All of the soldiers lie on their backs, like corpses in a row, tucked neatly into their blanket, completely still save for their fingers, which are moving rapidly in accordance with their dream. When he wakes up in a cold sweat, he sits up in his bunk and looks across the room. The night after the checkup, Stripe’s implant apparently isn’t fixed, and it gets glitchy, multiplying his visions of the woman (who is no longer somewhat chastely clad in lingerie but stark naked). But it looks like the implants, not the soldiers’ brains, are generating the dreams.
The “real good sleep” the psychiatrist promises Stripe is an amped-up version of his usual dream, which features a beautiful young woman we’ve assumed, to this point, is his girlfriend or wife. “A real good sleep.” Michael Kelly as a military psychiatrist in “Men Against Fire.” Laurie Sparham/Netflix “Let’s get you a good sleep tonight,” the psychiatrist says, typing into his computer. The headache can pretty much be ignored, but it interferes with his PT and he’s sent to the sick bay for a checkup, where the psychiatrist declares that Stripe’s “implants pass every diagnostic.” It becomes more pronounced as time goes on. That high-pitched scream keeps returning, giving Stripe a headache. Their faces are flattened and insect-like and their teeth razor sharp he shoots them and stabs one repeatedly even after he’s dead.īut then Stripe picks up an object the roach had been waving at him, a small wand that emits a bright green light, and when he looks into it, he hears a high-pitched scream. Eventually, Stripe finds the roaches upstairs, huddled and in hiding. As Stripe’s commanding officer sits downstairs with the man, by turns mocking his beliefs and trying to convince him that the only humane thing to do is wipe out the roaches, the soldiers canvass the house. The soldiers board a truck headed for the home of the local oddball, known to be deeply religious and, probably, harboring roaches in his home. The villagers plead with the soldiers to protect them, and the soldiers promise to help. Stripe and his fellow soldiers are sent to a shantytown in the midst of a forest, where the villagers’ food supply has been pilfered and contaminated by these roaches. In “Men Against Fire,” we’re at first led to believe that the bug of this episode is some kind of virus that turns people into zombie-like beings called roaches.
But interestingly, “Men Against Fire” - while it lacks some of the tension and terror of other episodes - ends in a profoundly chilling place that has nothing to do with our future and everything to do with our past. Black Mirror presumes that we will eventually - and voluntarily - “upgrade” ourselves out of being human.īlack Mirror is the bleakest possible picture of a post-human world. According to the show, if the technocrats have their way, humans’ faulty wiring - bugs, if you will - will be systematically replaced with fixes that aren’t really fixes at all, but ways to strip us of our humanity. Like most Black Mirror episodes, “Men Against Fire” is set in a near future where the promise and optimism of 20th- and 21st-century technologies have been gamed out to their frightening but queasily logical conclusions. The Army, Marshall argued, should increase its effectiveness and invest its resources in training its infantry to shoot to kill.Įmpathy is a mark of humanity, the psychiatrist tells Stripe, and “that’s a good thing - until your future depends on wiping out the enemy.” The book, based on interviews Marshall conducted with soldiers immediately after combat, claims that during WWII, only one in four US soldiers in combat actually fired at their enemy with the intention of killing them - despite their training. Given the title of the episode, it’s clear he’s repeating the argument of a book called Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command, published in 1947 and written by World War I vet and World War II combat historian S.L.A. Instead, they fire above the heads of their enemies.
Late in “Men Against Fire,” a military psychiatrist ( Michael Kelly, who plays Doug Stamper in House of Cards) tells young soldier Stripe ( Malachi Kirby) that most soldiers don’t actually shoot to kill. ” There are spoilers and discussion regarding the episode’s plot. This article is a recap of Netflix’s Black Mirror episode “ Men Against Fire.