The Past as the Final Frontier

Black Mirror | Cast: Salma Hayek, Anjana Vasan | Creator: Charlie Brooker | English | Netflix

It is 1979. The National Front wants England to become all-white again. A young woman of Indian origin takes her lunch break in the stockroom, which her co-worker finds offensive because of the lingering smell. She gets ticked off by her boss who tells her she can eat her lunch in the basement. Nida (Anjana Vasan) is a dutiful shop assistant with a sudden attraction to Boney M whose singer will soon manifest in her life in the most unlikely way. Cut to 2023 reality and a curry-eater is running the country. Across five seasons so far, Black Mirror has shown us how technology can end up controlling us but when technology itself has reached such diabolical proportions it’s better to go back into the past. So in the episode ‘Mazey Day’, set in 2006, the paparazzi hunters become the hunted in most unexpected ways. In ‘Joan Is Awful’, which may very well be set now, a Netflix-like streaming service starts streaming Joan’s life as a prestige series, with Joan being played by Salma Hayek. In ‘Beyond the Sea’, two astronauts download their consciousness to create replicas of themselves for their families back home only to realise that solitude is endemic to the modern world. But it is the episode ‘Loch Henry’ that is really heart-breaking. Here, a true crime documentary turns out to be a bit too close to home. A young couple goes home to Loch Henry to make a nature documentary and gets sidetracked into telling the story of a series of murders by a local youngster, and uncovers some shocking truths. It’s symptomatic of our times, of our obsession with other people’s crimes, with other people’s dysfunctional families, with other people’s ugly secrets. Until the camera turns its gaze on our own frailties.

Why Watch it? For the Black Mirror chill down the spine, that this is not our future. This is where we are and this is where we come from

 The World in a Glass

Drops of God | Cast: Fleur Geffrier, Tomohisa Yamashita | Writer: Quoc Dang Tran | French-Japanese | Apple TV+

Wine is the earth, humans and the sky, says Camille’s father to her as the rain falls in the middle of the vineyard. Shots of gorgeous glasses filled with wine, the sun in Provence, the imper­sonal greys in Tokyo, the intertwining bodies on a bed. Drops of God is the best kind of armchair travel, taking us to a world of compulsive connois­seurs and reluctant devotees. Here wine is god, proof that perfection is possible and that the combination of soil, man and the weather can create something so dazzling in the ways it can bring joy, from the libation of a long evening of conversation to the accom­paniment of a great meal. In Drops of God, a competition will decide who will inherit the 87,000-strong collection of Alexandre Léger, a world-famous wine expert and creator of the influential reference work, the Léger Wine Guide. Will it be his recal­citrant daughter, Camille (Fleur Geffrier), or his most dedicated student, Issei (Tomohisa Yamashita)? They have to pass many tests before they can claim the prize.

Why watch it? Who can resist eight episodes devoted to the pleasures of fine wine?

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