The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on December 29th, 2017. In this series, six writers will look at each of the fourth season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears.

The other essays in this series address “USS Callister,”“Black Museum,”“Metalhead,”“Arkangel,” and “Crocodile.”

Spoiler warning: This essay does not give away the ending of “Hang The DJ,” but does offer plot details not seen in the episode trailer.

Blind dating is typically associated with mystery, dread, and minimal bleak optimism, and technology complicates the process immensely. So it’s surprising it took four seasons for Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker to center an entire episode around it. In the fourth-season episode “Hang the DJ,” many of the common complaints about dating apps — there are too many options, promising matches suddenly ghost, it’s difficult to tell how serious a relationship is, the anonymity of early interactions makes users vulnerable to harassment and abuse — all disappear, because personal choice no longer exists. There’s only one option for anyone who wants love, sex, or anything in between.

In this world, dating is a highly regulated process managed by something called The System, which promises every user that they’ll eventually end up with their perfect life partner. Users interface with The System through disc-shaped devices equipped with a seemingly sentient voice assistant called Coach. The System decides a user’s matches, where they’ll go on their dates, what they eat there, and most importantly, how long each “relationship” will last. Each couple is given an “expiry date” determined in advance by The System’s algorithm; it could be anything from hours to years. This eliminates one source of dating anxiety (will it last?) and replaces it with another. (Why spend several years of your life in a relationship you know will eventually end?)

“Hang the DJ” opens with a date between Frank (Joe Cole) and Amy (Georgina Campbell), both new to The System, on a date at some nondescript restaurant. Afterward, automated golf carts shuttle them to a small home in the middle of nowhere, where they must spend the night together. Every date on The System is like this: dinner, followed by a ride to a house that looks like it’s been staged for prospective buyers. It’s the version of romance sold by The Bachelor: pre-planned food and drinks, mood lighting, and a night in the fantasy suite, where no one has to have sex, but it’s assumed they will. Frank and Amy have a good first date, with easy, witty conversation, but The System has determined their relationship will only last one night. Neither of them argue, or try to override their orders: dating only exists within The System, so there’s no point in seeing each other again without its permission.

Even if they had, the System is enforced by armed guards, so users can’t quietly back out of their customized quests for romance. Eventually, the System begins to feel just as untrustworthy as its users’ hearts: is it pairing them with the right people? Or is something better still out there?

The System’s big claim is that each date will get users closer to their “ultimate compatible other” — the perfect soulmate that always seems to be waiting in fiction, in romance novels and romantic movies. The idea is that every date will give The System more data it can use to determine that person’s perfect match, with a 99.8 percent success rate. Conceptually, it’s not unlike our current “system,” where apps collect enough data to effectively push products at users, or predict human behavior. There are already apps that collect data about your dates to determine whether you actually like them, and apps that award successful couples with “milestone gifts.” This past November, Tinder announced that it plans to release consumer-facing AI features that will “blur lines between the physical and digital world.”

Black Mirror just pushes that further by prioritizing data collection over the actual user experience. It doesn’t matter whether Frank or Amy want pasta for dinner, any more than it matters whether they want to spend years in enforced relationships with people they hate. Too bad, they’re told, suffering through bad relationships is an important part of how you find true love. That may seem cynical, but people who’ve been on long, fruitless dating-app quests, looking for someone compatible, might recognize the appeal in the idea that it all means something, that no unpleasant evening or hookup gone wrong is actually wasted, that it’s all a means to an end.

Throughout all this, there’s never any mention of who owns The System, or whose purposes it serves. The System’s omnipresence, the lack of any visible figurehead pulling the strings, and the stern enforcers all add more layers of tension to the matchmaking process. When The System disappoints “Hang the DJ”’s protagonists, they have nowhere in particular to direct their anger.

Black Mirror is most comfortable when it’s suspicious of technology, but it’s sharpest when it examines distinctly human anxieties. In “Hang the DJ,” those anxieties are related to social acceptance, loneliness, and the blank unknown of the future, the unanswerable question “How will my life ultimately turn out?” The System might pair users with the wrong person, but without The System, they might choose the wrong person anyway — and have to accept all the blame for their failure. And at least The System has done away with the universal fear of ending up alone.

“Hang The DJ” takes place in a world that looks like this one, but without any details that could give away its era or location. Its universe feels flat and neutral, which makes it look both eerie and like it could be the backdrop for a Victorian-novel romance, where characters take long walks around the lake, and generally have nothing to do but kill time. There are no outside influences, or even friends, in the world of The System. There’s no sign of class inequity or poverty or luxury. The whole world is apparently just men and women looking for their “ultimate compatible other” in a controlled environment. There are ultimately good reasons for that impression, but the way the story plays out is still striking in its narrow focus.

The main difference between this world and ours lies in the amount of influence dating apps have on individual lives. Online dating is more popular and more socially accepted now than ever before, but only around 27 percent of Americans aged 18-24 use dating apps, according to a study from Pew Research. Even those who do use them often remain open to other ways of meeting people. In the world of “Hang the DJ,” that isn’t allowed. Everything is part of the System — users even affirm their sexual consent by checking off a few boxes on their Coach devices.

