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USS Callister

• Episode aired Dec 29, 2017

Capt. Robert Daly presides over his crew with wisdom and courage. But a new recruit will soon discover nothing on this spaceship is what it seems. Capt. Robert Daly presides over his crew with wisdom and courage. But a new recruit will soon discover nothing on this spaceship is what it seems. Capt. Robert Daly presides over his crew with wisdom and courage. But a new recruit will soon discover nothing on this spaceship is what it seems.

• Toby Haynes
• Charlie Brooker
• William Bridges
• Jesse Plemons
• Cristin Milioti
• Jimmi Simpson
• 173 User reviews
• 23 Critic reviews
• 1 nomination

Top cast 14

• Robert Daly

• Nanette Cole

• Elena Tulaska

• Nate Packer

• Kabir Dudani

• Callister Employee
• (uncredited)

• Callister Employee (VR Tester)
• Pizza Guy #1
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Did you know

• Trivia Kirsten Dunst can be seen very quickly in an uncredited cameo as a Callister employee. She happened to be visiting her partner Jesse Plemons and her cameo was unplanned.
• Goofs Once the DNA is digitised, stealing the origin DNA source is utterly pointless.

Nanette Cole : Okay, stealing my pussy is a red fucking line.

• Connections Featured in WatchMojoUK: Top 10 Actors Who Have Appeared in Black Mirror (2018)
• Soundtracks Silent Night (uncredited) Written by Franz Xaver Gruber and Joseph Mohr

User reviews 173

Rating just to spite the negative reviews.

• Mrrogersbestneighbor
• Mar 12, 2018
• December 29, 2017 (United States)
• United Kingdom
• Official Facebook
• Official Netflix
• Channel 4 Television Corporation
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Runtime 1 hour 16 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Black Mirror 's 'USS Callister' Is Much More Than a Star Trek Parody

The first episode of the Netflix show’s fourth season finds a new angle on tech horror through sci-fi satire.

Sophie Gilbert and David Sims will be discussing the new season of Netflix’s Black Mirror , considering alternate episodes. The reviews contain spoilers; don’t read further than you’ve watched. See all of their coverage here .

When Black Mirror ’s third season premiered in late 2016, it began with “ Nosedive ,” a wrenchingly comical episode about the horrors of a connected world, where every interaction or transaction with another person is rated and judged on social media. Its fourth season begins with an opposite horror: a hermetically sealed world, disconnected from the rest of the internet, a sci-fi fantasy perversely controlled by one man. In “Nosedive,” escaping the online universe was the goal; in “USS Callister,” it’s the opposite. Credit to the show’s creator, Charlie Brooker (who co-wrote this episode with William Bridges): He can conjure nightmares from anywhere.

What I liked most about “USS Callister,” which makes for an exceptionally strong start to this new season, was the nasty, winking twist of its set-up. Our sad-sack protagonist, Robert Daly has the profile of a misunderstood nice guy. He’s an unheralded genius at his job, where he created an online gaming world that his publicity-minded boss Walton (Jimmi Simpson) takes all the credit for. He’s shy and retiring, he’s played by the adorable Jesse Plemons (Landry from Friday Night Lights !), and he spends his nights fantasizing that he’s the great Captain Daly of his favorite show, Space Fleet , using the high-end tech he invented, a forehead-mounted brain-projection chip.

But even though the ’60s-era Star Trek knockoff he’s playacting seems chintzy and harmless, there are signs of creepiness from the get-go, with Daly treating not one but both of his female crew members to a passionate kiss at the end of another “episode.” After a friendly interaction with Nanette (Cristin Milioti), a new employee at work, things go from creepy to truly disturbing, as Daly steals her DNA from a used coffee cup and creates a digital version of her within his Space Fleet program.

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Nanette is now the ship’s science officer, clad in the familiar miniskirt and go-go boots of that kitschy decade; but more importantly, she’s trapped. Unlike the online multiplayer game Daly invented, this program is walled off from the rest of the internet to serve as his private playground. Nanette and other co-workers are Daly’s ensemble cast, and anytime he enters the program, they have to shower him with obsequious praise as he acts out his childish fantasies. Apart from that, they’re stuck in the program, with nothing to do except wait for their tyrannical master to return.

Any Black Mirror episode is going to invite comparison to the real-life excesses, and dangers, of the tech world; prior entries, like Season 2’s “The Waldo Moment” and “White Bear,” seemed outlandish when they debuted but harrowingly apt now. “USS Callister” is darkly funny and at times delightfully surreal (these computer versions of the crew lack genitalia, giving them a Ken-doll physique). But it’s also a knowing satire of the male power fantasy that’s been playing out online since the dawn of the internet, and that seemed to go from bad to worse in 2017.

As the commander of his own private starship, Daly demands adoration and total acquiescence from his crew members, or else he harasses them by removing their faces or turning them into alien monsters. They can’t even escape their predicament by dying, as much as they’d like to; only Daly has control over life and death within his universe. When Walton resists him, Daly torments him by creating a digital clone of his son and killing it in front of him. As cute as the set dressings of Space Fleet might look, this sci-fi world is one of drudgery mixed with emotional abuse—Daly thinks he’s a hero captain, but he’s little more than an online troll.

So many of Brooker’s Black Mirror fables warn against the terror of being connected, so I was delighted that he opened this new season with a story about just the opposite. After all, so much of 2017’s news has been defined by a lack of communication, by polarization, and by political leaders who, like Daly, seem to crave unprecedented levels of control along with hollow compliments. In “USS Callister,” the only way to defeat Daly is to open his secret network up to the rest of the game, visualized as the crew piloting the ship into a wormhole while their boss is momentarily distracted by real life.

“USS Callister” was perhaps a mite too long at 75 minutes (its epic conclusion, while tense at times, was very drawn-out). But its concept was perfect for Black Mirror : a mix of fizzy pop culture and genuinely bleak drama. More importantly, it had a happy ending—the crew escapes, Daly is stranded in his now-empty program, and Nanette’s online clone finds herself in a comparative paradise, a multiplayer video game. Who’s the first person she encounters there? An egotistical fool (voiced by Aaron Paul) who lamely proclaims himself the king of space battles. Yes, there’s more than one Captain Daly out there—but at least this time Nanette can warp to another galaxy. Sophie, do you share my take on the topicality of “USS Callister?” Don’t you want to drive into a wormhole as 2017 winds to a close?

Read Sophie Gilbert’s review of the next episode, “Arkangel.”

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In praise of 'USS Callister,' the Black Mirror  space opera to end all space operas

It makes the recent 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars' entries feel empty. It's more fun, too!

I can’t stop thinking about the best new episode of Black Mirror . Its official title is “ USS Callister ,” it will forever be known as “The Star Trek Episode,” it is the most exciting motion picture space opera since last decade’s Battlestar Galactica . Go watch it now so I can start spoiling it. It’s a little over an hour — half as long as Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Alien: Covenant and that Star Trek: Discovery premiere we all raved about before we fell asleep watching the rest of Star Trek: Discovery . God, we were lousy with space operatics this year, “lousy” being the operative word. “USS Callister” doesn’t just mercilessly deconstruct those aging sci-fi franchises: It out-thrills them, too. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

Start with the casting. Jesse Plemons plays Robert Daly, a brilliant double role. The first time we meet him, he’s a swaggering space commander, strolling onto the bridge of the USS Callister , a ship full of subordinates ready to yes-captain his every command. The man’s hair looks as ridiculous as the wig Patrick Stewart wore in his Picard auditions, as luscious as William Shatner’s dirty blonde hair before it trended dark-brown in the ’80s. And Space Commander Daly speaks ludicrous accent, a modern-day approximation of how you imagine every Roosevelt spoke, “Mid-Atlantic” by way of Brad-Pitt-in- Troy .

