"White Bear" is the second episode of the second series of the British science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. It was written by the series creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker and directed by Carl Tibbetts. The episode follows Victoria (Lenora Crichlow), a woman who does not remember who she is, and wakes up in a place where almost everybody is controlled by a television signal. Along with some of the few other unaffected people (Michael Smiley and Tuppence Middleton), she must stop the "White Bear" transmitter while surviving merciless pursuers.
Brooker originally wrote the episode in an apocalyptic setting, but when the script was about to be filmed at a former Royal Air Force base, he changed it because of a fence he saw there. He rewrote the story in two days, removing some details he considered useful for a sequel story. The main change was the addition of a plot twist at the end of the script, which was noted as the most impressive aspect of the episode by several reviewers.
The episode, first aired on Channel 4 on 18 February 2013, was watched by 1.2 million viewers and was very well received by critics, particularly for its writing and Crichlow's performance. The story draws parallels with real murder cases, primarily the 1960s Moors murders, in which five children were killed. Its horror aspects have been said to be reminiscent of the 1970s film The Wicker Man and the video game Manhunt, while some similarities with The Twilight Zone have also been noted. This dystopian episode reflects upon several aspects of contemporary society, such as media coverage of murders, technology's effects on people's empathy, desensitisation, violence as entertainment, vigilantism, the concept of justice and punishment, and the nature of reality.
Plot A woman (Lenora Crichlow) wakes up with amnesia, in a house where television screens are showing an unknown symbol. Turning the screens off, she finds photos of herself and a man (Nick Ofield), along with one of a small girl (Imani Jackman) which she takes with her. She leaves the house and pleads for help, but people ignore her while recording her on their phones. When a masked man opens fire at her with a shotgun, she flees and meets Jem (Tuppence Middleton). Jem explains that the symbol began appearing on television and mobile phone screens, turning most people into passive voyeurs, called "onlookers". The woman and Jem are unaffected, but they are also a target for the "hunters"- unaffected humans who use the fall of society to act sadistically. Jem plans to reach a transmitter at "White Bear" to destroy it.
As they travel, Baxter (Michael Smiley), a man who also seems unaffected, picks them up. He turns out to be another hunter, and holds them at gunpoint in a forest, where he tries to torture the women with a drilling machine, but Jem kills Baxter. They continue travelling to the transmitter; when they reach it, two hunters attack them. The woman wrestles a shotgun away from a hunter and fires at her attacker, but the gun only sprays confetti. Walls open to reveal a seated audience, and that everything was staged. Jem is an actress, and Baxter is not only alive, but also the event's master of ceremonies.
The woman is strapped to a chair and informed that her name is Victoria Skillane, and that the girl in the photograph is Jemima Sykes, whom Victoria and her fiancé, Iain Rannoch, had abducted and murdered, filming the crime. After the pair were arrested, Iain died by suicide in his cell, while Victoria was sentenced to undergo daily psychological punishment at the present facility, which is called White Bear Justice Park after a white teddy bear that Jemima owned.
Victoria is driven back to the compound past an outraged crowd and returned to where she awoke. As she is shown her own videotaped footage of Jemima prior to her murder, Baxter places electrodes on her head, simultaneously torturing her and wiping her memory of the day's events so that she will live the same day repeatedly as part of her punishment. Interspersed between the end credits, the next day's events are seen from the point of view of the park's staff, and its visitors who play the voyeurs.
Production Series creator Charlie Brooker came up with the idea while working on the 2008 zombie horror serial Dead Set. During filming, Riz Ahmed's character was being chased by zombies; some schoolchildren noticed the production and began watching, taking pictures on their phones. Brooker considered it to be "an interesting and frightening image, because they're standing there, not intervening". Brooker converted it to a script for Dead Set, in which a photograph goes viral on social media and "unlock[s] this primal urge for people to be voyeurs of agony". Although the idea was given the green light, they did not have the budget to do it.
The first conception of the episode was as "a straightforward apocalypse story", featuring a female journalist and taking inspiration from the 1967 science fiction horror film Quatermass and the Pit. The signal would have affected people all over the world, turning 90% of them into voyeurs and the rest into mad people who attacked each other; its source was never explained. It was to end with a public crucifixion.
