“Shut Up and Dance” seemed to share the same sense of nihilism, implicating the audience in the final reveal (spoiler very much ahead) that Kenny hadn’t just been watching regular porn on the internet while he was masturbating—he’d been looking at pictures of children. “How young were they?” asks the man in the woods whom he was ordered to “FIGHT TO THE DEATH.” “How young? Yeah. Me too.” After Kenny somehow emerges from the woods, bloodied and shuffling, he gets a phone call from his horrified mother, who’s apparently seen the video Kenny’s been working all day to keep private, along with everyone else he knows. “Kids!,” she cries. “You’ve been looking at kids.”

The reveal throws everything else in the episode into confusion, from the scene in the beginning of the episode where Kenny is nice to a little girl in the restaurant to the sympathy we’ve been encouraged to feel for Kenny throughout his ordeal. Alex Lawther, best-known for playing the young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, makes Kenny a totally endearing character through his shyness, his breakdown in the face of what’s happening to him, and his vulnerability, so the question for viewers at the end is, can we still sympathize with him? Should we?

In addition to “White Bear,” this episode reminded me of “Paedogeddon,” an episode of the satirical British fake news show Brass Eye, which you wrote about, David, and which Charlie Brooker co-wrote. “Paedogeddon” lampooned the kind of moral panic and mob fury that’s unleashed whenever the subject of child abuse is up for debate. Brooker seems to be offering up more of the same in “Shut Up and Dance”: a condemnation of those who refuse to empathize with people who have terrible impulses, or who’ve done terrible things.

“Shrive,” the name of the anti-malware program Kenny downloads, is an archaic term that means to either confess your sins to a priest or to be absolved of them. In that sense, the gauntlet Kenny, Hector, and others are forced to run throughout the episode seems to be a kind of punishment for their sins, but at the end, none of them are forgiven. The invisible torturers text them all a troll face and then leak all the blackmail material anyway. The woman from the beginning of the episode is outed for racist comments she made. Hector’s attempts to solicit prostitutes are sent to his wife. In the most punitive and grisly sentence, Kenny and the other viewer of child porn are forced to fight until one of them dies, and then Kenny’s video is released to all his contacts, and he’s arrested for everything he’s done: the pictures, robbing a bank, killing a man. And the overarching mystery of the episode—the question of who exactly is running this horrible show—is as unclear as it ever was.

I didn’t take anything away from this episode other than a sense of doom, and an urge to cover up every camera I own. Brooker’s already made the point that moral panic is a bad thing, and to relish in the degradation of criminals makes us as bad as them. So what was the point of this episode? To understand that good people can have awful urges? To be very afraid of downloading anything? To realize how awful it would be if everyone’s private internet activity was made public? To be horribly depressed? David, what did you make of it? You might have to tell me by letter because I’m fighting the urge to go offline forever.

Read David Sims’s review of the next episode, “San Junipero.”

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