The first scene of “USS Callister” is a knowing parody, a loving hyperbolization of everything the original Star Trek was. In a few snappy minutes, Daly leads his crew into battle, tells the anxious blue-shirted first officer to chill out, defeats the bad guy, receives kisses from his adoring female crew. There’s a blue woman, a guy with robot stuff on his face, computers that spark without ever exploding. The colors are garish, the special effects primitive on purpose. It captures the effect of watching the original Star Trek on Netflix, the half-century-old images rendered with such color-popped HD that you figure Starfleet must be Belko Experimenting some weird psychology unto its unknowing officers, “The Effect Of Primary Color Wardrobe And Alien Purple Light On The Human Brain.”

There might actually be a brilliant, heavily-embedded joke in this opening. The bridge of the Callister is actually much more colorful than the bridge of the Enterprise , and there’s a slight purple tint to the lighting more suggestive of how the early Trek liked to shoot nemesis ships. Check out these roughly comparable shots from “USS Callister” and from the all-time Trek classic space-submarine thriller “Balance of Terror,” and notice how Black Mirror immediately casts its space commander in vaguely Romulan color tints:

And then “Callister” SMASH CUTS, to a world we recognize as “Real,” because it’s been 20 years now since The Matrix established the bizarre rule that actual reality is always grayscale whereas even the worst computer simulation is groovily sepia.

Here is the “real” Robert Daly: On a crowded elevator, wearing glasses, hairline receding as all true hairlines must. He walks into his office, and the camera stays close enough to him that we feel what he must feel. The world doesn’t respect him. People don’t get out of his way as he leaves the elevator. The cute receptionist is annoyed when his keycard doesn’t work, does her best not to look at him as she buzzes him in. The intern is making coffee for everyone but him. He trips over a gym bag belonging to some cute brogrammer, who laughs at him behind his back. He retreats to his office, which is full of memorabilia of a TV show he loved when he was a kid, VHS tapes, DVDs, even those figurines you would read about in Wizard Magazine when you thought the whole point of growing up was getting to buy more expensive merchandise. Robert loves this TV show, even convinced his co-founder to name their company after the franchise’s spaceship. The show was called Space Fleet and the ship is the Callister , but you’re encouraged to read between the lines. “It was visionary ,” says Robert, not realizing or not caring that what was visionary in the past tense can look backwards in the present.

Plemons has a sweet spot: He is Hollywood’s Apparently Nice Young Man Who Is Unexpectedly Great At Killing People. Ironically, this was his least impressive trait on Friday Night Lights . On NBC’s smalltown symphony, Plemons played Landry Clarke, AP nerd, lonesome kicker, garage rocker so unrockerly that he self-branded his music “extreme grindcore with heavy thrash influences” like he was category-tagging a music-review blog post. Landry was either a freshman or a sophomore when Friday Night Lights started. (The timeline is fuzzy; Landry ages diagonally.) But Plemons was one of the show’s few true teenagers, almost a decade younger than prom-royal costars like Scott Porter and Minka Kelly.

The casting worked, because TV can always make more sense than reality. Plemons’ actual real-kid youth read onscreen as geeky diminution. Next to, like, Taylor Kitsch’s deity-of-wreckage Tim Riggins, Landry could only look approachably small. He was a great character, an entry-point everyman for anyone (like me!) who thought football was pretty dumb. But Landry was also a particular 2000s archetype: The Romantic Nerd, a chatty brainiac questing towards some radiant local princess like every Link quests toward Zelda.

This was not a new idea. Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst spent that decade re-enacting the nerd-sacred romance between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson, geek canon from when LBJ was president. Here was a tale as old as time: The chemistry-loving weirdo and the hip drama kid, the public menace and the Broadway diva engaged to an astronaut aristocrat. But those first-and-still-best Spider-Man s defined a catchy new romantic plot arc. Call it Beauty and the Geek . That’s what Ashton Kutcher called his actual mid-2000s reality show; I could’ve sworn that title sounded charming, and yet now now all I hear are the 1,500 appropriately enraged thinkpieces its mere announcement would generate in these enlightened times. On The OC , Seth Cohen and Summer Roberts were unabashedly the beach-money variation of Peter Parker and Mary Jane — except not just symbolically Jewish anymore! — and they even restaged the Maguire-Dunst upside-down kiss, a remix of a remake. Nerds can be sexy, said the 2000s! According to TV Tropes , “This is pretty much the entire point to The Big Bang Theory ,” so there.

And so Landry spent most of his years on Friday Night Lights dreaming of Tyra Collette, the no-question coolest girl in school — played by Adrienne Palicki, who makes every man look like the forehead posing next to Nicole Kidman’s chin. The Landry-Tyra arc was weird, cursed with the only plot point Friday Night Lights everyone remembers hating. Suffice it to say that by season 3, they had gotten together and then broken up, and then Landry kisses another girl, and then she thanked Landry for self-actualizing her lesbianhood. Ego-bruised Landry went to local saint Tami Taylor (Connie Britton) seeking advice. “I have some sort of talent that repels females,” said Landry. “I was in love with Tyra for a long time. I chased her away.”

Tami allowed him a benediction; don’t quote me, but this might be the only time those two characters ever properly spoke to each other on the show. Tami’s words are well-intentioned, are in fact not much different from the advice any young vaguely smart-shy student probably receives at some point in their awkward adolescence. I can’t read these words now and not feel a little shiver, but so many things I used to unquestionably love have started to feel wrong somehow. See what you think:

You are gonna go to some great college. You’re gonna have a career that you’ll love. And, I’m telling you right now, women are gonna flock to you. I know it’s hard to believe, but that’s the way it’s gonna work. You are a good person, and this is just the beginning.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because you just recently watched Stranger Things 2 . The second season of Netflix’s ’80s pastiche — the season where there’s something wrong with Will, not to be confused with the season where there’s something wrong with Will — ends at a school dance. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) has struck out with every girl in school. So his best friend’s big sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer) takes pity on the poor lad, pulling him onto the dance floor, to the general awe of Dustin’s female contempos. She tells him not to worry, things will turn out okay, not just okay, dammit, great :

Out of all my brother’s friends, you’re my favorite. You’ve always been my favorite. Girls this age are dumb. But give them a few years, and they’ll wise up. You’re gonna drive them nuts .

As we see Robert Daly sit in his lonely office, surrounded by the pop culture artifacts of his nerdy youth, you can almost imagine that he is both Landry and Dustin, all grown up. He went to some great college. He has a great career — the CTO! Of his own company! — and yet here he is, all alone.

A woman walks into his office. Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti) has just been hired by Robert’s company, coding an update to the online videogame Robert invented. She isn’t just the first person who looks at him for more than two seconds. She praises him. “I just wanted to pass on my admiration,” she says, “To the person who actually designed Infinity . The procedural algorithm is amazing. Just…some beautiful …code.”

A decade-plus of Romantic Nerd storytelling has prepared us for this interaction to trend somewhere cute. Here is Robert, a geeky cut off from the world, devoted to an old science fiction idea of far-out space adventure. Here is Nanette, the only person who notices him. Isn’t this what Tami and Nancy promised him? Promised us ?

Clearly, Robert thinks they belong together. So he takes a sample of her DNA left on a coffee cup, and downloads her into his own private videogame universe, and makes her his prisoner-plaything. He’s done this to a lot of his coworkers — the annoyed receptionist, the intern who didn’t look happy about getting him coffee, the brogrammer who giggled about his pratfall, and more. These coworkers are now the crew of Daly’s own version of the USS Callister . They have to be…or else.

