Black Mirror Boldly Goes There

With its highly anticipated fourth season, the Netflix thriller solidifies its place as the sci-fi standard-bearer of our age—despite a galaxy of competitors.

- Darren Franich

ROBERT DALY DREAMS DIGITAL nostalgia, like so many lonely men his age. By day, he’s the chief technology officer of Callister Inc., a tech-entertainment purveyor peddling a multiplayer cosmos full of things to trade and kill. That CTO gig may sound important, but Robert’s the Wozniak, a funkless coder to his Jobs-ian partner’s entrepreneurial flash. As played by Jesse Plemons, Robert looks like the cartoon ideal of the bespectacled nerd, except balder and sadder. But by night, in his own private cinematic universe, he’s the commander of a starship, exploring same-y new worlds, boldly going where he thinks all men used to get to go. His female colleagues want him; his hair is perfect. He bases this virtual world on a TV show from his youth called Space Fleet. “It was visionary,” Robert says. “Netflix has it these days.”