Black Mir­ror ​‘Strik­ing Vipers’ review – Sex­u­al free­dom in nos­tal­gic environments

It starts out with a group of friends in their late twen­ties enjoy­ing a night out at the club. Noth­ing too crazy – just a lit­tle role-play between long-term cou­ple, Dan­ny (Antho­ny Mack­ie) and Theo (Nicole Beharie), and a bit of dance floor bad-assery between Karl (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his girl Daisy (Monique Cyn­thia Brown).

Upon return­ing home, Dan­ny and Theo engage in a pas­sion­ate love-mak­ing ses­sion and fall asleep in each other’s arms, while Karl whips out his game-con­sole to kick vir­tu­al butt. Loud­ly. So loud­ly in fact, he wakes Dan­ny up and imme­di­ate­ly con­vinces him to join in on a ses­sion – work be damned. With dou­ble the excite­ment in the room, the vol­ume ris­es, caus­ing Theo to wake up and warn them to keep it down.

Fast-for­ward 11 years and Dan­ny is bare­ly recog­nis­able in his bougie style and slick frames, in his sub­ur­ban home, sur­round­ed by a bunch of peo­ple seem­ing­ly cut from the same cloth he feels no con­nec­tion to at all. He stum­bles through an awk­ward con­ver­sa­tion with Daisy’s new hus­band, unable to find the tini­est square footage of com­mon ground. It’s not until Karl makes an appear­ance that we see Dan­ny relax for the first time since his care­free days in his late twen­ties. Their con­ver­sa­tion is by no means pro­found, nor does it cov­er any of the usu­al ter­ri­to­ries women might: rela­tion­ships, health, over­all well-being. Theo pokes fun at their super­fi­cial rela­tion­ship, but Dan­ny is quick to admit that most men sim­ply don’t have the need to go ​“beyond sur­face bullshit”.

Kick­ing off Black Mirror’s fifth sea­son with ​‘Strik­ing Vipers’, Char­lie Brook­er has flipped the script this time by focus­ing on the nuances of male rela­tion­ships, desire and the blurred line between fan­ta­sy and the real exe­cu­tion there­of. The episode explores the changes we under­go between our twen­ties and for­ties, how it affects past friend­ships and how it brings on a sense of loss – of hav­ing lost our for­mer, younger selves not just phys­i­cal­ly but emo­tion­al­ly – and how, often, this loss can­not be rec­on­ciled by form­ing new rela­tion­ships in a body and mind­set that con­tin­ues to feel alien.

By gift­ing Dan­ny the lat­est ver­sion of the video game that shaped their youth and friend­ship, Karl seems to have found a way to recon­nect and relive those nos­tal­gic years. How­ev­er, as you can already imag­ine, Brook­er had a dif­fer­ent game in mind for them.

When Karl and Dan­ny first meet online as Strik­ing Vipers char­ac­ters – Rox­ette and Lance respec­tive­ly – their bat­tles begin in true Tekken-style with crazy fight com­bos and idyl­lic, Asian back­drops. As they reach the end of the first bat­tle, with Rox­ette tri­umphant­ly strad­dling Lance, there’s a shift in the atmos­phere. Sud­den­ly, the fight’s adren­a­line seeps into the men’s nether regions, as they embrace in a pas­sion­ate, horny kiss. Freaked out by what has just occurred, they sign off from the video game, con­fused and ashamed.

Dan­ny, who is still sport­ing an erec­tion when he crawls into bed with Theo, is par­tic­u­lar­ly affect­ed by the sit­u­a­tion. How­ev­er, like Karl, he can­not shake the intrigue. What ensues is the explo­ration of an online, sex­u­al rela­tion­ship that they rarely dis­cuss or acknowl­edge IRL. And while Dan­ny isn’t actu­al­ly cheat­ing on Theo in the real world, she can feel some­thing is going on and he is tru­ly strug­gling with the fact he is betray­ing her on a lev­el that is dif­fi­cult to define.

‘Strik­ing Vipers’ explores how the flu­id­i­ty and com­plex­i­ty of our sex­u­al­i­ty may not always trans­late into real-life sce­nar­ios, and this is exact­ly where VR could act as an edu­ca­tion­al – albeit dan­ger­ous – tool of self-expres­sion. Were it not for the fact that Karl and Danny’s online char­ac­ters were free enough to give into their lust, they nev­er would have put their attrac­tion to the test in real life. By the time the episode comes to an end, Brook­er has us believ­ing these type of VR games could become a sex­u­al­ly lib­er­at­ing device for those who feel restrict­ed by society’s rigid views on – par­tic­u­lar­ly male – sexuality.