We get introduced to this whole weird idea via a new Nanette (Milioti again), now sytlistically Star Trek -ified, with retro-hair and the kind of official uniform only Mad Men ‘s Harry Crane would’ve designed. Lesser space operas always get hung up on pointless logic, but here we have Chewing Gum ‘s Michaela Coel just explaining that Robert has a “gizmo.” Nanette asks her coworkers: What they did do to deserve this punishment? Shania (Coel) called out Robert for staring. Elena (Milanka Brooks), the receptionist, committed the crime of “insufficient smiling.” Nate (Osy Ikhile), the intern, brought Robert the wrong sandwich. It’s a savvy twist, operating on multiple levels. Our lovable nerd is actually a toxic boss. The self-perceived victim of a hundred social slights has created a world where he can be as monstrous as he wants to be. (Most toxic bosses just call that world “the office.”)

Robert walks onto the bridge, back in his “Space Captain” guise, no glasses, better hair, insane accent. Nanette won’t play his weird game. “The whole thing’s much better if you let yourself get into it,” Robert insists, sounding like every nightmare you’ve ever had about a frat dude. “Go f— yourself, sir ,” Nanette says. And then Robert takes snaps his fingers, her face disappears.

She crawls on the ground, unable to see or breathe. She won’t die. “I could keep you gasping like this forever, if I wish,” says Robert. “Do you submit?” How can she not? “ Good girl ,” he says, the matter closed, more fun for him.

———————————————————

The equation of this is simple, in Star Trek terms. Imagine Captain Kirk was actually Q; imagine the crusading space Captain was precisely as egomaniacal as all tyrants (and certain actors) have always been. Imagine Sulu secretly hated Kirk as much as George Takei openly hates William Shatner. According to Walton (Jimmi Simpson) — IRL Robert’s swaggering co-founder, cast in Robert’s dreamspace as the simpering beta-male Wormtongue — they are now living in “a bubble universe ruled by an a–hole god.”

Throwing this out there: That also describes Star Trek for at least some portions of its history. It requires no imagination whatsoever to imagine “USS Callister” as a metafictional portrait of the experience of filming Star Trek V: The Final Frontier , the Trek movie William Shatner directed and the Trek movie that is specifically about how Captain Kirk is a cool, funny, god-crushing, stripper-tossing, mountain-conquesting dudely man. And I say that as someone who kind of likes the movie ! But don’t forget about Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , a film about how Spock is the most important person in the universe, coincidentally directed by the man who was Spock. And there was Gene Roddenberry, who created Star Trek : An old-fashioned Difficult Man, alleged womanizing, his own worst enemy, delusions of grandeur.

I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole here, don’t want to say “Everyone is an a–hole!” and also don’t want to underrate the fact that the history of human art is a partially (largely?) a history of a–holes. Actually, it’s almost too easy to go back to the original Star Trek and appreciate some of its greatest stories as portraits of utopian douchebaggery in extremis . In the very first proper Star Trek episode ever filmed, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Kirk has to kill Gary Mitchell, his own best friend. He never mentions this profound act ever again in his onscreen life. An earlier viewing generation would recognize this as a function of television’s self-erasing history; watching with modern eyes, you wonder if Kirk is a sociopath, or if he never really liked Gary very much to begin with.

(Eerily, before Gary Mitchell dies, he gives us an unusual piece of biographical detail, which runs counter to everything we’ll come to understand about Kirk. Apparently, at Starfleet Academy, our brash space captain was a total nerd, “a stack of books with legs,” so unlucky in love that Gary had to set him up on a date. That date led young Kirk to almost get married, but the relationship ended as badly as all of Kirk’s relationships always do. You wonder: Was Kirk another Robert Daly? Is his own persona an act, like the shy little boy grown up to be a machismo grenade? Later canon will establish Kirk as an absent father and a thrill-seeking workaholic, fascinating character traits that defy our weird modern tendency to drape all genre heroes with life-affirming nostalgia glasses.)

Look, I love a lot of Star Trek , and it’s pointless to make any broad statements about any story cycle that has lasted through so many years and permutations. Then again: If we’ve learned one thing this year, it’s that we can would maybe be better off if we started to throw out some of pop culture’s most sanctified legacies. Or at least question them? The notion of Star Trek as a bold liberal act of utopian idealism can always run aground on the experience of Star Trek as a well-intentioned act of retrograde idealism. You can watch the original show now and appreciate its moves towards diversity — or you can notice how the all-important Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic is the ship’s three dudes solving everything for the castmates who barely ever get a B-plot. “USS Callister” doesn’t play up identity politics, but it’s all over this horrific digital prison. The chief white dude, who feels so unhappy in his own life, is a vision of malicious toxic masculinity. There’s only one other white dude onboard the Callister , and he’s the resident coward, least willing to follow bold Nanette and her renegade escape plan.

Now, the most recent iterations of Star Wars and Star Trek have made strides toward greater inclusion. This is admirable and right, but the actual texts themselves are so backward-looking that they bungle the execution. The Last Jedi is most clearly a movie about one large spaceship chasing another large spaceship with all the excitement of a glacier chasing a dying snail. But it is also a movie about a diverse group of young rebels waiting patiently for a legendary white dude to re-become the greatness he never wasn’t. I think there were four scenes where Rey asked Luke Skywalker to be a Jedi, and Luke kept saying he didn’t want to be a Jedi, but then he was a Jedi: Riveting stuff here, folks, like imagine if Samuel Beckett wasn’t funny and had to sell Porgs.

Discovery has the better cast, and the willingness to argue that two men can love each other enough to settle the day’s problems while they’re brushing their teeth. But it has largely squandered Sonequa Martin-Green, a wildly compelling screen presence. In the pilot, her Michael Burnham jumped through space (once without a spacesuit!), and fought Klingons hand to hand. Since then, she has run around her ship carrying the futuristic version of an iPad, and looked very sad about various things that happened in her past, and fallen in puppy wuv with the cutest toughest sad guy in sight. (She fought Klingons again, eventually, already Greatest Hits-ing.) Meanwhile, the show hasn’t quite gotten around to figuring out just how evil it wants Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) to be, the result being that he comes off as a typical CBS law dude who does vaguely wrong things for inevitably right reasons.

Both projects also featured pointless mutinies, where the heroic mutineers are quickly reinstated on the grounds that their commanders like the cut of their gib. If you’re a fan of this genre, or of actual drama with compelling stakes, you can’t help but remember the great mutiny in Battlestar Galactica ‘s final season, which spiraled into murders and executions. But Battlestar Galactica wanted to be weird, and the Star franchises now just want to be popular.

But there’s a deeper shared weirdness. Both franchises, in their own way, want to become better progressive visions of a science-fiction future — which is great! But both franchises can never quite move too far away from their own traditions, the sanctified legacy , this idea that there is after all some purity of essence that these long-running space operas must worship towards. This subtext — this total kneeling submission to what has come before — becomes the text. So tough Jyn Erso spends Rogue One honoring the suicidal destiny her various dead dads demanded of her. And Michael Burnham spends a whole half-season of Discovery mourning her dead parents, missing her dead captain, and trying to reconnect with her emotionally distant stepdad. And parent-obsessed Rey — who, with no training, is capable of more powerful feats of Jedi strength than pretty much anything we ever saw Luke perform in the original trilogy — spends The Last Jedi trying to convince Luke to go save people, before spending the final climax hanging out in the rearguard as Luke scores a philosophical victory by believing in hope, or whatever.

