Charlie Brooker on “USS Callister” and the horrors of the workplace in Black Mirror (2024)

This eventually evolved into the final concept of “USS Callister” via the famous Twilight Zone episode in which an evil six-year-old goes God Mode on his hometown, using his incredible psychic powers to terrify the locals into submission. (You might be more familiar with the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror parody where Bart torments Springfield and turns Homer into a jack-in-the-box.) “Maybe I just watched the Twilight Zone episode that was on… And that became the catalyst for me [initially] thinking, What if you had someone who was low-down in the pecking order, becomes the captain of the ship… And then they get drunk with power. You’re stuck with this revenge fantasy,” Brooker says.

The great trick that “USS Callister” plays on the audience is fooling us into initially thinking that Daly is the office's downtrodden tech nerd, even if his enacted in-game fantasy is a little leery and weird. “You see him ostracised, and you feel like he’s an underdog, and you feel sorry for him, and then we do a switcheroo,” Brooker says. In service of this are the office archetypes who populate the workplace around Daly. He’s the loner than no-one likes; Coel’s Shania is the work-shy gossip; Simpson’s Walton is the rockstar CEO; there’s the bored receptionist, the eager intern, and so on. “I think the archetypes in the office slightly, probably came about through thinking about, Who would he put in there? Some of the women who have rebuffed his advances,” Brooker says. “You’ve got Walton, who is quite oily, and we show has exploited him… And then you’ve got Nate, who is the intern, and is in there for getting Daly’s sandwich order wrong. So it’s also strange, petty grievances.”

Brooker doesn’t recall being inspired by a specific workplace story — or, indeed, any personal experience — so much as the arduous working conditions that are sometimes reported out of major corporations, not least in the tech industry. “You just hear about bad situations. Because it’s a sort of power fantasy that’s being carried out in the story, it provided an opportunity to flip the dynamic that was going on in the office,” Brooker says, “where Daly feels powerless and ostracised and feels like an outsider, but they’re all working with him as soon as you get inside [the game].” As to whether Daly is actually doing anything immoral or unethical by torturing his digitalised co-workers — you could argue, as some have, that he’s just torturing lines of code— Brooker is unequivocal. “I can see why you’d argue that in a detached sense from the Wikipedia synopsis, but within the episode itself we make it pretty clear that we feel in the story that these people are real,” he says. “They certainly feel that they are real people, and if they feel that they are real people, who’s to say they’re not?”

For Brooker, the workplace “makes perfect sense as a setting for a drama because we’ve all worked in one”, and it’s one of the rare situations in which lots of would-be strangers are forced into the same place. “It’s great for a writer, because why are all these disparate characters forced together? Because they fucking work together in the same building,” Brooker says. “USS Callister” might be the most overt example in the Black Mirror catalogue concerning work, but it hardly sits on its own. Take last season’s “Beyond the Sea”, in which Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett play retrofuturistic ‘60s astronauts who pilot spacefaring clones from machines located safely on terra firma, which Brooker calls “the ultimate Zoom, working from home episode”. There’s the aforementioned “15 Million Merits”. In “Demon 79”, the protagonist works in a retail store, where she has to endure racist jibes from her co-workers. “That was a character demoralised by what we would now call micro-aggressions, or actually, I would say overt aggressions, overt racism,” Brooker says.

Other episodes were conceptualised as reflections on the workplace, but became something else entirely. An early idea for the episode “Nosedive”, where Bryce Dallas Howard plays a well-to-do woman living in a world with real-life social ratings akin to Twitter likes, saw her “going to a corporate event, where she was going to be representing her company, and the reputation management thing [becomes] a problem,” Brooker says. In the final version, the event for which she curates her reputation is a high-stakes wedding. “Actually,” he continues, “we’ve done workplaces more often than I think!”