Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 5 - Men Against Fire

Black Mirror (2011-)
Season 3  - 6 episodes (2016)

Watch Black Mirror Season 3 on Netflix
Written by: Charlie Brooker 
Directed by: Jakob Verbruggen
Starring: Malachi Kirby, Madeline Brewer, Michael Kelly

Plot 
Black Mirror examines the pitfalls when technology and society intersect. What happens when technology goes off the rails, creating a horrifying situation? Ultimately the questions are, does technology make us happier, is being connected at all times beneficial, and does it do more harm than good?
Black Mirror is an anthology. Each episode is self contained with completely different actors.

The fifth episode of season three is Men Against Fire, the military has created the ultimate soldier, compliant with any orders.

Verdict
Men Against Fire is a solid story, but it's the implication that makes an even bigger impact.
I wondered if this was going the District 9 route with Stripe becoming a monster, but it's much darker than that. The military manufactures psychopaths that will kill anything and anybody without argument.
Watch it.

Review
The military is high tech, with improvements and implants that improve vision and reflexes. It allows them to see orders, schematics and site targets through a heads up display. In this remote outpost they hunt 'roaches'. These are zombie vampire looking people that might have been human at some point, but now steal and contaminate everything they encounter. The villages hate the roaches, and the army kills the roaches.

Stripe and his unit search an old farmhouse suspected of housing the creatures. Stripe dispatches two of them, and then he looks into a laser pointer device, something that one of the roaches seemed to be holding like a weapon. The light zaps him, but it's not immediately clear what it did to him. As it often happens with Black Mirror, I began to put the pieces together. Does the implant change how he sees certain people? This is confirmed when Rai sees and guns down roach people but Stripe sees them as regular people.

Episode 5 - Men Against Fire

How do you make a better soldier? You remove pity and remorse so that they aren't killing humans, they're killing bugs, roaches. It's forced compliance, and the doctor lays it bare. The implants make pulling the trigger easier because humans don't want to kill other humans. You don't see them, hear them, or smell the blood. Anyone not genetically engineered is eradicated. This is similar to Gattaca, where anyone not genetic screened could only work the most menial of jobs. Some people didn't take to it and conceived the old fashioned way subjugating their children to a lifetime of servitude. In Men Against Fire, the government takes an active role in ridding the world of undesirables.
The doctor gives Stripe a choice. Erase his memory and recent realization and go back to being a compliant soldier or remember and be tortured endlessly with horrible visions through the implant.

Black Mirror nails the endings. The doctor spelling everything out lacked subtlety, but the ending brings it back. Stripe is still living a fantasy, but what did he choose? I have to imagine he chose to forget. Why else would he get leave? Who would choose torture? He goes back home and sees a beautiful image of his house and a woman we thought was his wife or girlfriend that likely doesn't even exist.
If you keep soldiers happy and satisfied, they remain compliant. Any soldier suffering from PTSD an have those memories erased.

Earlier in the episode when the doctor told Stripe he needs a real good sleep, I thought he was prescribing mediation, but he was programming Stripe's dreams.

While San Junipero seemed poised to be my favorite episode of the season, the implications from Men Against Fire are on a whole different level. The military has created remorseless psychos that have no problem killing innocent people. Think about the atrocities humans have committed against each, and imagine that they saw other human beings as less than, as some kind of rodent. This episode straddles the line of a very possible future and a window into the mind of a psychopath.