The Kitchen Sink

What if you could change everything? 

In the second episode of the new season of Black Mirror, we are introduced to Maria, a food researcher at a company named Ditta, who seems to have a wonderfully ordinary life: she has a partner, a job she loves, and seems to hit it off pretty well with her coworkers. 

During a focus group, which Maria watches from behind a two-way mirror, a familiar face from her high school years, Verity, shows up slightly late but convinces everyone that the miso jam candy bar Maria has developed does actually taste wonderful. They then meet casually in the bathroom moments later, and Verity tells Maria she’s planning on applying for a position at Ditta, which Maria wasn’t even aware was open.  

At home, Maria talks to her boyfriend about how odd Verity was in school. She was shy and reserved, and spent her entire free time at the computer lab, making up computers she’d like to build one day. Maria’s boyfriend replies she seems cool, but Maria then tells him there was a nasty rumour about Verity going around, which said she masturbated their teacher, Mr Kendrick, in the lab, but that Maria herself never believed it to be true, even if Verity made herself easy pickings due to her odd personality, which, mixed with the rumour, earned her the nickname milkmaid. 

Back at work, we are treated to yet another background discussion as one of Maria’s coworkers, Julia, keeps having to buy more almond milk because someone constantly drinks it all, and she’s the only vegan in the office so that’s the only milk she can have, but Maria seems more interested in Verity’s interview with Gabe, the boss, where we learn Verity has a degree on molecular biochemistry from Cambridge, and studied catering at Oxford Brookes; also, she scuba dives since the age of 12, which doesn’t seem true even to someone like me who doesn’t know anything about scuba diving, but apparently the minimum age for diving is 10 years old, which is insane. 

Unsurprisingly, Verity gets the job, and as more and more oddities start happening around her, Maria knows Verity must be doing something, or many things, to make Maria sound insane and cause her coworkers to doubt her. 

Finally, near the end of the episode, Maria’s fired after Verity accuses her, and somehow manages to doctor security cam footage, to show that Maria is actually the one who’s been drinking Julia’s almond milk, a strange accusation since Maria has a nut allergy – which is a thing that doesn’t exist, apparently. 

Fed up, Maria connects the dots and realises Verity’s necklace, which she holds onto like a fidget toy every time she’s under stress, must be the tool Verity is using to change the course of events, and she breaks into Verity’s home, finding a strange painting of her as a goddess, as well as pictures of her as the cover of Vogue Magazine, posing next to Harry Styles and in an astronaut spacesuit. 

Verity then reveals it all, the necklace is not the actual agent that changes their timelines, but is connected to a quantum computer, built by Verity, that uses its frequencies to change their reality to one of many parallel realities that exist, and as there are infinite realities and timelines, Verity simply chooses the one where Maria is the only one that knows what’s truly going on, driving her to insanity. 

A fight breaks out, and Verity tells the computer that there are cops outside, called by Maria’s boyfriend after she left their house in disarray with a knife and said she was gonna break into Verity’s home; but before the cops can get her, Maria steals a gun and shoots Verity in the face, and after a shootout, manages to get to the pendant and use Verity’s still warm fingerprints to transfer control of the quantum computer to herself, and immediately skip into a timeline where she is the Empress of the Universe. 

– 

I will say, unfortunately this episode didn’t hit as hard for me, although I do love the classic elements of sci-fi like messing with timelines and one sole human being being capable of building a quantum computer, but as the episode started to cool down in my mind, and after a rewatch, I began to appreciate it more. 

The main reason for my new appreciation of the episode is the realisation that Verity didn’t use her necklace to turn Maria’s coworkers against her until the very end, when she doctored the footage to make it look like Maria drank the milk. For the remainder of the episode, Verity actually uses their coworkers racial bias to turn herself into the soft victim and Maria into the savage aggressor, and everything in the episode is actually built around the knowledge that, due to Verity’s position as a white woman, she’s a much more believable victim than Maria, which we come to revisit as Maria admits to have started the rumour about Verity to get their now-deceased schoolmate and former friend of Maria’s, Natalie, off her back; and although Maria was popular, it’s apparent from their school pictures that Natalie, the blonde blue-eyed girl, was the ringleader.

Verity’s presentation at the office also plays into that notion, she wears a lot of soft fabrics in light colours, like pink, white and yellow, a stark contrast to Maria’s darker coloured denim outfits. But the most obvious show of the way Verity uses her whiteness in contrast to Maria’s blackness is when she truly makes Maria question her reality mid-episode, when the two of them are at their boss’ office to discuss what an alleged email said and Maria, explaining her side of the story in a matter-of-fact way that, albeit dry, is also straight to the point, calm and collected – something she’s surely had to practice and do a lot in her life as a black woman and seemingly one of two in her office; but Verity turns things around by crying, nervously fidgeting with her necklace and asking Maria to stop shouting, to which their boss agrees she is and is also out of line, and that actually makes her angry. 

At the end, their entire office jumps at the opportunity to care for and defend a person they met less than a week ago over a coworker that’s been with them for three years and has never given them reason to question her moral code, even if some, like nick, believe Maria to be too “strong headed” and “opinionated” – two very open microaggressions.  

This episode, albeit weak compared to others from the Black Mirror franchise, resonated with me as both a woman of colour and a victim of relentless harassment and bullying, both physical and verbal, all throughout high school and even at work. I can truly understand where Verity is coming from, as I too have fantasised about making those who have wronged me to the point of intensive therapy and C-PTSD pay for what they’ve done, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought of things much worse than simply driving them insane. But as a black woman, I can also sympathise with Maria, I can see how wonderful of a professional she is, how she truly understands and loves her field and I know just how exhausting it can be to be a black woman in any industry, and having to constantly tune yourself down and make yourself smaller as to not be seen as deserving of harassment, while also having to work 3x harder than others to prove you do actually deserve to be there. 

As for the title, Bête Noire is an expression meaning “someone one truly dislikes”, which could be seen from the perspective of both protagonists, Verity as she’s spent her entire life hating those who’ve wronged her, but has also been at the receiving end of hatred in school; and Maria since her arc is dependant on both hating Verity and being hated by others. However, since this expression is of French origin, and they’re not exactly known for being kind and welcoming to foreigners, there’s a layer of racial prejudice embedded even in the title. 

And finally, the undertones of racial prejudice and racial purity come full circle with the episodes’ obsession with milk – both because almond is the type of milk a liberal sort of crowd would be attracted to, bringing to attention how their office pretends to be politically correct on the surface but still are very quick to turn their backs on a black woman they’ve worked with for years; and with its association, both in real-life through extremist right-wing groups, and in the universe of Black Mirror through their character Robert Daly in USS Callister, who drinks milk while gaming and is portrayed as an overall bigot who subjugates women and poc to roles of servitude. 

fin 🙂