Charlie Brooker trolls fans hunting for Black Mirror Easter Eggs
“Why did you bother PAUSING this, you freak?”
The new series of Netflix’s Black Mirror is chock-full of exciting Easter Eggs, from the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them Kirsten Dunst and Aaron Paul cameos in USS Callister to pretty much everything you see on screen in Black Museum.
For many fans, part of the fun in watching the series is hunting around for these very secrets – and series creator and writer Charlie Brooker knows that.
That may be why he and the production team seem to have been hiding secret messages for their most dedicated fans in different episodes of the series, poking fun at their obsessive Easter Egg-hunting by smuggling gentle taunts into obscure parts of certain episodes.
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The first such instance was spotted by viewers in Crocodile starring Andrea Riseborough, when her character Mia’s old partner-in-crime Rob (Andrew Gower) shows her a newspaper article with a rather unusual paragraph…
The paragraph, as discovered by redditor AFellowOfLimitedJest, reads: "'Of course the real question is why anyone would pause what they’re watching just to read a sentence in a printed out newspaper article', says a voice in your head – before advising you to go and share this finding on Reddit."
Accordingly, this image is now all over the internet, but it’s not the only message to fans hidden among the dystopian sci-fi action.
In Metalhead, a later episode starring Maxine Peake as a woman trying to escape a vicious four-legged drone or “dog”, we see a high-tech car ignition sequence – and if you pause at the right moment, there's another hidden missive (credit to BRB_UKN for the spot).
In case you can’t make that out, underneath references to the first two series of Black Mirror hidden in the code (for example, pigpoke is calling back to first episode The National Anthem, BRB.attic is from Be Right Back where Ash is kept, and tehoy.mem is a reference to memory-recalling story The Entire History of You) it says, “Why did you bother PAUSING this, you freak?”
For internet content, Charlie. Always for the #content.
Anyway, we wouldn’t be surprised if these two are just the first of many friendly insults headed our way in Black Mirror series four, so get your pause button ready on the rewatch and prepare to be mildly maligned in the line of duty. We'll be waiting for your findings.
Black Mirror series four is streaming on Netflix now
