In Black Mirror’s season 5 episode “Smithereens,” Andrew Scott plays a man who takes a social media company’s intern hostage and threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t get connected on the phone to the company’s CEO. It’s a tense ride that slowly untangles the mystery of who the man is and what pushed him to this extreme action - but the ending deliberately leaves one big question unanswered.
Unlike other Black Mirror episodes, “Smithereens” doesn’t have a sci-fi premise. However, in keeping with the show’s general theme, it does explore the damaging effect that modern technology and the prevalence of social media can have on people’s lives. It begins with a man who will we later learn is called Chris Gilheany (Scott) waiting near the building of a company called Smithereen to accept ride share requests from people leaving the building. Eventually he picks up a young man called Jaden (Damson Idris) and kidnaps him, believing him to be a high-level employee because of his suit. Unfortunately for Chris, Jaden is just an intern and the kidnapping goes awry when the police give chase, resulting in Chris’ car careening into a field and getting stuck.
Chris reveals that he has a gun and makes just one demand: he wants to talk to Smithereen CEO Billy Bauer (Topher Grace) on the phone. As the police forces stack up around the field, the hostage situation becomes an international incident with both the FBI and the Smithereen team in the USA working to save Jaden’s life (for legal and publicity reasons more than anything else). Eventually Billy Bauer is tracked down at his silent retreat, and against the advice of everyone at Smithereen agrees to speak to Chris on the phone. Having gotten his wish, Chris reveals why he wanted to speak to Billy so badly.
What Happens at the End of Smithereens
The hostage situation comes to a head when Chris tells Jaden that the gun he’s using to hold him hostage isn’t real. Since Smithereen is using the call to listen in to the car, the information gets passed along to the UK police, and an onlooker overhears them saying the gun isn’t real. The police start to approach the car to arrest Chris, but he sees the posts on social media calling the gun fake and realizes that Smithereen are spying on him. He fires the gun out of the car window, and in response the police snipers shoot at him, hitting him in the arm. An angered Chris tells Smithereen he will kill Jaden if Billy doesn’t get on the phone within five minutes. Billy decides to speak with him and, when Smithereen refuse to give him Chris’ number, invokes “god mode” to access Chris’ Smithereen account and get his number from there.
With Billy finally on the phone, Chris explains that he used to be completely addicted to Smithereen - that it was the first thing he looked at in the morning, and the last thing he looked at before going to sleep. One night, while driving home with his wife, Tamsin, he got a notification that someone had liked a comment he’d left on their photo, and he looked down at his phone to read the notification. During the moment he was distracted, the car crashed into another car and Tamsin was fatally injured. The other driver, who also died, was blamed for the accident because he was drunk.
Chris explains that he was eaten alive by the secret that the car accident was his fault, and that he couldn’t tell anyone because he was so ashamed. He felt that the only person he could possibly tell the truth to was Billy Bauer because, as the CEO of Smithereen and someone who knowingly made the app so addictive, Billy was partly to blame for Tamsin’s death as well. Searching for something to say, Billy rants that Smithereen has gotten out of his control and become like a “crack pipe,” with a special department that has “dopamine targets” to make it as addictive as possible. Having said his piece, however, Chris is no longer interested in Billy giving an apology or trying to atone. He only asks that Billy use his connections to help a grieving mother with whom Chris had a one night stand, by giving her access to her late daughter’s social media account.
Chris tells Jaden he’s free to go and prepares to commit suicide with the gun, but Jaden refuses to get out of the car knowing that as soon as he leaves, Chris will kill himself. He tries to persuade Chris that he still has a reason to live and, when that fails, grabs the gun and starts a struggle for control of it. Seeing the struggle, the police sniper takes a shot at Chris and misses. They take a second shot, this one ending the hostage situation, but we don’t get to see who was shot - only the various characters’ reactions to it.
Did Chris or Jaden Get Shot?
From the way they were struggling with the gun, either Chris, Jaden, or both could have been shot by the police sniper in the confusion. The responses from major characters are difficult to read, and could be interpreted as either sad or relieved, while members of the general public barely seem to react at all. The most likely scenario is that Chris was shot and killed by the sniper, and that certainly fits with the most neutral reactions to the outcome. However, a more nihilistic reading of the ending is that Jaden was killed in the crossfire as well and that his death simply didn’t have much of an impact.
The Real Meaning of Smithereens’ Ending
While it’s easy to dismiss Black Mirror as a show that simply states over and over again that technology is bad, the stories are rarely so simple, and are more about how technology evolves something that already existed before that technology came along. For example, the critically-acclaimed episode “Nosedive” was about people’s hunger for approval from their peers, and the shocking season 1 episode “The National Anthem” was about the mob mentality of wanting to see a public figure humiliated - something that has been around since the days of putting criminals in stocks.
If “Striking Vipers” was about the interaction between technology and sex, then “Smithereens” is about the interaction between technology and addiction. Chris acknowledges that he was responsible for the car accident, but also argues that the people who deliberately made Smithereen so addictive are to blame as well. It’s a question of personal responsibility vs. companies deliberately preying on human weaknesses in order to make money, and can also be applied to alcohol, tobacco and gambling addictions. Chris’ car accident is a confluence of this issue, because the Chris was checking his Smithereen notifications and the other driver was drunk. Assuming that the other driver was an alcoholic, who was to blame for him being drunk behind the wheel: him, or the company that produced the alcohol he drank?
The secondary plot about Hayley obsessively trying to figure out her daughter’s Persona password shows another side to the addiction that Chris experienced. Whereas Chris became dependent upon Smithereen in order to feel connected to other people, Hayley is desperately trying to gain access to Kristin’s messages because she thinks it will allow her to get to know her daughter, and make sense of her death. Thanks to Chris she ultimately gets her wish, but we never find out what the messages say or whether they offer any clue to the reasons behind the suicide. And even if they do, they still won’t give her what she really wants: to have her daughter back.
The outcome of the hostage situation is deliberately withheld at the end of “Smithereens” to drive home the message that, to the people experiencing the situation via their phones, the outcome really doesn’t matter. The notification that they get updating them on the news is just another small hit of dopamine to their brains, and they soon move on from it. As show creator Charlie Brooker outlined to EW:
Significantly, the montage of reactions includes a driver checking his phone as a woman with a pram walks in front of his car, and then the driver behind him honking to make him move. That incident doesn’t end with someone being killed, but it makes it clear that Chris won’t be the last person who have his life ruined by a notification. After all, the final shot of the episode is Billy once again closing his eyes - literally and figuratively - to the damage his company is doing.
“Really it was about how this massive drama — this most important day in several people’s lives — was reduced to ephemeral confetti that just passes us by; just one more little crouton of a notification. So it was about the disposability of it and how it becomes just another distraction for a myriad of other people.”
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