The second version opened with a patient speaking to their psychiatrist about their nightmares and a recent urge to commit violence. The patient draws a glyph from their dreams, and the psychiatrist files it along with identical symbols drawn by her other patients. This glyph resembles an upside-down "Y" and was created by Brooker after much experimentation; it is the one used in the final episode. This draft had the character Baxter in it and resembled the 1973 horror film The Wicker Man. Executive producer Annabel Jones noted that the theme had shifted more towards voyeurism. By this point, director Carl Tibbetts was involved with the project.
After working on the other series two episodes "Be Right Back" and "The Waldo Moment", the latter of which was in production, there was little of the budget remaining for "White Bear". Filming was limited to a military base at RAF Daws Hill in southeast England, which was formerly a United States Air Force base. The base contained an abandoned housing estate and buildings that could be repurposed to look like shops and garages. The base was surrounded by chicken wire and Brooker considered that the fence could be there because the events of the episode were not real. Brooker believed that the public would watch certain people be tortured for such as Jimmy Savile, against whom hundreds of sexual abuse allegations have been made, or Myra Hindley, a serial killer who committed the Moors murders with her boyfriend, Ian Brady.
Brooker then rewrote the script in two days "in a bit of a fever dream". He noted that he had never changed a script so dramatically so late in the production process, and that this is the first major plot twist in a Black Mirror episode. Brooker considered making Victoria innocent, but settled on making her unknowingly guilty. Lenora Crichlow had already been cast as Victoria prior to the rewrite.
Prior to the twist, the episode is shown from Victoria's perspective. According to Tibbetts, handheld cameras were used to make the episode "very intense and personal" and to make the viewer identify with Victoria. Contrastingly, in the end credits scenes filming is "still and static" to resemble an observer's perspective. Flashback scenes were balanced to avoid giving away too much information before the twist. The scene in which Victoria is driven through the crowd was cut shorter in the final edit and many of the crowd members were added digitally. Brooker had the idea during editing of displaying Victoria's next day at the park during the credits. The episode is 42 minutes long, slightly shorter than Channel 4's standard of 45–48 minutes for an hour-long episode.
The episode's soundtrack was composed by Jon Opstad. The score is mostly electronic. To give a different character to the music played as Victoria lives her next day in the theme park, Opstad added acoustic elements, but feeling that this did not fit with the universe he used pizzicato cello music and overlaid "spidery" atonal lines.
Brooker had other ideas that were removed from the original script because they would be complicated to do. He said he could use these ideas in a sequel story which would involve the main character finding messages that she had left for herself on previous days as the process of erasing her mind starts not to function. However, as the location for the episode no longer exists, he felt it would be more practical to create a graphic novel instead of recreating the scenario.
Cultural references Many reviewers identified an allusion to the Moors murders, committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, a British couple who killed children in the 1960s. The A.V. Club David Sims emphasised the similarities between Victoria's video recording and the fact that Hindley audio-taped the torture of one of her and Brady's victims.
The influence of horror works was highlighted by critics and Brooker himself. Lambie found aspects of the forest scene reminiscent of 1970s exploitation films. He also felt there are several visual and thematic parallels to The Wicker Man and Kill List. Morgan Jeffery of Digital Spy agreed it is reminiscent of zombies and slasher films "and even has that unsettling Wicker Man feel with its notion of 'society gone wrong'." Brooker commented it is indeed "a Wicker Man–style horror", and Tibbetts commented that the film was "a big touchstone" for him. Because they have similar concepts, 28 Days Later and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were also mentioned by reviewers as possible influences. Paul Brian McCoy of Comics Bulletin stated it "recalls any number of zombie apocalypse dramas, including Brooker's own Dead Set at times" and The Signal. While Brooker said the hunters' design was inspired by the horror video game Manhunt, McCoy felt its opening echoed another game, Resident Evil.
The Twilight Zone has been seen as an influence by some reviewers. Jeffery commented that Black Mirrors "roots in" the American anthology series "have never been more visible", while Sims noted that "White Bear" is "the most Twilight Zone-y episode of the show", and James Hibberd of Entertainment Weekly said it could even have been an episode of that series. Lyndsey Weber of Vulture made a "post-viewing guide" to Black Mirror, where she included The Twilight Zone episode "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" as "bonus watching" to "White Bear". The plot, however, is more similar to the episode "Judgement Night," which similarly features a character struggling with amnesia, this time aboard a ship, where he feels an impending sense of doom that the ship will go down at 1:15 am, but no one listens to him. At the fateful time, they are attacked by a Nazi U-Boat. The twist reveals the main character is the captain of the U-Boat, now forced to relive the terror those felt on the doomed ship for all eternity.
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