This episode turns the love between two men into another factor in a dunderheaded thought experiment, clinically analyzing emotional impulses and tendencies as if completely unfamiliar with how they’d actually play out between real people. “Striking Vipers,” the first installment of Black Mirror’s fifth season (excluding last year’s interactive one-off, “Bandersnatch”), serves to illustrate how difficult it must have been to pull off “San Junipero.” Everything that could have gone wrong the first time around does so here, from catastrophic tonal issues to an overall lack of the warmth that’s supposed to render the central relationship worthy of our heart’s investment. The episode ended gracefully, replacing the usual nightmarish twist with the establishment of a new romantic status quo bringing compassionate closure to the writer’s creations. That episode was called “San Junipero,” and it handled the courtship between Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis in a computerized ’80s realm with delicacy and respect. Representing one’s self in an artificial reality provided a sense of digitized freedom that allowed characters to explore previously untouched impulses and find joys unlike any they’d ever known. Once upon a time, Black Mirror told a story of tentative, unlikely queer love made possible through the mediating influence of technology.
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