( LARGE ASIDE: There are probably Last Jedi defenders who think I’m misrepresenting Luke’s final actions — that Luke isn’t actually the legend everyone thinks he is, is in fact a literal mirage in his final battle, and so his act of heroism is actually a deconstruction of heroism. This line of thinking obviously more resonance than, like, the dumbo trolls and their dumb arguments that girls are wrecking their Star Wars , said dumbo trolls hopefully this weekend watching “USS Callister” and having a good think about how a lifetime devoted to a silly science-fiction adventure franchise has warped their mind toward antisocial behavior. But Last Jedi is deconstructive the way the recent James Bond and Batman movies have been deconstructive: Not very much at all. Much time is spent establishing that the great central hero of the story isn’t quite what they used to be — Bond is out of shape in Skyfall , Batman’s got a bum leg and a bad back in The Dark Knight Rises , Luke’s a hobo. You can read this is somehow deep, an attempt to complicate the heroic legends of yore. It looks to me now like a con job, a way of passing time before the inevitable: All three movies end with the hero doing precisely what the hero has always done in movies like this. The Last Jedi even picks up a specific visual concept from Dark Knight Rises , how the little children of the world worship totems of their movie hero, the Bat signal written in chalk, the Rebel Alliance ring. I guess some truly upper-level Last Jedi devotee would claim that Luke’s actions are equivalent to, like, the twisty-theme climax of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , John Ford’s actual deconstruction of heroism, which lands on the famous idea that legends are more important than fact. The whole point of Liberty Valance , of course, is that supposed hero Jimmy Stewart is not actually the kind of guy who blows up Death Stars or saves Gotham from neutron bombs. Rarely has the attempt toward confessional deconstruction ever felt so much like ego stroking, but we live in a world where a billionaire pretends to be an outsider every day. Luke Skywalker even gets to expire all alone in his remote coastal refuge, fading into the sun in a burst of pure serenity: Precisely how all rich Californians secretly hope they’ll die someday, and Luke even has servants he never talks to. END OF ASIDE. )

We’re missing something here, and I think the word here is energy . You want to see Sonequa Martin-Green’s version of a swaggering spaceship hero. You wonder why none of the young rebels can ever just brag about how fast they make the Kessel run. The younger characters worship the older characters, and have no clear view of their faults; whereas it feels like the only way forward for humans in our own reality is to look closer at our heroes, and our own bad actions. The only character in any of these projects who actually wants to try something new is Kylo Ren, and he’s the bad guy, because people who wear black are evil, and change is scary for money-grubbing corporations and uninspired creators, and most of all for the fans, who need to feel like their whole life of love hasn’t been in vain.

What is Star Trek ? What is Star Wars ? “It’s a belief system, founded on the very best of human nature. It is a goal for us to strive towards for the betterment of the universe, for the betterment of life itself.” That’s actually Robert Daly, mansplaining Space Fleet to his prisoners, but I’m almost certain I’ve heard equivalent philosophical propaganda applied to our own most familiar science-fiction franchises. (No one has ever made any utopian philosophical arguments about the Alien franchise, which is why Ridley Scott’s god-addicted prequels are so pointless and fascinating. It’s like someone made a religion out of the Sarlacc Pit.)

Of course, Robert Daly isn’t striving toward the betterment of the universe, or the betterment of life itself. Neither was Space Fleet ; from what we see, it was a splendidly junky science-fiction show from a long-ago era when nobody spent three months writing thousand-word prose-grenades about junky science-fiction TV shows. Robert’s just using his preferred ideology as a cudgel to hurt people less powerful than him, and those people happen to be almost exclusively People Who Aren’t White Males.

You are encouraged to see real-world analogies here, although Black Mirror showrunner Charlie Brooker (who cowrote this masterpiece with William Bridges) is clever enough make the characters precise but the themes broad. Every dictator turns their regime into a kind of psychopathic cinematic universe — there’s a reason so many modern-day despots love movies — and it just so happens that Robert’s religion is Space Fleet . He adhered to the letter of law and betrays everything about its spirit.

(Robert’s actually a lot like Kurt Russell’s Ego, the hedonistic cosmic narcissist at the center of this year’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 , who builds himself his own private planet and wants to remake the whole universe in his own image. Guardians 2 was a nigh-plotless space opera full of secret dark resonance and individual moments that looked like Dr. Seuss illustrating a Blink-182 album, and I kind of loved it when I saw it. I love it even more now that Ego looks in hindsight like a brilliantly lacerating parody of both Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi and Michael Fassbender’s android in Alien: Covenant . What a year for lonely gods on distant planets!)

Nanette discovers that, here in this digital hellscape, the prisoners have suffered a final indignity: Their sexual organs have been removed. “Okay,” says Nanette — and holy hell is Cristin Milioti great, but this line is the one for the T-shirts — “Stealing my p—y is a red. F—ing. Line.”

One of my learned EW colleagues who suspects that this plot point was a helpful contrivance by Brooker and Bridges. If Robert could have sex in his space simulation, then presumably sex is all he would want to do — the argument everyone uses when we worry about the effect of Virtual Reality on teenage boys and most grown men. That would’ve invariably made this episode an attempt to analyze rape culture which just-as-invariably winds up helplessly furthering rape culture, which cultural theorists refer to as “Being The Movie Sucker Punch .” I would counterargue, though, that Robert’s sex-organ removal is both a hilarious sight gag and a very literal castration, and that Robert’s removal of sexual agency is its own tantalizing allegory. Late in “USS Callister,” Nanette takes off her clothes to go swimming with Robert — part of her con, and also a moment that feels designed to remind you of how every hot young actor, male and female, in the latter-day PG-13 family-friendly science-fiction movies has at least one split-second scene where they’re shirtless, got it thanks guys that’ll be great for the trailer!

“USS Callister” becomes a race against time on multiple fronts, and has one notable dull plot point. The Nanette of the digital world — bold, tough, probably plays Renegade in Mass Effect — tells her crew that to escape, they have to get in touch with her real-world self. This involves an act of blackmail. Digital-Nanette knows that Actual-Nanette has some embarrassing pictures on her phone. And it leads the IRL Nanette — by all appearances a workaholic regular-person coder — to an act of loft-thieving espionage worthy of Jason Bourne. The breakneck pace of its final act robs real-world Nanette of her own agency here; it turns her shock at the private pictures into a too-easy gag, and just assumes she’d break into the home of her hero on a moment’s notice. I’ve never wanted a sequel to a Black Mirror episode more, if only because I keep imagining the theoretical meeting between real-world Nanette and her digital doppelganger: The one too trusting of powerful men and too devoted to disappointing heroes, the other all-too-aware of what evil lurks in the hearts of nice guys.

Whatever: “USS Callister” builds to a full-scale rejection of Robert Daly-ism, and everything he represents. He’s left all alone in the universe he built. (The lights go out, just like they did in Twin Peaks .) The Callister ‘s final escape involved the sacrifice of Simpson’s character — the only other white guy, in actual reality the flirty yin to Robert’s leering yang — and so there’s a pleasant feeling of mutual immolation rocketing Nanette and her crew to a brave new world.

This new digital reality looks uncannily like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek , complete with the tilted angles and the lens flares. (Director Toby Haynes finds so many clever variations on the TV-starship aesthetic in just this single episode!) The crew finds can go explore the infinite universe now: They’re officially online. A ship hails them, someone playing the online game. They’re excited to communicate — and the voice the hear demands that that they trade, fight, or f— off.

“Stick us in hyperwarp,” says Nanette, “And let’s f— off somewhere.”

It’s her own personal “Make It So”! And as this ship of rescued lost souls sets off into the digital ether, we’re left with the voice of the gamer who chased them away. It’s wonderful Aaron Pau l, the voice of sad slacker-ish white dudery on Breaking Bad and on Bojack Horseman . He declares himself “King of Space.” He repeats it again, sighing. “King of Space.”

