Two college friends have a virtual affair with each other in the Season 5 premiere of Netflix’s “Black Mirror.”
In the season opener, “Striking Vipers,” Danny (Anthony Mackie) and Karl (Yahya Abdul Mateen II) are reunited at Danny’s birthday party. They haven’t seen each other in 11 years and naturally have completely different lives. Danny’s married to Theo (Nikki Beharie), his college sweetheart.
They have the whole suburban setup: house, backyard, kid. Karl is still on the market, with a gym-toned body, to appeal to millennial women. While having dinner with his latest conquest, he compares a waiter to Dennis Rodman. His date doesn’t know who that is, but sure enough, whips out her smartphone to look him on Wikipedia. Karl may be scoring, but he has nothing in common with the local talent.
As a birthday party present, Karl gives Danny a copy of the video game they used to play in college, “Striking Vipers X.” The new version has a virtual reality add-on and Karl supplies the necessary software so they can play together from separate locations. In Charlie Brooker’s fiendishly clever script, Danny and Karl choose as their video game opponents Lance (Ludi Lin) and Roxette (Pom Klementieff), two very attractive Asian martial artists.
With discs attached to their temples, Danny and Karl zone out on their respective couches while the combat maneuvers between Lance and Roxette lead to a kiss at the end of the game, and through subsequent sessions, greater degrees of sexual contact, until it becomes clear that the two friends are getting each other off in the virtual world represented by “Striking Vipers X.”
Mackie and Mateen deftly convey the exciting but threatening change in their relationship.
Away from the game, they are perpetually distracted. At home, Danny is cool to his wife, avoiding all physical contact as he “saves” himself for Karl/Roxette. As for Karl, he can’t satisfy his girlfriend because he has Lance/Danny on his mind at the most inappropriate times. Their dynamic plays with tropes of African American macho behavior, with Karl clearly delighting in his ability to inhabit a woman’s body and be submissive. Brooker and his actors expertly tease out the sexual tension between the two men while never touching each other. When Danny nearly misses his wedding anniversary and Theo has a heart-to-heart with him about their sexual problems, he breaks off the virtual affair, putting “Striking Vipers X” and the VR add-on away in a closet and breaking Karl/Roxette’s heart.
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“Striking Vipers” works neatly as a short play, but its visual dimensions are greatly enhanced by the video game environment, which largely features a pretty Japanese pavilion backdrop where Roxette and Lance fight, cavort and discreetly copulate in a series of brightly colored costumes that contrast with Danny and Karl’s nondescript dude wear.
Brooker consistently raises the tension between the two coexisting worlds in a way that reminds me of the old Daphne du Maurier novel “The House on the Strand,” in which a married man in Cornwall, England, drops a psychedelic drug on a dare from a friend and is transported back to the 14th century and falls in love with a woman from another lifetime.
Soon he becomes hooked and wants to go back more often and see her again. At one point, he is nearly hit by a train coming out of a modern-day tunnel not from the manor house where he lives with his family. Similarly, Karl tries to get Danny to come back to their virtual romantic hideaway, at one point confessing that substitute video game partners just didn’t cut it: “I f—ed a polar bear and I still couldn’t get you get out of my mind.”
Brooker’s story explores the provocative ways the world we live in and those we escape to for entertainment intersect, overlap and threaten to supplant each other. Danny and Karl try to bring their affair into the real world, with surprising results — one that even poor, practical Theo can learn to live with.