White Bear

            During this episode of “Black Mirror” we witnessed a woman get tortured by hundreds of people as a form of “justice” for a crime she committed. It also served as entertainment for the people watching and as a source of profit for the people carrying out the torture. Justice should never be a source of profit. This relationship becomes toxic because over time increasing profit will outweigh increasing justice. This means that the owners will set a goal to maximize profit instead of justice. Imagine a world where judges would get paid per case. Judges would begin to care less about the impact that their decisions have and more on how many cases they can run through a day. This is just one of the many reasons why White Bear is a bad idea and not really solving anything. Now some people will say that the torture was justified but can torture ever really be justified? Does that not make us as bad as the person being tortured? I personally do not think that it makes us as bad because that would mean that judicial executioners are just as bad as the murderers that they are executing. They are just carrying out a sentence that was set by a judge and a jury, so if we must blame the executioner, we must blame the judge and jury too. The difference between the executioner and the spectators/owners in White Bear is that they are getting a sense of joy from it while the executioner is not. They are just doing their job, it would be like if the executioner created a livestream where they charged viewers to spectate the execution, which sounds ridiculous but is exactly what happens in White Bear. The episode did not reveal how Victoria or any criminal before or after her ends up at the park. This detail is very important because it would reveal just how involved the government is with the park. The news report that was revealed to Victoria is our only source of insight because it explained that the couple had been sentenced and were in jail. This means that they had to have had some sort of trial that resulted in them being guilty so what I wonder is if the park has become an alternative punishment to prison. If so, how and who decides which criminals end up at the park? If we had been given this information, we would have a much better idea of the world in which the episode takes place which is something that I try to do in each “Black Mirror” episode.