographic Clayton Leigh (Babs Olusanmokun). Rolo insists he was guilty of murder but Nish reminds him of conflicting evidence. While on death row, Clayton signed up to Rolo's exhibit: when a visitor pulls a lever, a conscious hologram of Clayton receives the electric chair, and a souvenir copy of him experiencing electrocution is made. The exhibit was immensely popular. As Rolo begins to have difficulty breathing, Nish continues the story, revealing herself as Clayton's daughter. After public protests, attendance to the exhibit dwindled to sadists and wealthy white supremacists, who abused Clayton's consciousness so heavily he was left in a vegetative state. Nish's mother Angelica (Amanda Warren) overdosed the day after she saw him. As revenge, Nish sabotaged the air conditioner and gave Rolo poisoned water. Nish transfers Rolo's consciousness into Clayton's hologram, then electrocutes it, which creates a souvenir of Rolo's suffering. Nish takes the monkey containing Carrie with her and sets the museum on fire. She converses with her mother, whose consciousness is inside her head, like Carrie's was with Jack. She hangs the Rolo souvenir on her car's rear-view mirror, and drives away from the museum as it burns down. ==Production==

Whilst series one and two of Black Mirror were shown on Channel 4 in the UK, Netflix commissioned the programme for 12 episodes (split into two series of six episodes) in September 2015 with a bid of $40million. The six episodes in series four were released on Netflix simultaneously on 29 December 2017. "Black Museum" is listed as the last episode, and was also one of the later episodes to be made. Production overlapped with various stages of each of the other five episodes' productions. Jillette had written the story based on the personal experience of being ill in a Spanish welfare hospital in 1981, where it was difficult to get a diagnosis due to the language barrier. He conceived of technology that allowed a doctor to understand what pain a person was suffering, but led to the doctor's addiction to the pain of others. The story continued with the doctor "beating people to feel their pain", engaging in sadomasochism and desiring to experience what Jesus felt while being crucified. Jillette met with Brooker before the production of the third series and told him about the story. Brooker took Jillette's past performances as part of Penn & Teller and his documentary series Bullshit! as inspiration for Rolo. Casting and filming The production had previously looked to cast Letitia Wright in an episode of the third series of Black Mirror, but she became unavailable. During casting for "Black Museum", Wright was at the end of shooting for the superhero film Black Panther, where she worked with the star of the first series episode "Fifteen Million Merits", Daniel Kaluuya. She provided a self-tape audition, with Kaluuya reading the other characters' lines. Filming took place immediately after Black Panthers filming ended. Colm McCarthy directed the episode. It took a month to film, with locations including Spain and Nevada, United States. Hodge's scenes were shot in chronological order. During the first story, Rolo shows Dr. Dawson a pair of rats, for which stuffed frozen rats were used. The first story also featured a graphic sex scene, which took a long time to film relative to its brief screentime. Scenes which relate to the plot twist of Nish's true intentions at the museum—such as her first sighting of the museum, her handing Rolo water and her entering the exhibit where her father is—were shot in many different ways. Wright played the early scenes as if Nish was the tourist she claims to be. ==Marketing==

In May 2017, a Reddit post unofficially announced the names of the six episodes in series 4 of Black Mirror. The first trailer for the series was released by Netflix on 25 August 2017. Beginning on 24 November 2017, Netflix published a series of posters and trailers for the fourth series of the show, referred to as the "13 Days of Black Mirror". The poster for "Black Museum" was released on 28 November and the trailer on 29 November. On 6 December Netflix published a trailer featuring an amalgamation of scenes from the fourth series, which announced that the series would be released on 29 December. Cristobal Tapia de Veer's compositions for the episode were released through Lakeshore Records on 19 January 2018. A music sampler was released earlier, on 27 December 2017, on his YouTube and SoundCloud accounts. ==Analysis==

Sophie Gilbert of The Atlantic found that the episode's structure was very similar to the previous portmanteau instalment "White Christmas". "Black Museum" has a linear narrative and Jacob Oller of Paste believed that the three stories are "darker and darker" as they progress. Tasha Robinson of The Verge commented that it explores the genre of "traditional horror". Louise Mellor of Den of Geek found it the "most cynical episode of the season". Robinson said that the "storytelling style" is as in previous instalments, but not the "moral framework": rather than the notion that "people are terrible" or "technology is dangerous", it revolves around Rolo being "personally loathsome". The technology allowing Dr. Peter Dawson to experience other people's physical sensations was compared by Charles Bramesco of Vulture to the 19th century novella The Corsican Brothers, about a pair of formerly conjoined twins who can feel the other's pain. Gabriel Tate of The Telegraph found the consciousness transfer into a person's brain to be similar to the comic strip series The Numskulls, where small beings maintain the characters' brains and bodies. Mellor found the use of "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me" in the ending to be a punchline characteristic of Black Mirrors fourth series. Bramesco called him a "storyteller" with a role similar to Matt Trent in "White Christmas". Noel Ransome called Rolo "a figure of the white and the western, who senselessly use the black and the misguided for personal gain". The ending saw Rolo the victim of the technology he had created, similar to Robert Daly's outcome in series four episode "USS Callister". Ransome wrote that he serves as "the standard black man", who "begins with enthusiasm and ends with exhaustion". The term "Black Museum" was the original name for the Crime Museum, a museum of crime artefacts at Scotland Yard in the United Kingdom. ==Reception==

received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for her performance. "Black Museum" received a mixed critical reception. It received ratings of three out of five stars in The Telegraph, a C+ in The A.V. Club and a C− in Entertainment Weekly. Handlen reviewed that its "obvious setups" led to the work lacking "surprise or insight", while Tate found that the characters were not developed well. Gilbert said it "isn't exactly a satisfying conclusion"; on the other hand, Framke called it "incredibly satisfying". • 13th – Matt Donnelly and Tim Molloy, TheWrap • 17th – Charles Bramesco, Vulture • 18th – Aubrey Page, Collider • 20th – Corey Atad, Esquire • 20th – Morgan Jeffery, Digital Spy • 21st – James Hibberd, Entertainment Weekly • 23rd – Ed Power, The Telegraph Instead of by quality, Proma Khosla of Mashable ranked the episodes by tone, concluding that "Black Museum" is the 7th-most pessimistic episode of the show. Other reviewers ranked "Black Museum" against other series four episodes: • 2nd – Christopher Hooton, Jacob Stolworthy, The Independent • 6th (grade: D+) – TVLine Awards and accolades ==References==