The Kitchen Sink

At one hour and thirty minutes total runtime, the long-awaited sequel to the acclaimed Season 4 episode USS Callister has finally arrived, and it, as I expected, a total waste of time, and the weakest episode of the season. 

In Into Infinity, we’re treated to another open end tale of the crew of the USS Callister, a ship existing inside the game Infinity populated by digital clones of real world people created by the now deceased Robert Daly, the co-creator of the game who passed away months ago under mysterious circumstances. 

We open on a nightmare inside the mind of Nanette, or Clonette, as I’ll call her, the clone of the real-world Nanette, who’s seeing visions of her past torture by Daly, a much needed recap of the last episode for those of us who enjoyed the original, but not enough to think it warranted a sequel. 

Turns out Clonette and her crew are fucked, as the surge in item prices has made them have to resort to robbing other players of their credits to survive, as they now exist in the public game server and need to pay for their things. However, their not having player tags makes it nearly impossible for the victims of the robberies to report them, and they’re also under the danger of being killed, as they, unlike the other players, can bleed and if they die they have no real-world to go back to. 

Speaking of real world, Nanette still holds her job at the company that created the game, and has yet to grow a backbone, but she takes to spying her boss, Walton, when a journalist comes to visit the company, and discovers he’s writing a story about the deceased Bob Daly, and has been able to identify a DNA Digital Cloner, a machine that has been banned globally due to being an infringement of human rights, as people were apparently using it to torture digital versions of real humans. The reporter is quickly kicked out of the office by a very distressed Walton, who begins to plan his flee of the country, when he’s interrupted by Nanette claiming she knows a way to find the robbers, and is granted all the access she might need. 

After watching footage uploaded by someone who was robbed, Nanette quickly figures out that the robbers are Nate and herself, and tells her boss she was at Daly’s apartment when he died, and was blackmailed do break in by a strange voice that, after decoding, turns out to be her own, allowing her to come to the conclusion that Daly made copies of them and placed them into the game, and the only way to revert that would be accessing his computer, which she believes to be gone by now, but is actually in Walton’s possession. 

Back in the game, Clonette figures out a plan to save them by building a server for themselves and locking it so only they can live inside their own universe, but as Daly is dead both IRL and in game and Walton is dead in game and would wipe them IRL, they can’t access the restricted code that would allow them to build that universe. 

Miraculously, Karl becomes useful by revealing Walton has quarters in the ship, something that should be impossible as they were assigned quarters once they passed through the wormhole into the public server, which happened after Walton fried himself to death, meaning a part of Walton would need to have been alive in the public server for him to have quarters, and that part would’ve been enough for him to respawn in a new planet, meaning if they can figure out a planet that was created at the exact moment they passed through the wormhole, they can find a version of Walter, Clowter. 

Real-life Nanette quickly realises this and finds the planet, instantly transporting herself and Walton to that planet, finding Clowton and Clonette there, with Clonette convincing Clawton and his friend Rocky (a rock with a face and a hole for lovemaking) to join them in the spaceship, and Nanette and Walton joining them. 

In the spaceship, Walton finds out the clones’ plan to access the Heart of Infinity so they can build their own server, and he shoots Karl, killing him, as he tries to eliminate all the clones, resulting in Clonette killing him and kicking him out of the game and demanding Nanette also leave to stop him from attempting to come back. 

Walton and Nanette get into an argument, she quits her job and leaves the building, being hit by a Deus Ex Machina car and left by Walton to be rescued by the driver. She ends up in a deep coma, with her brain being so damaged she’d never come back, and if she did, she wouldn’t be the same, which Clonette discovers via telephone call. 

Clowton decides to then tell Clonette why his real-world counterpart is so terrified of their accessing the Heart of Infinity, telling the story of how Infinity came to be. 

The story goes that Walton was a rich, spoiled, trust fund baby constantly looking for things to invest his money on. One day, he hears of a genius coder who’s developing a new game, and decides to ride down to meet him. He describes Bob Daly as being a huge Space Fleet nerd who didn’t understand the lucrative business he had on his hands, and he convinces Bob to turn his “immersive experience” into a real video game, needing him to work day and night to create more for the game. 

Bob can’t work fast enough, though, as he is only one person able to create the game, so Walton reaches for another one of his failed investments, a machine originally designed by the porn industry to replicate people in VR using any little bit of DNA and create a virtual fucktoy of whoever the player wanted, but as the machine was banned before launch, he was one of the only people still in possession of one, which he introduces to Daly as a way of making him work less. 

Bob and Walton then insert a copy of Bob’s consciousness, Clobert, inside the code of the game, so he’d be able to build faster and spend his entire eternity only building Infinity, for infinity, making him a very angry clone with a shit ton of power, and yet, Clonette still wishes to go down there. 