Is this a remotely plausible future? It does seem possible that we could eventually give dating apps more decision-making power than they have now, especially in the name of convenience or compatibility, as a way to lower the stakes of those difficult first meetings. It’s not hard to imagine a new Tinder feature that suggests your likelihood of dating a person based on your message exchange rate, or one that suggests restaurants in your area that would be perfect for a first date, based on past data about matched users. Dating apps now require very little actual commitment from users, which can be exhausting. Why not quarantine everyone looking for marriage into one place until they find it?

Because this is Black Mirror, “Hang The DJ” does eventually shift trust away from the System. The System was meant to prevent users from making the wrong choices, from being resigned to a lifetime of disdainful sex or silent sulking. But Black Mirror is never about blindly trusting technology, it’s about examining how we use it — and then, often, rejecting it. Here, the pattern holds, and the show’s long-awaited romantic advice is pretty old-fashioned: go with your gut.

“HANG THE DJ” RATINGS

Relevance: High, especially for people who are currently dating. Turns out near-perfect dating technology can’t eliminate confusion, boredom, and anxiety.

Aesthetics: Neutral, like the platonic ideal of a relationship

Squirm Factor: This is one of the lighter Black Mirror episodes. It’s about as anxiety-inducing as a first date.

• "Black Mirror" can be dark and dystopian, so it's surprising when people are inspired to copy the ideas in real life.
• But this is what the 24-year-old programmer and entrepreneur Julian Alexander did when he developed a dating app.
• His app Juliet matches people together with an expiration date.
• It's similar to the "Black Mirror" episode "Hang the DJ" where couples have a time limit to work out their compatibility.
• Alexander said he was tired of the traditional dating apps, so decided to shake things up.

In Season 4 of Charlie Brooker's "Black Mirror," there's an episode called "Hang the DJ" where people are matched together, but their relationship is given an expiration date. The newly coupled pair can either choose to look at what their expiration is, or continue on oblivious until their digital "Coach" tells them their time is up.

It's hailed as one of the more wholesome episodes, with a relatively happy ending. One viewer liked it so much, he has seemingly created a dating app based on the matchmaking method.

Julian Alexander, a 24 year old programmer and entrepreneur, posted an AMA on Reddit a few days ago.

"For the past few months I've been building an AI matchmaker named Juliet to help you find your perfect match," he wrote in the post. "My friends and I were tired of all the dating apps currently on the market, endlessly swiping with little to no results. I decided to take matters into my own hands and shake things up."

Read more: All 19 episodes of 'Black Mirror,' ranked from worst to best

Alexander's app is named Juliet. The idea is it only matches you with one person at a time, and will learn about your interactions, likes, and dislikes. If it deems it necessary, your match will expire, and Juliet will find you someone you're more compatible with. According to Alexander, the AI takes physical aspects into account as well as personality.

Speaking about his app to Forbes, Alexander said the urgency and unpredictability of the time element means people can be more focused on actually finding a match.

"Like when you see someone you're interested in, you have to make a move or you'll lose your chance," he said. He added that he's a big fan of "Black Mirror," and finds the role of technology in modern day life extremely important.

"That's why I wanted Juliet to merge technology and humanity," he said.

Reddit users were quick to point out the similarities, asking "Did you get your idea from Black Mirror's episode Hang the DJ?"

"This sounds like a person who loved Black Mirror for all the wrong reasons," another user wrote. "See you all in the cyber-dystopia."

If Black Mirror is the Twilight Zone of our time, it’s natural to expect that the show’s portrait of app-based dating in the not-so-distant future would be fairly bleak: Something familiar but with a dystopian twist that offers a disturbing critique of the dark impulses that emerge when we swipe or click or message or whatever. (Everyone have a successful cuffing season? Good. Great. Me too.)

Warning: There are major episode spoilers ahead.

“Hang the DJ,” from Black Mirror’s fourth season (on Netflix now), introduces Spiro Date, an app that promises to lead you to your perfect match. It’s like an optimized Tinder: Instead of relying on humans to select matches, Spiro does it for them. In a calm, Alexa-like voice, Spiro analyzes users’ preferences and sets them up on blind dates. Spiro determines who meets, where they meet, what they order for dinner, and how long the relationship will last (12 hours, one year, a lifetime, etc.). We see how it works for the episode’s two protagonists, Amy (Georgina Cambell) and Frank (Joe Cole).

Honestly, it seems ideal: a technology that eliminates human error, and promises, after a series of dates, that you will find your one true match and live happily ever after. What a nice (and seemingly untrustworthy) guarantee! Naturally, Spiro quickly begins to seem both a little bit sinister — notice the guards that oversee dates? — and pretty inaccurate. Frank and Amy forge an instant connection but are only allotted 12 hours together. After they part ways, we get to see how the system continues to unfold. Amy dates a handsome guy for a few months, and then has a string of one-night stands while still thinking of Frank. (Okay, just like real life.) Frank enters into a long-term relationship with a woman who hates him and he still thinks about Amy. (How is this different?) Both of them are apparently stuck trusting a dating algorithm that mostly seems to be fucking with them. (Again, ARE WE ALREADY LIVING A BLACK MIRROR NIGHTMARE?)