There’s always another bubble universe, another a–hole god. Our most prominent space opera franchises are struggling to evolve; “USS Callister” is how it feels to fight back. Send this episode to HR, show it to the Silicon Valley microaggressionists and the dudes who insist pop culture ended in the ’80s. There’s got to be something better than endless preaching about pop culture legacies, how visionary everything was when we were kids. If not, let’s follow Nanette’s lead, and f— off somewhere better.

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Cristin Milioti: Shooting Black Mirror on a Spaceship Is ‘Just As Fun As You’d Imagine’

Spoilers for the Black Mirror episode “ USS Callister ” below.

On its surface, Cristin Milioti’s Black Mirror episode looks like a straight-up Star Trek parody. But “ USS Callister ” is a lot more complicated than it seems. In the episode, Milioti plays two characters named Nanette: a new employee at a tech company, and a digital clone who gets trapped in the twisted virtual universe where the company’s CTO (Jesse Plemons) exacts revenge on his co-workers. As with most installments of Black Mirror , there are a few more turns of the screw after that, but Milioti’s performance keeps the episode grounded, as we see her move between playing a meek coder, an objectified sexpot, and eventually, a captain in her own right. Vulture caught up with Milioti to talk about the joys of acting on a spaceship, her retro hairdo — which was not a wig — and why she prefers to wait for the right parts.

Between your play After the Blast and this episode, you’ve been doing a lot of sci-fi this year. I guess they are sci-fi! I mean, Black Mirror is certainly more sci-fi, since, you know, we’re on a ship, but After the Blast didn’t seem that sci-fi to me, because it doesn’t seem that far off. What Zoe [Kazan] did so brilliantly in that play was to make you think that you’re in the future and then realize, really, it’s about things that have been with us for eons. I’m so proud of her. I guess more so than usual I have been involved in slightly futuristic stories, but here we are.

Were you a fan of Star Trek or sci-fi adventure shows before this? What was it like to play that part of the world? I did not have a very in-depth knowledge of Star Trek . I’d seen a couple of the vintage episodes. I knew just about as much as anyone on the street. I knew how William Shatner talks, I knew about the costumes, and I knew about the passions of the fans of Star Trek. But it was so much fun. To shoot on a spaceship is just as fun as you’d imagine. Your inner 5-year-old is just going crazy. I could not believe I was on a spaceship. I loved every second of it.

And you get to wear this gigantic wig … That is not a wig! That was an hour and a half to two hours in the makeup chair every morning that they would tease it out 1960s-style. There’s a little big of fake hair in there, but the rest is all mine. Into this giant bouffant, every day . They had a fantastic makeup and hair team on that show who were able to make us look so much like we were in this retro, ’60s space TV show.

Does that make you feel bad for the actors on those shows? I didn’t even have to go through the worst of it. Milanka [Brooks, whose “USS Callister” character is turned into an alien] — she had to be turned blue every day. She was there for three hours every morning.

What was it like to also play Nanette on the real-life side of the story, where she’s an office drone? This episode has been such a dream job on so many levels — to get play a fully realized person, to get to play a woman in all shapes and forms and not just “the girlfriend” or “the foil for this,” and to see a woman so angry and to refuse to back down. One of my favorite movies of all time is Kill Bill , and that’s about that . That gets me so deeply jazzed.

When you first see her in the office, she seems like she might be a shy, wallflower character … You don’t realize what she’s capable of!

But she has a has a complete inner life. She has sexy pictures on her phone. It’s not something that she’s ashamed of, it’s using them against her that makes her angry. She doesn’t have that shame about those photos. But I think that what’s interesting about her is that she realizes her best and truest self in the space world. In the office world, she’s asked to do so many of the things that women are raised with. A guy puts his hands on her lower back and instead of saying, “Don’t fucking touch me,” we are asked to shrug it off. Obviously that tide is changing now, but we see her saying “ha ha ha” and being sweet and quiet. You don’t realize that tiger that resides within.

I don’t think that only resides in women, that’s one of my favorite types of stories, when you underestimate what a character is capable of. And yet they themselves underestimate. I don’t think she herself realizes that about herself.

By the end of the arc of the office world, do you think she fully realizes what has happened? I don’t think she does. We talked about this at the wrap party, like, “Oh, right, he’s going to die and they’re going to find her prints at the scene.” Maybe they won’t. Maybe they won’t dust for prints because it’s clear that he just passed away. But I don’t know! I don’t think she has any understanding in the real world of what this virtual reality is. Maybe they try and get in touch with her again. I don’t know, I’d want to see what happens with that group of people. I feel very strongly that in the space world, she becomes captain and leads them on a bunch of awesome adventures.

It feels like she’s more fully realized in the space world by the end of it. I know! Which I love. I think there aren’t the parameters and the social contracts in the space world — she’s just a woman pushed to the edge and is like “no fucking way.” All of the politeness and all of the trappings of one’s life that you build over time all go away.

Did you spend time figuring out her power pose in the captain’s chair at the end of the episode? I didn’t, but I loved shooting that more than I can even explain to you. I think I was given three takes for that. I remember being very nervous that it wasn’t a lot. I didn’t have anything planned other than what she would feel at that moment. I can’t tell you how much fun it is to sit in the captain’s chair of a spaceship. It’s the most fun thing you could do.

It seems like you’ve been involved in a lot more plays in New York and more selective with TV and film projects recently. Has that been a conscious decision? I’ve always lived in New York, I never moved to L.A. I was developing and producing and writing a pilot for a year. That took me out of everything for over a year. When that sadly didn’t go forward, I shot Black Mirror right after that.

This year, I’ve been drawn more to wanting to get back into an acting boot camp with these plays that I’ve done, that have been so immensely challenging and written by dear friends of mine. I’ve gotten to collaborate with the most incredible people. I’ve always tried to have a pretty discerning eye with the roles that I’ve picked, which is maybe why it seems like I take breaks, but really they’re not breaks. It’s just that there’s not as much out there as one would hope. I’m lucky enough to be able to be choosy sometimes. I think this past year I’ve just tried to choose what feels right to me and what excites me.

Well, if you get something that puts you in the captain’s chair … Yeah, when that happens, it’s just the best.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

• cristin milioti
• black mirror

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Den of Geek

Black Mirror: The Star Trek References in USS Callister

The Black Mirror episode, “USS Callister,” has clear nods to the original Star Trek series that combine nostalgia with obsession.

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There’s no mistaking the likeness of the USS Callister from the season 4 Black Mirror episode of the same name to the iconic USS Enterprise from the original Star Trek series of the 1960s.

Robert Daly’s vintage collection of all six seasons of the fictional Space Fleet series may exceed Gene Roddenberry’s three years of swashbuckling space drama, but the recognizable references to the source of inspiration deserve a closer look. Upon careful examination, here are the most obvious homages.

The Captain Kirk demeanor

Jesse Plemons’ performance is admirably distinct as he enacts both the more confident captain of the Callister vessel and the downtrodden CTO of the Callister company, but when he’s in character as Captain Daly, he’s almost channeling William Shatner as James T. Kirk. While Kirk may not have gone so far as to embrace all of his female crew members in a celebratory kiss after each mission, one trademark move that was hard to miss was Captain Daly’s delivery of the line, “Fire!” as he commanded his weapons officer to disable the villain’s ship, fist clenching under his chin with dramatic punctuation. Classic Kirk!

It’s no surprise, then, that Plemons had a dialect coach to master the signature voice. In an interview with THR , episode director Toby Haynes explains, “Jesse would say, ‘You let me know if you want to turn the dial up on Shatner.’ We did it one or two times where he went full Shatner, like when he says ‘fire’ in the opening. That’s straight out of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country . I love those movies. I’m quoting my heroes. So it comes from a place of love.”

