And him bringing the digital impressions of his co-workers along for the ride is outright horrifying. Daley retreating into an online space is no longer novel or endearing, it’s the norm. This is 2017 (well, soon to be 2018), though and we’re all meant to occupy online space. In a pre-Internet age, that’s a charming Never-Ending Story kind of tale. He’s clearly someone who feels ostracized, wrongly or not, and has retreated into a technological fantasy world. But the archetype he represents is unmistakable. I don’t know what Robert Daley’s search history is like. They’re plunging even deeper into the online abyss now, such is their lust to operate unchecked.” ![]() And so these same guys get VERY ornery when that online freedom is challenged in any way by valid criticism about racism, injustice, sexism, and privilege. The disconnect between the freedom some of those guys had in real life versus online was staggering. Back then, white guys could run amok online. “There’s a lot of money to be had in pretending that the internet is the same place it was back in 2006, or raging against the way it isn’t. But to understand what makes “USS Callister” so fun, it’s important to understand what makes Daley such a stomach-churning villain. We haven’t even mentioned yet that almost the entirety of the episode takes place in a simulation approximating a Star Trek-esque universe. “USS Callister” ends up being really, really fun. Worse still, creating a techno-fantasy universe and trapping your co-worker’s digital impressions within it as prisoners seems more terrifying and plausible than ever. Most importantly, however, everyone is very, very “online.” The idea that some Tron-like techno fantasy universe can solve all of your problems is laughable. Comic book movies make approximately a trillion dollars a second, and even the Luddites carry around computers in their pockets that could have somehow ended the Cold War. A future more distant than we could have possibly ever imagined. If Charlie Brooker wrote “USS Callister” in 1991, Robert Daley could have been a Revenge of the Nerds-style folk hero: creating a universe where there wasn’t one before just so that he could finally be in control of his life.īut this isn’t 1991. In an era before nerd culture was mainstream culture, he could have been endearing. ![]() Let me take you under my wing and help you with that.” He’s an undeniable genius with suspect social skills just walking through life as though he’s waiting for someone to step up and say “hey, I’ve noticed you seem to have trouble talking to people. He’s also the kind of character archetype who could have been a protagonist in the not-so-distant past. Robert Daley (Jesse Plemons) is a shitty man. The superficial angle is that at its core, “USS Callister” is the story of a shitty man released at the tail end of a year whose most relevant and consistent theme has been the exposure (and in some notable, terrifying exceptions: elevation) of shitty men. And also in a deeper, almost spiritual right story/right time sense. The timing is right in a kind of superficial “hey I recognize that from the Twitters and Facebooks!” sense.
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