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Musings

C.F.D.D Pod

Gaming in the Jon Byron Times

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Run time:44 minutes

Bad cellphones featured:

global internet, cable news, social media, VPNs/ MAC spoofing.

It’s an interesting plot, and one of the better Mirrors. It isn’t great, but it is fine. It is one of those episodes that is quieter and more dramatic and less about futurism. In fact, there is no future technology in place that I can spot. In my imaginary canonical timeline, this is probably the earliest event. What is ironic is, information technology doesn't really play a big role in this one. Yes, people are using phones and computers a lot, but phones and computers are used a lot in an average police procedural as well, or just in life for that matter. Considering this was always a show on streaming services, this "sore thumb" of Mirror episodes would be the one the lion's share of the viewing audience seen first.

The premise is: a member of the British Royal family is kidnapped; a very popular royal at that, and no one has any good leads on locating her and mounting a rescue. What it comes down to as the only hope of recovering the young princess safe and sound is, conceding to the ransom demand. The demand is for the Prime Minister to have sex with a pig in public view. This is obviously an extremely embarrassing act.

Notice I could summarize it all fairly well without mention of technology at all. Of course, the kidnapper is using computers, and a big part was, that the kidnapper put footage of the hostage on YouTube, and there was difficulty tracing the kidnapper with computers. It technically fits as a Mirror, but marginally, and in my opinion, it makes it one of the stronger stories. It isn't trying to shock the audience with how out of control a particular technology is. It is a simple self-contained premise enacted and acted well. A good anthology show episode. There is enough to fill an interesting episode of television, but not so much that one would feel it needed more time to exist.

The big twist is that it was a single individual that managed to do all this, a tortured artist. So, this one man, who as we are to believe, has most of his experience in being a cooky artist, had the ability to:

It's some high-level spy skills for someone who is just a regular guy and as far as we know had to self-learn to do all of that, and as far as we know hasn't done anything like this before. Not technically impossible, just rather farfetched.