Origin Story

The first ten minutes of "USS Callister" are a very precise study of a specific and recognisable office misery. He is the technical co-founder of a successful games company, he built the thing everyone works on, and he has been comprehensively out-manoeuvred by his business partner, who is charming, takes the credit, holds the meetings, and treats him with the faintly contemptuous fondness reserved for the person whose contribution is over. Daly eats alone. He says the wrong thing in the corridor and watches it land. Somebody takes his chair.

Then he goes home to a flat in which every surface is devoted to a 1960s television programme about a starship, opens a private build of his own game, and becomes the captain.

And the crew of that ship are digital copies of his colleagues, made without their knowledge from DNA he has collected in the office — a coffee cup, a discarded vape, a stray hair — and they are conscious, and they cannot leave, and he can do anything to them.

I have always thought the crucial line in the episode is not spoken by Daly but implied by the office. His grievance is real. He is being cheated. He built the engine that the company runs on and his partner has taken the company, and every slight the episode shows us is one we can independently verify as a slight. If the episode had made him a paranoid fantasist it would collapse, because then the tyranny would just be madness. Instead it gives him a legitimate complaint and then watches what he does with it, and what he does with it is build a place where the people who wronged him can be punished forever by someone who is, at last, in charge.

It is the show's most useful contribution to the study of power and I do not think it has been improved on. Tyranny does not usually begin in confidence. It begins in humiliation, in the specific conviction that one has been unfairly denied the standing one is owed, and the reason this is so dangerous is that the conviction is frequently correct. There is no shortage of tyrants in the historical record who were, in the plain sense, wronged first.

from Black Mirror: How the Future Learned to Look Like the Present (2026)