She succeeds, but as she finds Clobert’s perfect suburban hellscape, where he has been alone for over a decade, Walton sneaks back into the game, pretending to be Clowton, and invites every single player they’ve ever robbed to come into battle, instantly dipping to watch their annihilation from the safety of his office. 
Clonette tells Clobert the truth about his real-life cunterpart (a Freudian slip I will leave in), which he doesn’t believe since, as he states repeatedly, he’s a nice guy who would never hurt anyone unprovoked, emphasis on unprovoked. But he does agree to help Clonette, building her a closed-off universe server for her and her crew, then telling her she also has the option to go back to the real-world, as her human counterpart, her outie, has suffered brain death and will never be coming back. 

She’s ecstatic by that knowledge, until he reveals she has to choose one, presenting her with a Matrix parody of a blue disk, which would transport her and her friends into a private server, or a red disk, which would get her back to the real world but completely wipe out her crew as she’s tethered to the ship and if she leaves, they all die. 

Turns out this was all a bit of harmless fun, a joke played by Clob so he could enact a scene from his favourite show, Space Fleet, where a Captain is made to choose between himself and his crew as a test to his nobility, and when he chooses his crew, he learns there is a third option, which Clonette assumes to be both. 

Clobert then starts copy and pasting, as he calls it, before Clonette corrects him that it must be cut and paste, since if he clones the crew they will be illegals who must be destroyed. He states his intention isn’t to copy the crew, but to copy her, so that a version of her will remain there in the Heart of Infinity with him, and promises he would treat her well, and do no funny stuff, unless she wanted, proving he does only see women as disposable objects existing only for his pleasure. 

Clonette tries to speak some sense into him telling him she understands he might not see himself as someone capable of hurting others, but that power just doesn’t agree with him, and he’s bound to abuse it, which he immediately proves by making her nightmares come true and taking away her mouth, disarming her and throwing her against the shelves, ending up dead with an axe to the head that Clonette manages to catch, which instantly causes the world around him to collapse and Clonette to panic, searching in the demolished pile of disks which one is the correct one, angry that Clobert didn’t label his work, and shoving it into the old school computer. 

Turns out she chose the right one, and she awakens in the hospital to find out she now has full access of her real life body, but her happiness is soon diminished by the realisation that her crew has been transported to the inside of her brain and not their private server, and since the game and all the servers have been deleted, that is where they will stay until further notice. 

We end on a semi-positive note, the crew and Clonette, now Nanette, watching the news of Walton being arrested by the FBI after evading arrest for three months, and is being charged with counts of fraud, digital human rights abuse, embezzlement, failure to report, and much more; and Nanette promising she is working on a plan to get them out of her brain. 

– 

Honestly speaking, USS Callister didn’t need a sequel. It stood fine on its own as an homage to Star Trek which also explored the dangers of deep fake technology and how toxic masculinity leads men to act increasingly more violent towards women, and unsurprisingly enough, this episode delivers the exact same message, but in a different font, with the only highlight of it being the knowledge that the crew is now stuck inside of Nanette’s mind, forced to see the world through her eyes, until further notice. 

ultimately, this episode feels like its an hour and a half of writers patting themselves on the back about how good and smart they are to acknowledge women’s suffering, without much substance to back it up. there’s no real commentary being made besides the obvious statement that nice guys suck and are incredibly toxic and dangerous to women, but walton’s misogyny, racism and unprofessionalism isn’t explored at all besides the bare minimum statement that he’s kinda the worst.

Other than that little endnote, the series also brings some sweet easter eggs in the form of news channel USN’s story headlines, which appear at the bottom of Nanette’s screen and reveal the reboot of Hotel Reverie has just been released on Streamberry; a famous talisman has been found in a plane wreckage; Thronglets 2 has launched to critical acclaim; and the CEO of Rivermind has stepped down.

Another sweet easter egg for myself and the three other people who genuinely enjoyed Demon79 is the return of the actors who played Nida and Gaap, now playing Infinity players who come to attack the USS Callister, speaking to how gaap told nida that once he fails his assignment he will be thrown into the vast void of the universe to be alone forever, with Nida even sporting a cute little pair of fake horns. However, an episode has to be incessantly boring for me to genuinely give a fuck about easter eggs, and as much as Into Infinity is adorned from head to toe with cool visuals and references to the scifi classics of yore, it ultimately brings nothing new to both the universe of Black Mirror and the expanded universe of USS Callister, making it a skip and the weakest one of the season, more in terms of being unnecessary and trying way too hard to justify its own existence, than anything else, since it is written well enough that it doesn’t hurt to watch it simply serves no purpose.

I’d like to have seen quite literally any other story further developed, if any other at all, but that might just be due to my lack of deep connection to USS Callister, and the fact I wasn’t aware many people felt that strongly towards it, so, yeah, USS Callister Into Infinity is, unfortunately, the only weak link of this season.