USS Callister
Black Mirror Season 4 Easter Eggs
USS Calister is one giant Star Trek spoof, but along with references to that iconic series, as well as cameos from famous actors such as Kirsten Dunst and Aaron Paul, there are a few Easter eggs to Black Mirror episodes gone by, too.
Callister’s front-of-house secretary, Elena Tulaska isn’t the most attentive of employees. She’s seen browsing her phone, more interested in dating apps than smiling at colleagues that walk past. The app she’s using is the same one from Hang the DJ. We know it’s pretty handy at finding matches, so no wonder she ignores Daly as he struggles to walk through the security barriers.
Later in the episode, aboard the USS Calister, the planets Skillane IV and Rannoch that are visited by the crew might sound familiar. That’s because they’re based on Victoria Skillane and Iain Rannoch, the criminals from the White Bear episode from season two.
Daly is a big fan of vanilla lattes, and the brand of milk he prefers, Raiman milk, is a callback to Raiman from season three’s Men Against Fire. In that episode, Raiman described her family farm, which we can now assume is a dairy farm.
Arkangel
Black Mirror Season 4 Easter Eggs
The Archangel device is touted as the ultimate child-monitoring system, but when an obsessive parent can’t let go, things turn ugly very quickly. There are several Easter eggs seen throughout Sara’s childhood, starting from the opening scenes in which she visits the park with her mother. Sara is holding a Waldo lunchbox, alluding to season two’s Waldo character.
Following that incident, Sara’s mother decides to have Arkangel system installed in her mind. At the Arkangel facility, Sara undergoes a brief operation and then watches military footage to test the system’s sensory parameters. What she watches are scenes from season three’s episode, Men Against Fire.
The real Easter egg hunters will have noticed two other nods to previous seasons. First, later in the episode, teenage Sara has a picture of Tusk, the rapper who dies in “Hated in the Nation.” Secondly, the newspaper article about the cyclist killed is published by UKN, the very same media outlet that reports on the prime minister’s intercourse with a pig in the show’s very first episode, National Anthem.
Crocodile
Black Mirror Season 4 Easter Eggs
Crocodile is one season four’s most sinister episodes, in which Mia, a successful architect, and young mother, goes on a brutal killing spree to keep secret the ghosts of her past. Minutes after having made the split-second decision to wrestle Rob to the ground and violently choke him to death, Mia quickly throws together a plan to sneak the body out of the building. Having drawn the curtains and ordered room service so that she can use the mobile tray to move the body to the parking lot, Mia orders a pornographic film, presumably so she has an alibi as to her whereabouts. What you might not have noticed, though, is that before she settles on which film to order, Mia cycles past “Wraith Babes”, a throwback to the popular Fifteen Million Merits episode from season one. There’s also a title under the “Classics” category in the hotel’s video-on-demand section pictures a robot bee from the episode “Hated in the Nation.”
The sharpest observers may have noticed that the automated Pizza delivery car that causes the accident is the same company that delivers Robert Daly’s pizza in USS Callister.
After Shazia learns that someone in the hotel witnessed the accident, she tries to ascertain who was staying in the room. The concierge isn’t able to reveal Mia’s identity because he claims there is a strict privacy policy in place after their computer was hacked by tabloid newspapers. Journalists were searching for the name a prominent man who was caught there with a male prostitute. That man was a judge on Hot Shots in Fifteen Million Merits.
Another nod of the hat to Fifteen Million Merits in Crocodile is the song “Anyone Who Knows What Love is”, which has become somewhat of a reoccurring theme song for the series in general (it was used in season two’s White Christmas as well). As mentioned in our story and ending explanation, the song is usually a sign that something bad or unusual is about to happen. Crocodile is no exception, as the song ominously used to help the recaller device conjure more accurate images of the subject’s memory, and it forebodes Shazia’s ill-fated visit to Mia’s house.
Other musical references in the episode include the children’s play, which is a rendition of “Bad Guys” from the musical Bugsy Malone, the 1976 starring Arkangel director Jodie Foster.
Metalhead
Black Mirror Season 4 Easter Eggs
As we noted in our story and ending explanation, Metalhead takes a rather different tone than typical Black Mirror episodes. There’s much less dialogue, and the narrative doesn’t really feature the sorts of twists and turns we normally see from the show. As a result, there isn’t quite the same room for Easter eggs as in other episodes, but there are still one or two that caught our eye. Most notably, the van that character Clarke hacks and steals before being chased out of the warehouse by the robotic dog has the TCKR logo, which is the company that developed the memory cloud of San Junipero.
There’s also another reference to the San Junipero episode when Bella searches the household for supplies. There’s a San Junipero postcard lying on the table.
The Black Museum
Black Mirror Season 4 Easter Eggs
The season finale, Black Museum, tells several mini-stories, recapping grim science fiction tales before its own narrative wraps things up, which in a sense, serves as a kind of epilogue to both the episode and the season. The museum itself is packed with Easter eggs to previous episodes, but there are some other references to old seasons, too.
First, the obvious stuff: Nish, who we later find out is much more clued into the backstory of the Black Museum than she pretends to be, curiously investigates a number of creepy artifacts and ornaments on display. As she walks around, Rolo gives a running commentary on his background in neurotech, but she passes by dozens of props from previous episodes, including:
- The machine Daly uses to upload DNA from “USS Callister,” as well as Tommy’s lollipop
- The broken Arkangel tablet
- The bathtub that Shazia’s husband is lying in when he’s murdered in “Crocodile”
- The artist who hung himself in “National Anthem”
- Mugshots of Victoria Skillane from “White Bear”
- The hood and hunting costume that Baxter (Michael Smiley), Victoria’s torturer, wears in “White Bear”
- The game from “Playtest”
- Roach corpses from “Men Against Fire”
- A robotic bee from “Hated in the Nation”
The less obvious Easter eggs are things like the name of the hospital where Rolo scouts for victims, St. Juniper. It is, of course, a reference to season three’s San Junipero episode. Later we see that he also worked for the company that developed the virtual world, TCKR. Additionally, when Rolo explains consciousness transfer and the concept of cookies, it’s a nod to the same system described in White Christmas. Nish then asks Rolo whether it’s “Like when they upload old people to the cloud,” referencing the technology in San Junipero.
Two small – but awesome – Easter eggs appear in Rolo’s stories. Did you notice that the lab rats from Pain Addict are named Hector and Kenny after the two main characters from season three episode Shut Up and Dance? There’s also a graphic novel called “15 Million Merits” which can be seen during Rolo’s second story.
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