The Dark truth about White Bear

  "Black Bear" is another fascinating addition to the Black Mirror series and just as horrifying if not more so. It has a lot of factors that make it hard to agree or disagree fully on the events that take place.

The scene starts out with a woman waking up then wincing in pain before looking around at her surroundings. A weird symbol is on the screen and flickering and the hum of the T.V is quite annoying and seems to bother the woman as well so she turns it off. When she turns to the mirror on the other side of the room and touches her face as if she's never seen herself before or is in a new body, that's where the confusion for the watcher sets in. 

Everything else seems pretty odd but nothing too major. Great, she's lost her memory. Now what? She goes downstairs and turns off the second T.V with the weird symbol, pockets a picture of a small girl in a picture frame, gets some water, and puts on her shoes and jacket and goes outside. 

Black Mirror's episodes all have the same setting which is something not too futuristic but instead a scene taken out of our world today. The neighborhood the woman walks into is pretty average and so nothing is exactly standing out. That is until people start peeking out of their windows with phones in front of them as if recording the confused woman below. 

What happens next is like a scene out of the Purge. A man pulls up in a car with a shotgun and a mask and the woman seems to put two and two together and takes off. 

Now, I'm not going to explain the whole episode. What fun would that be? 

To sum it up, the woman gets chased a considerable distance along with a woman who seems to be an ally and right when things see really bleak for the two, the wall opens up and a cheering crowd awaits. It was confusing for me and the woman seemed to think so as well, especially when she was cuffed to a chair by the woman she thought was a friend and the two who were trying to kill the both of them. 

Here comes the really interesting part. A man stepped on stage and addressed the crowd before turning to the woman and played a news clip. Turns out the woman and her boyfriend had kidnapped a little girl, tortured her, and then killed her and burned the evidence. The woman's boyfriend had killed himself and escaped justice, however.

The woman, Victoria, was apparently being punished by having her mind wiped every day and then going through the same thing as the day before which consisted of being chased and recorded and then paraded back to the house and having it start all over again. The things she did to the child were horrible, but is her punishment actually just?

Personally, I think the punishment isn't even that. If you wipe someone's memory then they aren't even the person they used to be. All her thoughts, feelings, and memories are gone. She's an empty slate. If I told her she was the president of the United States she'd have to believe me at this point. So how can you punish someone who isn't actually...someone?

The way to think about it is if a ghost possessed someone's body and killed someone before leaving. The ghost's harmful agenda is now gone along with it, but the vessel that did that killing remains. The ghost is long gone and you can't ever catch it. Do you blame the body that the ghost possessed?

Our brain is the only thing that really makes us us. If all the information it contains is erased, it's something entirely new. It'll gain new skills, learn different information, the list goes on. Based on this, I don't believe Victoria's punishment is just.