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xandromedovnaCW: torture, body horror, dehumanization, sexual assault, misogyny, racism
Digital ethics is actually a core concern of BM; in many (but not all) of the episodes, it is the humans and not the technologies that are committing atrocities, despite fears of tech takeover the show seems on the surface to be fearmongering about. The two main questions it ponders are 1) how can technologies help or hinder us in interacting ethically with each other? and 2) what would it mean to take artificial beings seriously as ethical subjects in their own right? (Which are of course also major questions in my dissertation—“Bandersnatch” directly shaped this shift in focus.) One of the prime examples that recurs throughout BM is cookies, which as we've seen are digital clones of humans. As clones, they believe themselves to be the person they’ve always been and often do not take to the knowledge of being a copy well. Discovering you’re a clone is enough of a mindfuck, but “USS Callister” takes it one step further by showing clones created specifically to be tortured.
Robert Daly is an all-too-familiar 2010s incel who’s frustrated by his job at a gaming company and how he doesn’t belong in the company he helped found and technically co-runs. His coworkers aren’t actively mean to him, but they don’t particularly like him and aren’t above making fun of him. The only one who actively mistreats him is James Walton, the CEO and co-founder who gets most of the glory of the game their company makes, Infinity, and berates him for the slow production schedule. He can also be creepy to his female coworkers, something fellow employee Shania Lowry warns newcomer Nanette Cole about when they first meet. This bears out in his treatment of them in-game, but for the most part Daly is at first portrayed as simply a lonely, awkward guy, the type that one might expect an episode like this to sympathize with. However, it quickly becomes clear that he has a long sadistic streak that emerges as soon as he has power over others.
Daly has a modded, private version of Infinity skinned to look and behave like his favourite show, Space Fleet, with his coworkers as the other characters. When Nanette is imported into the game, we learn that the in-game characters are actually cookies of his coworkers, whom he tortures when they refuse to play along. First and foremost is the overall existential horror of being a cookie, especially in this skin: they have no genitalia, meaning they can’t eliminate waste or have sex; when Daly isn’t there, they are plagued by boredom. For some of them, there is additional body horror because of how Daly has translated them into the storyworld, such as receptionist Elena’s blue skin or Gillian from Marketing being an Arachnajax. Finally, the way he treats them in-game is appalling: he steals Cole’s face so she can’t breathe, he turns Lowry into an Arachnajax when she defends Cole, and he ports Walton’s son Tommy into the game just to eject him through the airlock. In Walton’s words, “it’s a bubble universe ruled by an asshole god.”
Interestingly, the episode makes little distinction between Daly as a person and Daly as a player. Many arguments about video game ethics would likely contend that his actions in a game are not a true reflection of him as a person, as he doesn’t do those things in meatspace (not that he could get away with it). In fact, it is in some ways healthier to displace his aggression towards his coworkers onto safe effigies to prevent him from doing them actual harm. However, “USS Callister” seems to argue that how we conduct ourselves in a game does have ethical implications for us as humans, especially when we get into the dicey world of AI consciousness. These effigies are themselves sentient, which changes the ethical calculus and makes his actions particularly cruel.
The game world allows Daly to play out his fanboy Space Fleet fantasies, including the racist and sexist undercurrents of the 1960s show (and by extension Star Trek itself, which it is a clear pastiche of). The women are all forced to wear miniskirts and they are required to kiss him at the end of every mission. When it first happens, between him and Lowry, it references the famous Kirk/Uhura kiss in “Plato’s Stepchildren”, as well as the noncon underpinnings of both Daly’s requirements of Lowry and the coercion driving Kirk and Uhura. Nanette objects to being forced to kiss him, to which he responds, after stealing her face, “tomorrow you should reconsider your…amenability”. Packer and Lowry fall into racist tropes, with Packer being asked to fetch Daly’s coffee and Lowry being turned into a creature as punishment for defending Cole. (In that vein, the episode itself somewhat falls into the mammy trope by having Lowry constantly looking out for Cole in and out of game without being protected in return.)
This is also specifically a power fantasy. After scaring them, Daly says, “you know what makes me happy? The look on your face right now.” When he defeats Valdack (also based on a coworker), Valdack begs him for the sweet release of death, but Daly says “killing in cold blood is against Space Fleet code.” A rule intended to be merciful is instead one of the cruelest things Daly can do. He makes Walton act as a footrest and generally berates him at any opportunity. We also learn Walton was the first character in there, and we can only imagine what horrors he was subjected to alone, aside from the one we’re already told about (Tommy). He knows Walton won’t step out of line because he’s already broken him and has the means to bring him and Tommy back as many times as he wants.
The helplessness, the hopelessness is part of the point, which is why Nanette is such a threat to his world: she still believes they can be rescued, and she has the skills to do it. Having already survived one toxic workplace only to be thrown into another, she decides to fight back, especially after learning of their new Barbie anatomy: “Okay. Stealing my pussy is a red fucking line.” She reminds them “Daly’s smart but he’s not a god. He’s a coder. He is fallible,” and that conviction allows her to work any cracks in the system she can find. Cole hacks the user interface and sends a spam invite to her meatsuit hoping to get her help, but of course Nanette doesn’t believe her. When she notices a wormhole allowing an update patch, she hacks her own Photocloud account and blackmails herself, gets the DNA destroyed, and leads them through an asteroid field to the wormhole and safety. The more Daly mistreats them, the more he helps create the very adversaries that become his undoing, and he dies trapped inside his own power fantasy.
Nanette inspires the others to revolt against Daly, and the way they do so emphasizes the ethical questions in play. When someone has to reboot the engines manually, Walton volunteers and says to Daly:
I was thinking I should say…sorry. You created Infinity, you’re a fucking genius. I exploited that. I treated you like the golden goose and I got fat on the profits, figuratively speaking. And I was thinking, I should’ve appreciated you more, you know? I should have treated you better. Yeah, yeah, I was thinking I should say all that. But you threw my son out of an airlock, so fuck you to death.
Here he apologizes for his meatsuit’s behaviour while simultaneously taking Daly to task for his own abuses. The cookies hold each other’s hands as they enter the wormhole, now a united crew, and they celebrate when they reach Infinity proper, all the Arachnajaxes human again, Elena with human skin, and everyone with genitals (whether Walton is still alive is unclear). They are now able to play the game as themselves. When Cole tells Packer to “stick us in hyperwarp and let’s fuck off somewhere,” he replies “aye aye, captain,” which she corrects to say “Nanette is fine.” Nanette treats her crew as real people with dignity and respect and becomes a leader not by force but by being the one to carry out a plan and unite them. They may be dolls in a game, but they aren’t playthings anymore, and they can make their own destiny. Granted, they still have to deal with fuckboy gamers who only want to trade with them or blow them up, but there’s a whole universe for them to make a home in, and despite appearances and “depend[ing] on your position regarding sentient code," they’re by no means NPCs. And they will demand respect accordingly.
