Nosedive, Black Mirror

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Nosedive

Lacie rating a fellow citizen using her mobile phone Site Type TV Series Sci-Fi Launch Date 21 October, 2016 Status active Product Line product Platform Netflix Website www.netflix.com

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osedive, the first episode of the third series of the British sci-fi series Black Mirror, was written by Michael Schur and co-written by Rashida Jones, and the episode was based on a story by Charlie Brooker. This episode of the series came to Netflix on October 21st of 2016, with the rest of season three.

In this episode, the audience follows Lacie Pound (Bryce Dallas Howard) in a dystopian near-future world where society utilizes a social rating system from which they rate each other one to five stars after every social interaction. The scores that people accumulate directly affect their socioeconomic status and end up dictating many people's lives, including that of Lacie, who is overly obsessed about her own rating.

Plot

https://www.tor.com/2016/10/24/black-mirror-season-3-nosedive-television-review/

Lacie Pound (Bryce Dallas Howard) is an above average citizen with a rating of 4.2 and stable job. Lacie lives currently with her brother, Ryan (James Norton), who has very little interest in ratings. Looking for a new apartment, Lacie finds a luxury apartment, but needs a rating of 4.5 or above to qualify for the discounts she needs to afford such a place. Lacie sets out to attempt to raise her rating, but her continuous attempts to be warm and extroverted during social interactions are making very little progress towards her goal. Seeing that she is making little progress, Lacie seeks help from a rating specialist who suggests that she surrounds herself with people who have higher ratings, as making a positive impact on people with higher ratings will go a very long way. After posting a photograph of a teddy bear, who she calls Mr. Rags, which her now highly rated childhood friend, Naomi (Alice Eve), made together many years ago, Naomi rates her photo five stars. Lacie, seeing potential opportunities to raise her overall rating, calls her friend and learns that she was recently engaged. During the conversation, Naomi asks Lacie if she will be her maid of honor and deliver a speech at her wedding. Lacie agrees, hoping that she can make a good impact on the many highly rated individuals which will be attending the wedding.

On the day that she is supposed to leave for the wedding, Lacie gets caught up in an argument with Ryan, spills the coffee of a passerby, and is late for her ride to the airport. During her drive, Lacie is very disruptive to the driver during a call to Naomi. As a result of these interactions, Lacie’s score drops just below a 4.2. After arriving at the airport, Lacey discovers that her flight was cancelled and is unable to book another flight because her rating isn’t a 4.2 or above anymore. After causing an incident, Lacie receives a penalty from airport security temporarily dropping her score a full point for the next 24 hours, her rating is now a 3.1, and imposing “double damage,” where all down votes are subject to a time two multiplier. She exits the airport and goes to a car rental where she is given an older model of vehicle due to her current low ranking. As a result, Lacie is no longer be able to make the rehearsal dinner for Naomi’s wedding because of her unexpected delays. The car runs out of battery, but Lacie is unable to recharge her car because she doesn't have an adapter. Lacie is forced to hitchhike the rest of the way with Susan (Cherry Jones), a semi-truck driver with a 1.3 rating. Lacie discovers that Susan used to have a rating of 4.6, then she stopped caring about ratings after her late husband was diagnosed with cancer and another person took his place in line for treatment who was a tenth of a point higher than her husband.

While Lacie is hitchhiking in an RV, Naomi informs Lacie that she is no longer invited to the wedding in an attempt to protect her own rating due to Lacie's low rating. However, Lacie will not take no for an answer. After managing to sneak past the guards standing watch over the celebrity wedding, Lacie gets hold of the microphone and begins to read her prepared speech. Starting to get really upset at her friend, Lacie grabs a knife and threatens several individuals before being detained by security. Lacie is brought to prison where the technology allowing her to see other people's ratings is taken out of her eyes. Lacie begins to argue with a man in the cell across from hers (Sope Dirisu), and they both realize how liberating it is not having to worry about ratings as they scream insults at one another.

References in Media

The episode Nosedive has made many appearances in media after it debut in 2016 on Netflix. For instance, there have been a multitude of articles likening China's social credit system to the one shown in the this episode. For instance, Rachel Botsman of Wired discussed the ways in which living in a world where your daily interactions and activities are constantly evaluated and how this "futuristic" vision of control isn't so futuristic after all because it's already happening in China. With this system similar to that in Nosedive, China hopes to cultivate a trustworthy and sincere environment. The app which China is using to rate it's citizens is called Sesame Credit, which was launched by Ant Financial in December 2017. The app uses ratings from social media and big data to reward its users based on their loyalty to China and its government. While Brooker acknowledges the similarities between the system he helped create for fiction and the one which China has come up with and that "it was quite trippy" to see his ideas come to life, the important difference between the two is that in "Nosedive" there is a central government that is determining this system, while the Social Credit System "sounds like an attempt to make the population behave in a particular way". Some articles tackle the ethical implications which China's Social Credit System has underlining the fact that while the system has potential to heighten surveillance, the privacy and freedom of China's citizens are being minimized.