BLACK MIRROR Season 4 Will Feature a Dark Story By Famed Magician Penn Jillette
Black Mirror is such an incredible show that tells these wonderfully dark and fascinating stories. There are currently three seasons on Netflix and if you haven't been watching them, you really need to.
Black Mirror Season 4 will feature an episode that will tell a story written by famed magician Penn Jillette. Now, I'm a huge fan of Jillette! He's a multi-talented guy who knows how to entertain and move an audience.
In the latest episode of Penn's Sunday School podcast, he talked about meeting with Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker. He shared a story with Brooker about being sick in a Spanish welfare hospital back in 1981. There was a language barrier that prevented a diagnosis and how no one knew where he was. This served as the inspiration for the story and it was so dark, it was never published. Penn talks about it saying:
"During that time, I got this idea for this short story called 'the Pain Addict.' I was postulating a future where you could put a gizmo on your head and feel someone else’s pain. So there would be doctors whose whole job it was to feel pain and say 'His left arm is broken. That’s not actually appendicitis, that’s a cancer thing.' They felt every pain. Like prizefighters and childbirth and child cancer. And this guy gets addicted to it and starts beating people to feel their pain. He also goes through S&M and all he wants to do is jack into Jesus on the cross. He wants to feel that pain. I wrote this story. It was the first story I wrote when I got a computer. When we did Penn and Teller’s first book, we had short stories in it. I submitted this and the editor said 'That’s too dark.' I’ve been trying to find a place for this story, which I thought was really good. I tried to write a comic book and they said no. I pitched it as a movie and they said no. So I told Charlie Brooker all of this and he said 'Oh, pain addict. That’s good.'"
It's pretty incredible that after 36 years of carrying this story around, it finally found a home with Black Mirror. It fits perfectly into the Black Mirror universe. Jillette was obviously just way ahead of his time. The Pain Addict will be one of three stories told in the Season 4 finale. It will be called Black Museum and Jillette describes what the episode will entail, saying:
"And then two years later, [Brooker] started calling me up a lot and for the [finale] of the next Black Mirror, they’re doing a thing called 'Black Museum,' which is three stories tied together as one, like they did with 'White Christmas.' We went back and forth. Charlie Brooker writes everything. There wasn’t a chance of me actually typing. I sent him my short story. We brainstormed for a few hours. It ended up being that the whole story was framed by a carnie in Vegas who has a museum that includes the helmet that was worn by the original pain addict. He’s telling the story to a young woman who was at the museum. He’s this washed-up carnie guy, 20 miles outside of Vegas, running his little museum there.
There's currently no premiere date for Black Mirror Season 4, but I'm sure it will be released sometime in 2018. I can't wait to see how this whole story will unfold. There aren't a lot of other details about the upcoming season, but Jodie Foster and John Hillcoat are both directing episodes in it.