Black Mirror season 7: Cristin Milioti on USS Callister sequel and Issa Rae on the bittersweet Hotel Reverie

When Cristin Milioti walked onto the set of Black Mirror, it had been seven years since she last stepped onto the bridge of the USS Callister.

The Star Trek-esque spaceship had served as a major piece for the 2017 episode which became one of the most beloved episodes of Charlie Brooker’s provocative and unsettling series which explores the wild, often bleak and dystopian, possibilities of where technology could lead us.

USS Callister: Infinity is one of the six episodes of the new season of Black Mirror and the only story, so far, to get a sequel since the show debuted in 2011.

The original instalment featured Milioti as Nanette, a computer programmer whose DNA is copied into a simulated world by a colleague named Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons), who seems like a meek, nice guy but is actually a malevolent person who exerts malicious control over everyone in a pocket universe he created.

For Milioti, being back in that space to film the follow-up was a head trip. “It seemed like both a hundred years had passed and three minutes had passed,” she told The Nightly.

“They filmed us seeing the set for the first time (again) and I was having such a brain melt and it was so strange to also have a camera in my face as I was having a brain melt. It was just so odd. Some of that helped with filming, but it really was kooky.”

If you rewatch the original episode, there’s no sense that seven years had passed. The urgency of its thematic foundations (coercive control, emotional abuse, the “nice guy” myth) is still so resonant. No wonder there was such a huge response to it, and a demand to see a continuation.

Milioti said Brooker had stayed in touch over the years and there had been various attempts to do something else in the USS Callister space. At one point, it was going to be a spin-off series or a completely different movie.

Because of scheduling and Covid and the rest, it never worked out. Until now. Milioti returns alongside Jimmi Simpson, Billy Magnussen, Osy Ikhile and Milanka Brooks, playing the sentient clones within the simulation as well as their real world selves.

Brooker is notoriously strict about spoilers so to reveal anything about the story would be sacrilegious, but let’s just say that it will engage with many of the same meaty beats that hooked audiences before.

“We didn’t know what we were making with the first one,” Milioti said. “We didn’t know how it would be received and its timeliness.

“I knew working on it, as a woman, that it felt like my life and all of the bullsh-t that we have been through. But I think no one could have predicted that it would also come at a time when we had elected someone like Robert Daly, who is a complete bully and predator, and that it would be coinciding with the MeToo movement and Weinstein’s downfall.

“It’s interesting that (the sequel) is also hitting at a time when he’s back in office. It didn’t serve me while shooting it to try and think of how it would resonate.

“You hope it’s good and provides fun and entertainment for people as well as maybe they think about this thing or that thing. You always hope, of course, that’s in communion with the world.”

That has always been Black Mirror’s pixie dust. Brooker and his writers have been so adept at tapping into our current anxieties, fuelled by the pace of technological change, and create stories that serve as modern fables. Some of them are warnings while some reflect our innate optimism.

This season has both, often in the same episode. Hotel Reverie is one of them, which stars Issa Rae, Emma Corrin, Awkwafina and Harriet Walter.

“I do like the bleak ones because they are such dire warnings, and I am a Twilight Zone fan and so much of Black Mirror pay homage to Twilight Zone,” Rae said. “But I will take a reprieve with one of these optimistic ones every time. I like the San Juniperos and Hang the DJs and even to some extent, Striking Vipers.

“Reading this episode, it lived in that same world, of those episodes where it’s like, ‘OK, it’s not completely bleak but it’s still kind of sad’.”

In Hotel Reverie, Rae plays a fictional A-list actor named Brandy, who loves old black-and-white movies, the sweeping love stories like Casablanca. When she nabs the lead role in a remake of a film called Hotel Reverie, she’s all in, but what she didn’t realise is the movie is being done inside an AI-generated virtual environment that’s been fed the old film and all its data sets.

Brandy’s consciousness is inserted into that virtual space to replace an existing performance in otherwise, the exact same film, including opposite the other romantic lead, played by Emma Corrin.

The episode explores questions around the traps of nostalgia and hanging onto a bygone era, human and (not)human connections and love. But it is, as Rae described it, “bittersweet”.

The “this is a warning” part of Hotel Reverie is how technology and AI is being deployed in the artistic process, a fraught battlefield that has captured Hollywood and the wider world.

As an actor, writer and producer, Rae can’t see a scenario in which she would ever participate in the process in the episode, although, gun to the head, if she had to be inserted into an existing movie, she would pick Clueless.

“That’s a movie that I could survive to get to the next line. And probably any Julia Roberts movie, maybe Notting Hill. Anything that’s safe and not too crazy, and doesn’t have murder in it. I’m risk averse.”

But the tech in Hotel Reverie, like most of what Brooker has dreamed up in Black Mirror episodes of the past is not designed to be an aspirational how-to roadmap.

“I hope nobody thinks this is cool and tries to replicate it, on so many levels,” Rae said. “It’s so disrespectful to the original filmmakers who pour so much into making a film, it’s disrespectful to the deceased actors who didn’t consent to their likeness being used, it’s disrespectful to the actor being placed in the life-and-death system.

“(Brandy) is kind of disposable to them, which is like a metaphor for how Hollywood treats its actors.

“I don’t want to see it as a viewer.

“It feels like the laziest form of lazy.”

Black Mirror season seven is streaming on Netflix