Black Mirror season 4 'USS Callister' review: A love letter to what ster Trek is really about 

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Warning: this review contains spoilers for \'USS Callister\'. Turn back now if you haven\'t seen it yet.

fans have always had an image of being liberal, progressive and proudly anti-bigoted. After all, wasn\'t that the utopian vision of Gene Roddenberry\'s trailblazing sci-fi series, that all genders, race and species would one day work together, free of exploitation and cruelty?

Yet it only took the casting of a black female lead in the latest

to root out those fans who seemed to have missed its message of altruism and social equality. And so it is with Robert Daly. "What is Space Fleet?" he soliloquises in this

. "It is a belief system, founded on the very best of human nature – it is a goal for us to strive towards for the betterment of the universe!"

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But of course, there\'s no \'betterment of the universe\' in Daly\'s pocket reality, just a waking nightmare for all those who have crossed him, slighted him or simply delivered him the wrong coffee. He\'s less Captain Kirk and more one of those petulant but omnipotent man-children the original

, its fictional substitute here), then Charlie Brooker certainly does. This is as much a love letter to Roddenberry\'s 1960s show as it is a top-tier episode of

. The opening sequence is likely to send a pleasurable shiver through every veteran Trekker, with its on-target pastiche, even down to the over-dramatic musical cues and 4:3 picture frame.

, Brooker delights in wrongfooting us. At first, it looks like Daly is the victim here: a meek, socially awkward coding whizz who\'s treated more like the new office boy than the joint CEO of the company. But, actually, there are no real bastards in Callister Inc, and if his old mate and fellow director James Walton is dismissive of his contributions, it\'s because, well, Daly\'s dragging his feet.

colleagues/prisoners kowtow to him and then cower when he blows a fuse is agonising to watch. They may only be digital copies, but Brooker makes us care more about them than their flesh-and-blood counterparts in the real world.

But despite the grave stakes here, \'USS Callister\' is full of LOL-worthy lines. You can imagine Brooker rolling back in his chair and guffawing over the genius of Nanette\'s "Stealing my pussy is a red f**king line!", while that sign-off of "Stick us in hyper-warp and let\'s f**k off somewhere" is a gloriously irreverent riff on

cliché. And it\'s difficult not to smile at a meta-overload line of Daly\'s when he tells Nanette where she can watch

Jesse Plemons (who started his career as a kind of Matt Damon ringer, but is now metamorphosing into Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives a nicely nuanced performance as the meek Daly of the outside world and the tyrannical bully of the virtual one.

But the episode really belongs to Cristin Milioti (Nanette) and to

\'s Jimmi Simpson, who\'s both hilarious and tragic as the perpetually humiliated Ensign Walton. A high-five too to Milanka Brooks as the blue-skinned Elena who brings a weary dryness to lines like, "I miss taking shit."

\'s artsiness, the truth is that it\'s always able to reinvent itself from episode to episode, and \'USS Callister\' is the series at its most unblushingly Hollywood. That unbearably tense race to get to the wormhole in time is pure big-screen

, even down to having Walton racing down corridors and sacrificing himself, à la Spock in

Even the bit where Nanette sneaks into Daly\'s apartment, while he\'s at the front door haggling over a pizza, plays out like a well-tooled Hollywood thriller. \'Infinity\' may be a \'a bottle universe\', but this episode is Brooker thinking bigger than ever.

We even get a happy ending. With their real-life counterparts blissfully unaware of any of this, these digital clones get their freedom, even if that means occasionally dealing with war-hungry gamers (a neat little voice cameo there from Plemons\' old

hasn\'t, so far, done the sequel thing, but, somewhere down the line, it\'d be interesting to pick up the story of the USS Callister and its crew. The universe is theirs now.

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