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Uhura and 60s fashion

There’s no doubt that Michaela Cole’s communications officer, Shania Lauer, is directly modeled after the pioneering performance of Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek , right down to the long, fake eyelashes. According to Coel in speaking with Digital Spy , “The eyelashes weighed a ton each. The costume was no respecter of your bladder. If you needed to pee it was like, well, you should have done that an hour ago.”

As soon as the new crew member cloned from Nanette Cole’s DNA arrives, her beehive hairdo makeover is immediately apparent, referencing the 60s origins of Star Trek and apparently Space Fleet as well. Daly does, after all, tell Cole that the show is from “before your time; before my time actually.” And while the midriff-baring uniforms aren’t directly modeled after anything from Star Trek , the mini-skirts are definitely recognizable as well.

Phasers, tricorders, and transporters

The technology of Star Trek has been imitated by legions of space dramas that came after it, both on television and in film, and Black Mirror isn’t about to break that trend. Even though helmsman Packer points out to Cole that their guns don’t work, Daly’s very tricorder-like omnicorder is instrumental in the crew’s eventual escape plan. And of course the de-materialization of the away team as they head to the planet is so ingrained in our collective cultural memory, no explanation of the transporter is needed. Hyperspace becomes white space and photon torpedoes turn into photon volts, but it’s all a familiar lexicon.

A favorite tongue-in-cheek use of technology, however, comes from Lauer as she acclimates Cole to her new position as science officer just after Daly has tortured her into compliance with his obsessive fan drama. As Daly asks Cole for a signal triangulation, Lauer whispers to her, “It’s any button. They’re all the same.” One can’t help but think of how earnestly Star Trek crew members likewise operated their nonsensical instrument boards.

Character likenesses

Is the villain Valdack exactly like the most infamous of Star Trek villains, Khan Noonien Singh? No, but the similarities are certainly there. Jimmi Simpson’s sycophantic Walton is meant to be more worshipful of his captain than anyone on the Enterprise , but his doubtfulness echoes both Bones’ “Dammit, I’m a doctor…” speech patterns and Scotty’s “It’ll tear the ship apart, captain!” a line which Walton mimics exactly in the opening sequence of the episode.

And while LeVar Burton’s Geordi La Forge isn’t from the original series, Dudani’s cybernetic enhancements remind viewers quite a bit of the blindness-conquering visor from Star Trek: The Next Generation . One might even conclude that Tulaska’s blue skin is an homage to the original series’ Andorians or maybe even the infamous green-skinned Orion femme fatale, Galia, reprised by Rachel Nichols in the 2009 cinematic re-imagining.

The red shirt

The fact that Lauer and Daly are the only ones wearing red uniforms is no mistake. The “red shirt” has become synonymous with imminent death ever since the original Star Trek famously depicted anonymous, red-uniformed away team members facing their inevitable demise at the hands of alien enemies. Although Lauer doesn’t exactly die, she is the first of those the audience meets to be turned into an alien creature and disposed of, and of course, Daly’s doom, although not predictable in the least, is foreshadowed expertly by the color of his officer’s jacket.

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Haynes explains, “I knew the original 60s Star Trek show very well. I was such a fan that I’m kind of reverential about it, so I was happy to play fast and loose with this version… which is why we put Michaela Coel in a red outfit. Michaela had to be in a red outfit because she’s the first of the crew to get killed. On Star Trek , the guy in red always gets nailed. I knew those layers of detail, so I made sure those were elements in there.”

As televised space dramas have evolved on television, a common vocabulary has emerged, and it all started with Star Trek . While the dark elements of Robert Daly’s power trip are pure Black Mirror , the obsessive fan culture surrounding a favorite classic sci-fi series is recognizable to any devotee of the multitude of Star Trek iterations. When viewers see Daly using fandom to conquer his insecurities, they see themselves, and that’s exactly what Black Mirror does best: act as a dark reflection of our own fallibility.

Michael Ahr | @mikescifi

Michael Ahr is a writer and multimedia producer at Den of Geek with a focus on science fiction television. Elsewhere, he teaches video production to high…

Black Mirror season 7 will include a Star Trek parody episode sequel

USS Callister is getting a part two

The first trailer for Black Mirror season 7 has dropped – and it looks like fans will be getting a sequel to one of the show's most popular episodes.

Netflix released a brief 30-second teaser, which can be viewed below, with the caption, "Six new stories, but one looks a little familiar. Black Mirror returns 2025."

Something does look familiar: in the clip, symbols appear across the screen. One symbol in particular lights up and turns yellow – the logo from the season 4 episode USS Callister.

USS Callister sees a gifted programmer named Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons) who, unhappy with the lack of recognition from his coworkers, decides to simulate a Star Trek-like space adventure. The episode earned four Primetime Emmy Awards including Outstanding Television Movie, with William Bridges and Charlies Brooker taking home the Emmy for Outstanding Writing. The cast includes Cristin Milloti, Jimmi Simpson, Michaela Coel, Billy Magnussen, and Aaron Paul in a voice-over cameo as Gamer691.

Six new stories, but one looks a little familiar. Black Mirror returns 2025. pic.twitter.com/uJmpxEhZH4 March 14, 2024

Season 7 was announced back in November , with Charlie Brooker returning as executive producer, along with Annabel Jones and Jessica Rhoades.

The show took a four-year hiatus after season 5, with season 6 premiering on June 2023. The cast included Annie Murphy, Salma Hayek, Aaron Paul, Josh Hartnett, Zazie Beetz, and Paapa Essiedu. 

Black Mirror season 7 is expected to hit Netflix in 2025. For more, check out our list of the best new TV shows coming your way in 2024 and beyond, or, check out our list of the best Netflix shows to add to your streaming queue right now.

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Lauren Milici is a Senior Entertainment Writer for GamesRadar+ currently based in the Midwest. She previously reported on breaking news for The Independent's Indy100 and created TV and film listicles for Ranker. Her work has been published in Fandom, Nerdist, Paste Magazine, Vulture, PopSugar, Fangoria, and more.

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Where You've Seen This Actress Before Her Badass Black Mirror Episode

Now that Black Mirror has returned with its fourth season, you should prepare yourself for one wild ride. One of the best episodes is "USS Callister," a parody of the original Star Trek . . . with a Black Mirror twist, of course.

The hero of the piece is a woman named Nanette Cole, who may look like a tiny, wide-eyed ingenue, but is actually a brilliant badass, played by the wonderful Cristin Milioti. The actress is perhaps best known for playing the titular mother on CBS's long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother . She became so popular with viewers that her storyline was be a big part of why fans were so unhappy with the final season and series finale episode. HIMYM aside, she's been in a variety of other projects as well.

After HIMYM , Milioti starred on NBC's short-lived (but adorable) sitcom A to Z , Hulu's continuation of The Mindy Project , and FX's second season of Fargo , playing Molly Solverson's cancer-stricken mother.

Milioti has also appeared in a handful of movies, notably playing Leonardo DiCaprio's wife in The Wolf of Wall Street . Milioti is also a celebrated Broadway actress, appearing on stage in That Face , Stunning , and Once , for which she earned a Tony nomination.

• Black Mirror

• Entertainment

'Black Mirror' boldly goes at Star Trek with 'U.S.S. Callister'

The new crew member on an Enterprise-like ship doesn't seem to have much patience with her mission.

• Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.

" Black Mirror ," the science-fiction show that shows the dark side of technology, is about to boldly go forth with a Star Trek homage.

On Tuesday, Netflix released a teaser for the fourth-season episode called "U.S.S. Callister," and Trek fans may feel as if they've been beamed aboard the Enterprise. Captain Daly (Jesse Plemons) welcomes Lieutenant Cole (Cristin Milioti), a new crew member, on board his starship. While things seem normal, this is "Black Mirror," so some kind of terrible twist is almost certainly lurking. 