Finally, though, the two are reunited and decide to rebel against the system: They run away together, Spiro be damned, and the viewer feels sure that the show is about to make good on that creeping sense of doom. What will happen to them? Will they be killed? Maimed? Turned into animals (à la The Lobster)? Will it finally get worse than real life?

Surprise! It turns out the Frank and Amy’s entire scenario was actually a simulation — a gauntlet their simulated selves were repeating a thousand times in a millisecond to determine compatibility. (If you “rebel” against the app, you belong together; if not, you don’t.) It’s not about taste in music, diet, career, shoes, or pithy taglines — just a simple test to see if your human connection can prevail over the dictates of technology.

In a “San Junipero”-ian twist (last season’s most optimistic and best episode in which love prevailed over technology and an interracial queer couple found everlasting happiness in an ’80s pop world), the Black Mirror universe offers a dating app that works better than anything we have in the real world. (Tinder, Raya, OkCupid, Bumble, Amish Match, J-Date … maybe take a lesson from Spiro Date.) The real nightmare is the fact that we don’t have Spiro Date available now.

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Charlie Brooker gets spoilery on Season 4's most romantic episode.

Major spoilers for theBlack Mirror Season 4 episode “Hang the DJ” follow below.

If you’re been working your way through Black Mirror Season 4 over the long holiday break, then you may have stumbled upon the episode “Hang the DJ”, which feels something like a close companion to Season 3’s series high-mark “San Junipero.” It’s an episode that takes on romantic relationships, but it does so on a more hopeful, optimistic note than, say, leaving you shaking in disgust/shock like some other Black Mirror episodes.

To recap, “Hang the DJ” is basically Black Mirror’s take on Tinder, as it takes place in a totalitarian-like reality in which couples are paired by The System, and are told how long their relationship will last at the outset. Our heroes are Amy (Georgina Cambell) and Frank (Joe Cole), who are paired up early in the episode, part, and can’t stop thinking about one another. In the end, even though The System tells them their time is up, they rebel and run away together, opting to scale a giant wall to see what’s on the other side.

But unlike a Logan’s Run or Maze Runner-type situation, they don’t find themselves in a new world on the other side of the wall. Instead, it’s revealed that the entire episode was taking place inside a Tinder-like app, which was running simulations to see how compatible Frank and Amy are in the real world. We see that in 1,000 simulations, only two times did the pair not rebel, thus making them a 99.8% match on this dating system.

It’s a whopper of an ending that’s in lock step with Black Mirror’s specific kind of madness, but it also provides the audience with something not super common in the world of this show: a happy ending.

Black Mirror showrunner Charlie Brooker recently spoke with EW about the “Hang the DJ” episode specifically, breaking down the happiness of the ending and what director Tim Van Patten (Game of Thrones) was able to catch on the screen:

“I think it’s a very happy moment and I think Tim did a brilliant job of directing it, and Georgina and Joe did a fantastic part playing that final scene. They know they are destined to have a very serious relationship and they’re each others’ chosen ones and I think they go through a gamut of emotions. You see them finding it exciting and taking on the weight of it, and then you see Georgina quite playfully just steps toward him at the very end. I hope the takeaway is that it’s playful and hopeful. So though there’s an algorithm that brought them together, and now they’re about to take the first step on that journey together.”

Brooker also addressed those two simulations in which Frank and Amy didn’t rebel, and explained how thoroughly they worked out what was really going on here:

“Now we do see at the end, [the app] runs it 1,000 times and two didn’t rebel. So I would think they would be matched with a random other person and their world would end. We did have a lot of torturous conversations about what’s really going on. We decided it’s a cloud-based system that’s simulating 1,000 different run-throughs of yourself and a potential partner to see how many times you’d rebel against it. And it deliberately is setting a tight framework. And if they do rebel, that means they’re destined to be together. So if you don’t rebel, the system has served its purpose and your reality ends.”

While “San Junipero” is an incredibly high bar to cross (seriously, that one’s an all-timer), I think “Hang the DJ” was a smart pseudo-sequel that takes the basic idea of a hopeful romantic episode but spins it into a very different kind of story.

For more on Black Mirror Season 4, peruse our recent links below:

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About The Author

Adam Chitwood (15942 Articles Published)

Adam Chitwood is the Managing Editor for Collider. He's been working for Collider for over a decade, and in addition to managing content also runs point on crafts interviews, awards coverage, and co-hosts The Collider Podcast with Matt Goldberg (which has been running since 2012). He's the creator and author of Collider's "How the MCU Was Made" series and has interviewed Bill Hader about every single episode of Barry. He lives in Tulsa, OK and likes pasta, 90s thrillers, and spending like 95% of his time with his dog Luna.

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