Do be warned that this article contains major spoilers for the Black Mirror Season 7 episode, USS Callister: Into Infinity.
USS Callister: Into Infinity has quickly propelled itself to the top of the charts as one of the most popular Black Mirror episodes of all time. If the media coverage and Reddit sentiment are any indication, most viewers really love this episode. And it’s easy to see why.
USS Callister leaned hard into the Star Trek campiness and a terrifying deconstruction of the mind of an obsessive, but it ultimately ended on a hopeful note. Protagonist Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti) and the Callister crew broke free from Robert Daly’s (Jesse Plemons) private server, and launched themselves into the infinite possibility of Infinity’s game world. With Into Infinity, director Toby Haynes picks up directly where the story left off, and immediately shuts down any semblance of hope and optimism the viewer might have held for the crew.
You see, escaping the clutches of an evil nerd and going into a video game world is great and all, but what happens when you figure out that the video game world is also full of evil nerds who have no regard for video game morality? The result is that you end up being at the mercy of video game players who have no qualms shooting and killing you just for fun. Now I could spend all day talking about video game morality and what it really says about me as a person when I read a note about an NPC in Assassin’s Creed Shadows trying to become a better person and I kill them anyway just because I can. But that’s a subject best explored another time.
Into Infinity uses video game morality as a framework for its narrative structure. When the crew sees just how callous video game players can be, they wonder if they were better off in a private build after all. A private build just like the one Daly imprisoned them in, but this time, without the nerdy psychopath.
To that end, the story takes our crew to Infinity’s source code. A narrative twist reveals that there was a clone of Daly in the code this entire time, just developing and building out planets for the game.
A Time of Youthful Hope and Innocence
For dramatic purposes, naturally only one person is allowed to enter the source code domain. And naturally, that person is Nanette, our main protagonist. When Nanette goes in and comes face to face with Daly again, there is a sense of trepidation that underscores the scene. At the same time, there’s also a bit of hope.
Daly is absent for most of Into Infinity. In fact, smarmy CEO James Walton (Jimmi Simpson) steps into the antagonist role for this installment. When we revisit Daly for the first time, it’s in a flashback from Walton’s perspective. The story tells us that Walton had exploited Daly and used his project to launch an incredible MMO that would rake in millions of dollars. When it becomes clear that Daly wouldn’t be able to build out enough planets for launch, however, Walton proposes cloning Daly and putting that clone into the source code so that he can just work on the game in perpetuity.
We’re meant to sympathize with Daly here. This isn’t quite the same man we saw in USS Callister. Daly is portrayed as a young nerd’s nerd who just wanted to create a cool universe, and ends up getting used by the rich jerk just throwing his money around.
This version of Daly predates the psychopath we saw in USS Callister. So when Nanette meets Daly again, there is hope. There is hope that Daly will be sympathetic to Nanette’s cause too. And maybe, just maybe, this could be the start of Daly’s redemption arc.
Are We Inherently Evil?
This is a Black Mirror episode at the end of the day, though, which means that nothing is ever so simple or straightforward. Daly is indeed quite sympathetic to Nanette’s cause. He’s even horrified when she tells him what the real him did to her and the other clones. He’s “a nice guy,” he says. He can’t believe he would do something like this.
And yet, his sinister side starts to rear its ugly head when he presents Nanette with a choice. Go to a secure private server with the crew, or she could be transferred back to her body in the real world but wipe the rest of the crew in the process. It’s a real Sophie’s Choice, but Nanette resists the temptation and quickly tells Daly to save the crew.
Daly smirks and reveals that this feels reminiscent of one of his favorite Space Fleet episodes, where the captain also has to make a similar choice. He then tells her that it’s actually possible to have the best of both worlds. Nanette can go back to her body, and the crew can go to the private server. He was just testing her.
That alone should be a telltale sign that the sociopath in him is still there. Daly enjoys watching Nanette agonize. He likes the mental torture. He likes the power that he had over her for just a brief moment.
If that wasn’t obvious enough, it’s made abundantly clear when he offers to copy and paste them into the server instead of cutting and pasting them. He wants to keep a copy of Nanette with him, and when she refuses, he turns into the psychotic Daly we’re all too familiar with. He uses his computer powers to torture Nanette and overpower her, all the while making the excuse that she’s the one making him act out in this way. If she would just be reasonable, he wouldn’t have to resort to such savagery because he’s such a nice guy.
What started out as a cautiously optimistic sequence quickly turns into a horrifying one as we essentially see a repeat of the events in USS Callister.
So what exactly is the takeaway here? Are people inherently evil? Clone Daly hadn’t gone through all of the mental abuse from Walton that real Daly did, so what’s his excuse? Perhaps the scary truth is that Daly is just the kind of person who will always abuse the power he has as soon as he gets it. Even in a time of youth and hope, Daly is unable to resist it and he goes down that dark path of manipulating and torturing the people who have no way of fighting back.
The Redemption Arc Does Exist
Like most other Black Mirror episodes, the USS Callister saga shows us that its characters are grey. Even if the episode doesn’t show us that maybe Daly could’ve been a good guy if he had the right support system, there is hope to be found in the other characters.
Clone Walton proved this in USS Callister, when he sacrifices himself to save the crew. By all accounts, Walton is a manipulative asshole who only cares about his bottomline. But when Daly breaks him by killing a cloned version of his son, clone Walton realizes that there are more important things than just himself.
Real Walton never quite gets there himself, but perhaps we can find a bit of solace in knowing that there’s a version of the character that exists that can be a decent person. The caveat is that clone Walton had to go through years of mental torture and watching his son die in front of him in order to change, but that redemption arc exists.
USS Callister: Into Infinity ends with a kicker when Nanette goes back to her real body, but the rest of the crew gets stuck in her mind. The final scene shows them watching TV together as the crew badgers her about looking for a way to transfer them out of her brain and into their bodies. Mouth full of snacks, Nanette says she’s working on it, and carelessly brushes away a few crumbs atop a notepad filled with lazy notes. Even our heroes have their moments of callousness.
Black Mirror is now available for streaming on Netflix.
