Black Mirror Season 7 Finds A Way To Make The Show's Most Despicable Villain Even Worse

This article contains spoilers for "Black Mirror" season 7, episode 6 — "USS Callister: Into Infinity"

When Netflix ordered "Black Mirror" season 7 with a sequel to one of the show's best episodes — the season 4 opener, "USS Callister" — fans of Charlie Brooker's dystopian sci-fi anthology perked up their ears. When the first trailer for the pitch-black show's newest season dropped, glimpses of high-octane shootouts and both versions of Nanette (Cristin Milioti) meeting face to face were more than enough to further intrigue the fandom. Now, "USS Callister: Into Infinity" is actually here, and it brings us one particularly big surprise: Jesse Plemons' villainous Robert Daly is back, and he's worse than ever.

The original "USS Callister" outdid the classic "The Twilight Zone" episode "It's a Good Life" by giving it a high tech twist. Daly is introduced as the chief technology officer of Callister, a company behind the online game "Infinity." He has also created a secret area within the game to play out various "Star Trek"-style fantasies in the titular spaceship, which he has staffed with illegally-created sentient digital clones of his coworkers. In this pocket universe, he's omnipotent, and torments his cloned colleagues in increasingly brutal and imaginative ways whenever they refuse to participate in his power trip.

After forcing the real-world Nanette into helping them, the captive clones manage to escape Daly's fantasy world into the game proper, leaving the Callister CTO's mind trapped in his dying pocket universe. This, in some other show, would have been the last that we see of Daly. However, in "USS Callister: Into Infinity," the roaming clones discover that the villain has a sentient in-game clone of his own ... and this version of Daly controls the entire game universe. 

While attempting to survive in the heavily monetized microtransaction universe of "Infinity," the USS Callister survivors realize they have few long-term prospects in a game populated by 30 million bloodthirsty players — especially after the villainous Callister CEO Walton (Jimmi Simpson) learns of their existence and decides to go after them. In an effort to escape the main game into a new, hopefully less hostile pocket universe, the clones decide to locate a surviving incarnation of the digital clone Walton in order to reach the central source code structure of the entire game. Unfortunately, there's a hitch. The game's universe is wholly created and presided over by a sentient Daly clone that not only wields godlike power over the game universe, but also has been trapped in his solitary task for what, to him, feels like 500 years. As it turns out, this hasn't been great for his sanity.

This version of Daly seems like a nice guy at first — not unlike the real Daly — and acts genuinely shocked when he hears what his original self was up to. However, when Nanette asks his help to evacuate USS Callister, he almost immediately starts playing his old mind games and abusing his power. Only, this time it's doubly worse because not only does he wield power over the entire game instead of a little tucked-away corner of it, he's not as much a clear-cut villain as he is a whiny incel type who repeatedly insists that he's a nice guy — and he's wholly convinced that he's entitled to make a slave copy of Nanette to act as his eternal "friend," simply because he himself is being treated unfairly.

Nanette fortunately manages to kill the game master Daly before he reaches a full-on mad god mode. After he's gone, the whole game is soon deleted from existence, and only Nanette's last-minute scrambling in the perished Daly clone's divine garage enables her consciousness to escape in the comatose real-world Nanette's head. True to the "USS Callister" duology's comedic sensibilities, the ship and the crew also end up watching the world through her eyes, and the episode ends with the whole group of protagonists in an uneasy, reality TV-fueled alliance.

Since "Black Mirror" is now in full sequel mode, the episode also gives Charlie Brooker a perfect opportunity to introduce an even worse Robert Daly at some point down the line. The camera lingers on the dead Daly just long enough to make the viewer wonder, and the fumbling nature of the USS Callister crew's last-minute escape from the game world leaves the door open for all sorts of shenanigans. The clone Walton's reappearance in "USS Callister: Into Infinity" also suggests that the mortality of sentient clones in the game world has plenty of asterisks that the show can abuse should it so desire. 

With all these opportunities in place, the cruelest and therefore most "Black Mirror"-style thing Brooker could do would be to bring back this version of Daly ... but this time, the show's most disgusting villain would be trapped in Nanette's head with the rest of the Callister crew. Whether this ever happens obviously remains to be seen, but as terrifying premises go, Nanette having to go through her life with an abusive, whiny Daly inside her head seems like a very "Black Mirror" thing to do.