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Cole herself looks like a fun character -- while off-ship on a mission, she starts to whine about an overly dramatic villain and is immediately shushed by a more dedicated crew member.

"Imagine if there was no twist. It was just an actual Star Trek parody to throw people off," snarked YouTube user They Might Be Bricks .

"U.S.S. Callister" is the fourth episode of the fourth season of "Black Mirror," and will be seen sometime in 2018.

‘Black Mirror’ Hid A Couple A-List Cameos Aboard The ‘USS Callister’

This post contains light spoilers for the Black Mirror episode, ‘USS Callister.’

The latest season of Black Mirror has hit Netflix, and like previous offerings, there is one episode of the bunch that is dominating the conversation (like last season’s uncharacteristically hopeful ‘San Junipero’ ). Season four ‘s standout is the Star Trek parody ‘USS Callister,’ which shines a light on the toxic side of nerd culture while also be a rather thrilling space opera in and of itself. Starring Jesse Plemons, Jimmy Simpson, Michaela Coel, and Christina Milioti, ‘U.S.S. Callister’ will challenge even the most die hard Star Trek fans to engage in a little self-reflection.

On top of it being an engrossing episode of television, ‘USS Callister’ also has some hidden cameos for the most eagle-eyed (and eared) viewers, because there are few things nerds love more than Easter Eggs. Plemons, who will be familiar to many after appearing on Breaking Bad and Fargo , stars in the episode, and he brought some of his connections with him.

Kirsten Dunst, Plemon’s co-star on Fargo and eventual fiancee, can be seen briefly at the real-life Callister tech company, the inspiration for Plemon’s ship in his Space Fleet simulation. The second cameo belongs to Plemon’s Break Bad compatriot, Aaron Paul, but unfortunately, Jesse Pinkman is not seen but heard. After Milioti’s crew takes command of the USS Callister and reach the open internet, they get harangued by Paul’s distinctive voice, and while the cameo is extremely low-key, he does get the final joke of the episode.

So, as you ring in the new year with a side of technological panic, be sure to keep your eyes and ears open.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjNhW2mR1lM

(Via Entertainment Weekly )

USS Callister review: Black Mirror delivers "a big space romp with a lot of comedy" in retro Star Trek parody

Warning: minor spoilers charlie brooker's co-creator annabel jones calls this episode "toy story for adults," but, of course, there's a much darker side to the technicolour shenanigans.

Black Mirror: USS Callister

• 09:41, 19 Jan 2018
• Updated 10:41, 19 Jan 2018

What is going on? There's the usual Black Mirror opening screen with the tendon-tightening sound effect, and then... the tinkly music and a airplane-shaped ship flying awkwardly towards us... we're in the realm of 1960s special effects.

So Black Mirror's really doing a Star Trek parody?!

Well, yes and no.

When Captain Daly (Jesse Plemons, Breaking Bad, Fargo), whose soothingly old-school line delivery takes us back to childhood, enters, the crew all jump into action.

He's the alpha male hero, keeping his slightly wooden crew calm through turbulence and intergalactic warfare.

One falls to his knees to ask the captain's forgiveness.

Then the whole gang actually applauds him and sings, "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."

It's when the captain embraces the two female officers, movie-star style, and kisses each of them in turn, one after another, that things seem more than a bit off.

Were they really this annoyingly grateful - subservient, even - in Star Trek?

As Charlie Brooker recently told Mirror Online: "We did consciously open USS Callister on the Star Trek parody, to make people go 'WTF?!'."

The first reveal of the episode is actually a series of slow-dawning realisations.

To say any more would be hugely spoil the whole episode, so we'll have to remain on the edges of the episode.

The crew aren't happy, that's for sure.

So the Star Trek-style spaceship is a place for acting up - and terrible consequences awaits anyone who abstains.

Subscribe to our Black Mirror Cracked podcast here

Then, one day, Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti, How I Met Your Mother) walks through the bridge doors.

She looks sweet, but isn't willing to bend to Captain Daly's command.

The two clash in a big way - and their enmity threatens everyone onboard the USS Callister.

It's a great ride of an episode, at turns funny and haunting, like the best Black Mirror episodes.

Classic Black Mirror themes bubble up again, especially around the themes of consciousness and retribution.

As Brooker says in his chat with Mirror Online: "it's a big space romp with a lot of comedy, but also with dark undertones to it.

"A story about what is reality, really? It’s about a tyrant and a terrible power imbalance. The crazy kingdom that a lunatic is running."

Introducing our post-binge podcast: Black Mirror Cracked

Just surfacing from your bed after gulping down Season 4? Feel the need to talk about it?

We're with you. That's why we made a companion podcast!

Check out Black Mirror Cracked , where we review each episode.

There's also a special bonus instalment, with creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones.

How to subscribe

Make sure you never miss an episode of the Black Mirror Cracked podcast.

• Subscribe on iTunes
• Subscribe on Audioboom

Wherever you're subscribing, add a rating and review to let us know what you think.

For a look behind the scenes of the podcast, check out this interview

• Watch Black Mirror Season 4 on Netflix

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Two Star Trek Captains Can Pull Off Spock's Vulcan Nerve Pinch

An impossible star trek doctor crossover just happened, after 57 years, star trek settles the truth about trelane's godlike species.

• Star Trek: Lower Decks is the greatest and most affectionate parody of the franchise, but its official canon status sets it apart from other spoofs.
• Various TV shows and sketches, like Chewin' The Fat, The Muppet Show, and The Adam & Joe Show, have successfully parodied Star Trek with humor and deep-cut references.
• Other parodies, such as Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek and Black Mirror's USS Callister, offer unique and sometimes dark takes on Star Trek, pushing the boundaries of the franchise.

Star Trek has been a cultural institution for nearly 60 years, and its place in the popular imagination has spawned all manner of spoofs and parodies. Arguably Star Trek: Lower Decks is the greatest parody of all time, given how it perfectly, and affectionately, sends up the entire franchise. However, its official placing within the Star Trek canon means that it wouldn't be fair to place it alongside the countless comedy sketches, movies and sitcoms that have sent up the show over the past 57 years.

There's a long history of William Shatner impressions of varying quality, with the most notable being Jim Carrey's from In Living Color . While the jokes in those sketches, such as "The Wrath of Farrakhan" haven't aged brilliantly, Carrey's impression is certainly worth checking out. Some Star Trek parodies have gone on to spawn a life of their own, with full series orders, merchandise, and a fiercely dedicated fanbase all of their own. Meanwhile, other parodies have said all they have to say about Star Trek in 5 gag-filled minutes, and move on to their next target.

9 Chewin' The Fat - Taysiders In Space

The casting of Martin Quinn means that Star Trek : Strange New Worlds' Scotty is now Scottish , after decades of being played by a Canadian and an Englishman. BBC Scotland comedy sketch show Chewin' The Fat depicted a whole crew of Scottish Starfleet officers in the memorable sketch, "Taysiders in Space". Based on the premise that Starfleet Academy opened up a new campus in Carnoustie in Scotland, the sketch depicts the first batch of recruits setting out across the universe, with their phasers set to " malky " - that's kill in Scottish. It's a bracingly Earthy take on Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek vision with some big laughs.

8 The Muppet Show - Pigs In Space

Pigs in Space has been a stalwart of The Muppet Show since season 2, and while it has sent up all manner of sci-fi movies and TV shows, Miss Piggy's starship is called the Swinetrek, directly linking it to Star Trek . Not only that, but the character of Captain Link Hogthrob is very clearly based on William Shatner's Captain Kirk and just like Star Trek , it spawned numerous spinoffs. In the 1990s, ABC revived The Muppet Show as Muppets Tonight , which ran between 1996 and 1998. Pigs in Space was also updated in the revival, with the subtitle Deep Dish Nine and the character of Captain Pighead to better reflect 90s Star Trek .

