[DSteinmann]

They can only reuse the same tropes so many times. Season 3 takes most of the "mind blowing" ideas from the first series and repackages them in a weaker presentation. The first episode was a weaker repackaging of Fifteen Million Merits (intrusion of social media rankings). I think there were two rehashes of White Christmas (protagonist being in an alternate universe where time moves slowly, which is always revealed a the end of the episode). White Chrismas did this much more effectively. Season 3 is just a thin shell around the same tropes.

[Namrog84]

Could it be that the first 2 seasons were British. And 3rd season is first time being British-American so that felt that revisiting popular ideas with a new spin the timing was good?

[tptacek]

And really, Fifteen Million Merits wasn't all that great either --- it was kind of all over the place narratively, and once you get the intrusive ranking trope, there's really not much more interesting about it. It felt sort of like badly plotted Vonnegut.

Again: if you haven't seen the MeowMeowBeenz episode of Community: it's a pretty good chaser to either of those episodes.

[Analemma_]

I have to disagree. Fifteen Million Merits is still my favorite episode, and what's more, I don't think it's about the intrusive ranking at all (meta-point: one of the best things about Black Mirror, IMO, is that people will often disagree on not only the quality of an episode, but what the episode was even about. That's how you know it's good).

I think the moral of that story was the inherent futility of ever rebelling against the System. Most people don't try, most who try fail, and even for the one-in-a-million who succeed, the System just instantly reconfigures itself to absorb your rebellion as part of it. Other works have done the "revolutionaries always become the new dictators" shtick, but Fifteen Million Merits did it better because it shows that this process doesn't even require a villain (like in, say, Animal Farm). Everyone in that episode, even the Simon Cowell stand-in, was just punching a clock and doing their job; the suppression of revolt was purely an emergent property of the system... as it usually is in real life.

It was the bleakest, most nihilist bit of television I think I've ever seen, made better by the fact that it wasn't empty "dark for dark's sake" like Twilight Zone-esque twist endings tend to be. I had to go for a walk afterward. I don't see how you can't like it... but like I said, the fact that people can disagree so profoundly is one of the show's best qualities, so I'll upvote you anyway and not hold it against you :)

[angersock]

Exactly!

The real hook wasn't the lame virtual-points Zynga oppression, it was how the main character reacted to their situation and then how the system reacted to them.

It's all ground that was covered before (and arguably better) in Network 40 years ago, but it does it well.