SPOILERS -- Black Mirror Season 5 EP 2 -- SPOILERS

In case it wasn't evident in the title, this entry is going to have complete spoilers so if you haven't seen the episode, and I sincerely think that you should, get out of here now.

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Episode 2 of season 5 is entitled "Smithereens" and has a lot more to do with the already existing society that we have rather than introducing technology that doesn't exist yet - which is common in other Black Mirror episodes, including the episode that came directly before this one.

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At the start we are introduced to Chris, who is an Uber driver (it isn't called Uber in the show, for obvious reasons) who sits at the same location for his fares every day - we are not really told why that is. Chris has extreme frustration with the way in which everyone in society is constantly staring at their phones - and this is not a terribly uncommon gripe that many "older" people have today.

Once he finally gets a passenger who actually works for this company "Smithereens" he seems to have accomplished something along the lines of what his true objective was, and he kidnaps this person at gunpoint. We still are not told Chris' motive because he does not know the passenger that he has kidnapped, nor does he have anything against him personally.

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Chris ends up accidentally attracting the attention of the police and since he does actually have a prisoner and a gun a kidnapping becomes a hostage situation and this is where the story seems quite typical and also where Black Mirror takes us down a path that we didn't expect to see.

Chris' one demand is to speak to someone named Billy Bauer. We (the audience) are not told who Billy is nor does he even appear for 45 minutes of the episode. Turns out that Billy is the creator of Smithereens which is a social media company that is similar to something like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. Chris wants to speak to Billy because his fiance died in a car crash years ago because while Chris was driving his car at night, he used his phone to look at Smithereens' app and although the accident was blamed on a drunk driver, it was actually Chris' fault and the guilt has been eating him up for years.

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this is Billy, and as soon as i saw his face I said to myself... "Is that Topher Grace?" and it turns out that it is

The story about social media being addictive and what not is not a novel idea, we all know that it is, but in my mind anyway the real story here is that during the standoff with the police, the staff at Smithereens are actually able to gather information and handle the situation much faster than the police even once the FBI is involved. It presents the question of "who really has all the power here?" because at times the executives at Smithereens are actually ordering around the FBI and the police on the scene. They seem to be the ones that are in charge.

At one point, Billy Bauer enters what he calls "God Mode" and he is able to access pretty much all private information about anyone who is on the internet including all passwords and personal details at lightning speed. This is something I think we can all relate to because even though we have various programs and what not that we are assured protect our information..... is it really protected?

This episode ends with no real conclusion and we are meant to decide what really happened on our own, which is something I really like about Black Mirror in general. Personally I think the episode ended like this:

Chris was eaten up over being responsible for the death of other people and this drove him to attempt to change the world by speaking to the "boss" of the social media company by taking a hostage in the first place. However, since the series tends to be quite dark, I think that in the end the sniper who fires on the car actually misses Chris and kills his hostage instead. Chris will survive, go to prison for a while, and will be forced to live out the rest of his days with the guilt of having caused yet another death.