7 The Adam & Joe Show - Stuffed Trek: The Toy Generation

The Adam & Joe Show was a cult TV comedy magazine show that was famous for spoofing popular movies and TV shows with toys long before Robot Chicken . In their sketch "Stuffed Trek: The Toy Generation", Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish sent up Star Trek: The Next Generation with some fairly deep-cut references. The mention of " more terrible movies " and irritation at Lt. Commander Da-Toy's newfound sense of humor say it all about Adam and Joe's opinions on Star Trek Generations . Interestingly, decades later and with successful feature films under his belt, Joe Cornish was approached to direct Star Trek Beyond , but he turned it down.

6 Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek

Turkish cinema is notorious for its copyright-skirting parodies of Western IPs, and not even Star Trek could escape this treatment. Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek is, like the title suggests, a film that places the titular Turkish comedy character into an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series . More specifically, "The Man Trap", complete with Salt Vampire and seductive apparitions. Watching it does feel like experiencing a feverish mashup of TOS season 1, but it's never boring. The Turkish Star Trek parody is also a charming buddy comedy between Ömer and Mr. Spack, and there's been nothing quite like it before or since.

5 Black Mirror - USS Callister

"USS Callister", Charlie Brooker's pitch-perfect parody of Star Trek: The Original Series had a predictably dark edge. As a Star Trek parody it worked on multiple levels, from the recognizable tropes to the much deeper critiques of its sexual politics. It's also a smart and thought-provoking take on Star Trek 's holodeck technology and the rights of those whose images are stored inside. The characters that Robert Daly (Jesse Plemmons) interacts with inside his simulation are avatars for his co-workers, who retain the memories of the cruelty he metes out to them. Star Trek has yet to fully interrogate the ethics of its holodeck technology in such a complex and engaging way, making this a must-watch episode for fans.

4 Animaniacs - Star Truck

Animaniacs' parody of Star Trek is an absolute riot as the Warner Brothers (and sister) cause chaos aboard the starship from their favorite TV show. It's full of copyright skirting names like Mr. Squat and Captain Kork, alongside typically meta-references such as a nod to " Ricardo Montalban and his plastic chest ." There's also a hilariously blunt joke about the classic Star Trek: The Original Series episode "City on the Edge of Forever". The parody featured some incredible impressions of William Shatner, DeForest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy by Maurice LaMarche that perfectly capture each of their iconic Star Trek roles.

3 Seth McFarlane's The Orville

The Orville 's reputation as a Star Trek parody initially hampered its ability to be taken seriously as a sci-fi show in its own right. There are strong Star Trek links to The Orville from guest appearances by notable stars, and creative input from 90s Trek legends Brannon Braga, Jonathan Frakes, and Robert Duncan McNeill behind the scenes. Seth McFarlane has a deep love of Star Trek and that really shines through in some of the affectionate jibes at tired old Trek tropes. However, The Orville is more rewarding than a mere parody because it recaptured the feel of the episodic, planet-of-the-week style Star Trek long before the debut of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in 2022.

2 Futurama - Where No Fan Has Gone Before

Both Matt Groening's beloved animated series The Simpsons and Futurama have featured various nods to Star Trek over the years, but "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" is the peak. In the episode, the Planet Express crew discovers the original Star Trek actors alive and well on the planet Omega 3, where they've been resurrected by alien superfan Mellvar. Reuniting the majority of the living Star Trek: The Original Series Cast - minus James Doohan - it was an episode packed full of references and big laughs. From Philip J Fry (Billy West) in Captain Pike's bleep-bleep chair to the killer final line delivered by William Shatner, it's an absolute hoot.

1 Galaxy Quest

While Futurama may have had the benefit of the involvement of the original cast, Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek parody . The beloved sci-fi movie, which has spawned its own dedicated fanbase, was released in 1999. Effectively putting a Star Trek spin on the Steve Martin movie The Three Amigos, it sent the cast of a popular sci-fi show into space to defend a planet from an alien warlord. It's full of acutely observed jokes about conventions and fans, and it's steeped in various well-worn Star Trek tropes. Tim Allen is perfectly cast as the William Shatneresque character while Alan Rickman's snobbish actor is archly funny. It's the funniest Star Trek parody of all time, but Galaxy Quest is also a joyous homage to the show and its hugely positive impact on fans.

• galaxy quest

Aaron Paul Had A Hilarious Cameo In 'Black Mirror' & You May Have Missed It

The twisted, technological horror of Black Mirror is finally back so that you can end 2017 with the crushing bleakness that this year deserves, but the string of pretty depressing new episodes does include one really funny bright spot... if you are good at recognizing voices, that is. Although he never physically appears in the show, Aaron Paul has a cameo in Black Mirror Season 4 — did you catch it?

Spoiler alert: This post will contain some spoilers about the Season 4 premiere episode of Black Mirror , "USS Callister." Yep; that's Aaron Paul's voice that you heard at the very end of Black Mirror 's bold Star Trek parody episode "USS Callister." Paul briefly appears in the intergalactic episode only as a disembodied voice, but delivers one of the most fun moments of the whole new season. Paul's cameo also turns "USS Callister" into a mini Breaking Bad reunion, since both he and the episode's lead, Jesse Plemons, starred in the acclaimed drug-dealing drama — Aaron Paul played meth-cooking protégé Jesse Pinkman and Plemons joined the show in the final season as another cook named Todd.

After the crew of the USS Callister escape the clutches of Jesse Plemons' sadistic game developer, Cristin Milioti's character navigates the virtual ship into the public gaming software, populated by thousands of other gamers. Unfortunately, the first new person that they meet is your typical gaming douchebag, played with delicious teen angst by Aaron Paul. Paul's character immediately demands to know what the USS Callister has to trade with him, and then prepares to blow them up when they won't offer him anything. Luckily, Milioti's character easily escapes Aaron Paul's lasers, and the episode ends with her ship blasting off into an ever-expanding new universe full of possibilities... and I guess also full of other douchey gamers.

Aaron Paul's voice cameo also felt perfectly cast — it is easy to imagine that it could actually be his Breaking Bad character Jesse Pinkman that is playing the video game during some downtime, or even his BoJack Horseman character Todd trying out a new video game. Though he gained fame for his on-screen role on Breaking Bad , Aaron Paul has been doing a lot more voice acting recently — he is a series regular on the animated series BoJack Horseman , he recently guested on cartoons The Simpsons and Tron: Uprising , and he starred in the CGI film Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV last year. He is also appearing in person as the star of Hulu's cult-focused drama series The Path .

Of all the new Season 4 episodes, it is surprisingly this Star Trek parody episode of Black Mirror that feels most timely, and positions itself as the clear standout of the season. With all the focus on abusive men in the workplace in 2017, "USS Callister" separates itself from the rest of Season 4 as the most relevant statement on current events. Though it appeared to just be a fun Star Trek send-up initially, the episode actually has an incredibly dark underbully, as Jesse Plemons' character uses his technological prowess to trap digital clones of his coworkers inside his private video game to torture as he pleases. Though the episode was filmed before the Harvey Weinstein exposé opened the floodgates to revealing Hollywood's abusers, it is difficult to watch "USS Callister" without these exposed, powerful men coming to mind.

"USS Callister" is also the most star-studded episode of the new season, with the most actors that TV fans will likely recognize of the bunch. Aside from Aaron Paul's cameo, the season premiere also stars Plemons, How I Met Your Mother star Cristin Milioti, Westworld and House of Cards star Jimmi Simpson, and Chewing Gum star Michaela Coel.

All six episodes of Black Mirror Season 4 are now streaming on Netflix.

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