Black Mirror creator says second USS Callister will pick up where first finished

By Casey Cooper-Fiske, PA Entertainment Reporter

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has said the highly anticipated follow-up to the show’s popular USS Callister episode will see its characters thrust into an online multiplayer game, picking up where the first finished.

The dystopian drama series returns to Netflix on Thursday for its seventh season, with episodes about “mind expanding” technology, violent video games and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as the sci-fi sequel.

USS Callister, from the show’s fourth series which aired in 2017, saw its characters at the centre of a tale about a sci-fi video game and misuse of power.

Speaking about the follow-up, Brooker said: “The original USS Callister follows a brilliant young coder called Nanette Cole, played by Cristin Milioti, who gets a job at a company called Callister which makes a video game which was created by a genius called Robert Daly, played by Jesse Plemons, who we discover in the first episode, is quite a troubled individual.

“He feels overlooked and put upon in his everyday life and so he vents his frustrations by making virtual clones of people in his workplace and tormenting them within a private build of the video game, which is also the chance for him to indulge his retro 60s sci-fi fantasies.

“He gets to play a noble captain but actually he’s an appalling tyrant. Callister is the story of Nanette leading the crew to freedom, they manage to escape from this game, and they fly through a wormhole and find themselves in a multiplayer online game, and that’s where the first one ends.

“That’s also where this second one starts.”

The 54-year-old said he decided to return to the story as he was “disappointed” he had to “say goodbye” to its characters at the end.

He continued: “We had such a great ensemble cast, and from the moment the credits rolled on the first one, I was like, I want to do it again, I want to keep telling that story.

“We left them in a whole new universe and there’s an immediate problem they’ve got, which is that they’re virtual clones but they’re also real, they’re effectively humans in a video game and for all the other people playing the game, it’s no bother to them if they shoot people because they think they’re just playing a game, but to Nanette and co, it’s life or death.

“If they get shot they die, that’s it, they don’t suddenly snap out of the game, there is no out of the game for them. It felt like a natural place to start telling the next chapter of this story.

“We were working on it for quite a long time, it went through lots of different iterations and we spent a lot of time toying with it, and it’s just been really gratifying to see it all come together.

“It was quite emotional getting the cast back and rebuilding the ship. Toby Haynes has returned as director, so it was like we had our whole crew, the whole gang back together. It was a thrill.”

Actor Cristin Milioti, who plays Nanette, went on to say that her character will discover she is “not doing a great job as captain” and said it was “really eating at her and she feels responsible”.

The new seventh season will feature stars such as Guardians Of The Galaxy’s Will Poulter, The Crown star Emma Corrin and former Doctor Who actor Peter Capaldi.

Black Mirror returns after its sixth season included episodes such as Joan Is Awful, which saw a woman discover that the events of her life were being retold in a TV show, and Beyond The Sea, about astronauts who are able to transfer their consciousness to replicas of their bodies on Earth when not needed in space.