Warning! Spoilers follow for Black Mirror Season 7, “USS Callister: Into Infinity.”
Black Mirror is moving into the final frontier with the Season 7 episode “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” a sequel to the acclaimed Season 4 episode “USS Callister.” In the sequel, we see coder Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti) as she tries to debunk the secrets behind the mysterious demise of Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons.) Meanwhile, inside the video game Infinity, a cloned version of Nanette tries to survive by becoming a virtual highwayman, only to become embroiled in a plot to return to her old body.
It’s a thrilling ending to the “USS Callister” saga, but it wasn’t the plan from the get-go. In fact, the star of the episode reveals that the previous versions were completely different.
Earlier this month, Black Mirror showrunner Charlie Brooker told Deadline that the sequel episode was originally planned as a limited TV series or a streaming film. “It went through various guises, but in the end we made it feature-length within the season,” he said. “It took so long getting it together — we had the pandemic, writers’ strike and then had to get everyone’s schedules lined up, and that was its own Rubik’s cube on a unicycle.”
“USS Callister: Into Infinity” is, in a way, its own TV movie, so it’s easy to assume the series and movie versions would be the same story just presented in a different format. However, Cristin Milioti clarifies to Inverse that this wasn’t the case at all.
“There were completely different plots for each one,” Milioti reveals at a roundtable interview attended by Inverse. “They shared some similarities. I think the clones were always involved in some way, but there were different iterations of it. Charlie truly came up with three or four completely different plots, which is just astonishing. The only thing that made it throughout all of them were the clones and meeting themselves.”
So, while we got to see a follow-up episode for this story, there is still more potential for the USS Callister story. Who knows, maybe we’ll see one of those rejected plots live on in a new way, even though Nanette’s adventures in Infinity are over. But for now, Milioti is happy about where the story left off.
“We haven't had any discussions about a third as of now,” she said. “What I like about this ending, because this is what I like this just in terms of my own taste of what I watch, you could say it's kind of happy, technically they're out of that situation, but I think they're in an equally horrifying situation.” That’s the Black Mirror guarantee.
