This article contains SPOILERS for the original “USS Callister” episode.
“From the very start, I thought I'd like to keep this story going,” Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker recently told IGN about his acclaimed series’ first-ever sequel episode, “USS Callister: Into Infinity”, which premieres with the entire seventh season on Netflix on April 10th.
“USS Callister” was the first episode of Black Mirror, Season 4 back in 2017. In it, twisted video game creator Robert Daly (sublimely played by Jesse Plemons) subjected sentient digital clones of his coworkers to his personal brand of terror within Infinity, the hugely popular MMO he programmed.
Within his game, which is modeled after Daly’s favorite TV show, Space Fleet (itself a riff on Star Trek), Daly is the captain of the starship USS Callister and his colleagues are the bridge crew who must do his bidding and placate his monstrous ego no matter what. Cristin Milioti played Nanette Cole, a meek programmer who inadvertently found herself on Daly’s bad side and, in both the game and real life, helps engineer his downfall. The real and virtual Daly is left for dead at the end of that episode, with the digital Nanette taking command of the Callister.
Milioti returns for “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” with both the real and digital Nanette front and center this time around. “When we last saw Nanette, she had discovered that actually, she was more than capable of rising to the occasion and that she could be her best self in the virtual game world. She was the captain, the leader, she stood up to their oppressor and defeated him,” Milioti said.
“Now she's found that she's not the captain she thought she was, she is failing both the crew and herself and has run out of ideas as to how to get them out of an infinite, dangerous, and extremely boring existence. She's dealing with some of the same let-downs she would have to deal with in the real world, in fact. She's at her wits’ end, and once again, desperate to escape her situation.”
Also reprising their roles for the sequel are Jimmi Simpson (as Walton), Billy Magnussen (Karl Valdack), Milanka Brooks (Elena Tulaska), Osy Ikhile (Nate Packer), and Paul G. Raymond (Kabir Dudani). (Michaela Coel, who played Shania Lowry, was unable to return due to scheduling issues, according to Brooker.) Toby Haynes is back in the director’s chair, while Brooker and “USS Callister” co-writer William Bridges penned the sequel with Bisha K. Ali and Bekka Bowling.
“I remember thinking I like these characters, which is not something you can always say about Black Mirror and people in general. Quite often, we feature quite unpleasant characters or deeply flawed characters, but I was very fond of the crew of the Callister. And obviously at the end of the first one, they find themselves flying out of the frying pan and into the fire in many ways in that they are in a massively multiplayer, procedurally generated universe and kind of threatened by casual gamers,” Brooker recalled.
Scroll through the gallery below for four exclusive new images from "USS Callister: Into Infinity":
Development on the sequel ended up taking years, prolonged by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the entertainment industry’s dual labor strikes as well as the busy schedules of its cast. While Brooker said there were writers’ rooms held for the seventh season during the pandemic, cracking the code for what would become “USS Callister: Into Infinity” presented its own unique set of challenges for him and his fellow writers.
“It's kind of like doing two different Rubik's Cubes at the same time because you've got the dynamics going on in the real world and the logic of that, and then you've got the logic of what's going on in the game world and the ramifications of that,” Brooker explained.
“You want quite a lot of interaction between the two sides. And so working out how that will work and how the flow of that [goes], it was quite a headache. And also trying to do that within 90 minutes as well. Sort of doing it within 90 minutes and making it coherent is also a challenge.”
The sequel also had to tackle an issue the original “USS Callister” episode didn’t have the bandwidth to fully explore: the mortality of digital clones and what constitutes a sentient life form. While gamers in the show's real world can have their in-game avatar eliminated, they can regenerate. Digital clones, however, cannot.
“[In the first "USS Callister"] they can't even die, basically. They're sort of at the behest of Robert Daly,” Brooker said of the clones in the original episode. “He's a tyrant ruling the roost, and he decides whether they live or die. As soon as they fly off his computer and go through the wormhole, and the 1960s Space Fleet skin is stripped away, and they're in the game, they are very mortal.
“They can't respawn [in "Into Infinity"]. If somebody shoots them, they're not going to respawn. That immediately became the problem.”
The Callister crew resorts to unorthodox methods in order to find ways to stay alive. “They're sort of talking about how everything has gone a bit micro-transaction-y in the game. That's one of the problems they're up against is that not only are they very, very mortal in this world, and no one else seems to realize they are, but everything costs money,” Brooker explained. “They're sort of virtual people. They're not real people. They don't have access to money, so they're having to scramble around and steal in order to move about in the universe.”
“Into Infinity” will see the in-game clones interact with people from the real world, particularly the actual Nanette, who remains largely in the dark about what exactly went down in the original episode where she aided the clones in escaping from Daly’s hold over them.
“You've got an interesting situation where the in-game version of Nanette is strong and assured and has proven herself and has become a more confident, capable individual,” Brooker said. “And then the version of her in the real world is still asking questions. She has no idea, really, what happened [in the game]. She just knows she was roped into something by person or persons unknown [in the original]. There were a lot of spinning plates, basically, that we wanted to keep spinning [in the sequel].”
Like its predecessor, “USS Callister: Into Infinity” draws narrative, design and costume influences from an array of sci-fi films, TV shows and video games, including No Man’s Sky, Fortnite, Borderlands and Fallout.
“If the first one was Star Trek, this is Star Wars,” Brooker revealed. “We've got a bit more sort of space battle action going on. We've got more planets that they go and explore and so on. And also, it's a little bit Battlestar Galactica. … They're in a world in which, if a player shoots you, you're dead. If you shoot them, they can respawn and come back, which is a little Cylonesque.”
While the original “USS Callister” took aim at fandom, Brooker maintains “we weren't taking the piss out of Star Trek” and that “Daly was misinterpreting or warping” the meaning of the then-progressive TV series Space Fleet. And while gamers play a crucial role in both the real and virtual worlds of “Into Infinity,” Brooker made it clear the episode is not knocking them.
“Within this we show people playing and they're just engaging in it like they would in a Fortnite game effectively, that they're just going in and shooting people. I certainly wouldn't like to infer anything about gamers because it bugs me as a gamer when people make sweeping generalizations about video games [or] all the people who play them,” Brooker said.
“The players in this are unaware of the stakes for the real characters. And if they were, they'd definitely be treating them very differently. Because they're in a playground and that's where they think they are, is in a playground, playing a game. I think they'd be absolutely mortified if they thought they were absolutely actually injuring or killing real people. Certainly it's not the intention to say that gaming is violent or all of that sort of crap that tends to get pushed around in the media.”
Brooker, a former video game industry journalist who told IGN he’s still a big gamer, put it bluntly:
“I trust people who play games a lot more than people who watch sports.”
All six episodes of Black Mirror, Season 7, including “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” launch on Netflix on April 10.
Editors’ note: Our interview with Charlie Brooker has been edited for clarity.
