Season 7 of Black Mirror concludes with a long-awaited return to one of its most beloved and unsettling episodes. USS Callister: Into Infinity picks up the thread of the original USS Callister, but it doesn’t just revisit old ground. It builds, mutates, and finally explodes the concept into something far bigger—a galaxy-spanning, server-breaking, corporate takedown that cements itself as one of the boldest and most satisfying instalments the series has ever attempted.
We rejoin the crew of the USS Callister—the digital clones of former Callister Inc. employees once imprisoned by Robert Daly in his private fantasy—as they try to survive within the massively multiplayer online game, Infinity. Life hasn’t exactly improved. Now untagged players without official gamer credentials, they’ve become space pirates, forced to raid other users just to survive microtransactions and system limitations. It’s capitalism in the stars, and they’re barely scraping by.
Enter the plot: they need to get James Walton’s clone, Walt, back into the fold, and use the secrets locked in his mind to access the "Heart of Infinity"—a protected core within the game where they can carve out a private server, free from the chaos and persecution of the main game. But first, they have to find him.
In the real world, James Walton (Jimmi Simpson) is the face of Callister Inc., having fully inherited the company from the late Robert Daly. A reporter starts poking around about illegal cloning technology, prompting Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti), still working at Callister, to offer her help. She joins James in re-entering the game to find Walt. Meanwhile, Nan, Nanette's digital clone and now captain of the Callister, is closing in on the same goal.
The reunion of Nanette, James, and the rest of the crew is predictably messy. James kills Karl’s clone with a digital laser, just to prove a point, and is swiftly ejected from the game by Nanette. But then, a classic Black Mirror swerve: in the real world, Nanette is hit by a car and left brain dead. The show doesn’t linger on the moment—it punches right through it, and suddenly the stakes shift from liberation to preservation.
As Nan (the clone) enters the Heart of Infinity, she finds herself in a digital recreation of Robert Daly’s garage—a chilling resurrection of a character we thought we’d left behind. Jesse Plemons returns as Daly, or rather, Daly's clone, placed here by the real Robert as an eternal creative engine. He explains that the crew can either be copied into a private server, or Nanette can be revived by merging with Nan. But there’s a catch: choosing the copy would leave a version of Nan trapped forever with Daly, a digital ghost doomed to serve.
It’s Black Mirror at its most philosophical. What is the cost of freedom? Is a partial death better than infinite servitude?
Meanwhile, in the main game, James has disguised himself as Walt and sent out an invite to all the players the Callister has robbed. What follows is digital bedlam. Hundreds of ships converge on the USS Callister. Lasers fly. Explosions bloom. It’s as close to Star Wars as Black Mirror has ever dared.
Back in the Heart, Nan kills Daly’s clone with a prop knife, triggering a failsafe that begins to destroy the space station. Racing against time, she finds the correct floppy disk, executes the cut-and-paste, and everything changes.
Nan wakes up in Nanette’s real-world body, now co-inhabited by the Callister crew. They can see through her eyes, speak through her phone, and finally live lives not dictated by scripts or sadistic fantasy. It’s the most bizarrely uplifting moment of the series, a digital consciousness jailbreak turned communal afterlife.
The final beats are perfect. James Walton is arrested, Nan and the crew settle into something resembling peace, and the last image is them watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta in a shared consciousness. It’s weird, tender, and darkly hilarious.
Billy Magnussen, Milanka Brooks, Osy Ikhile, and Paul G. Raymond reprise their roles with verve, each bringing a slightly jaded but deeply empathetic energy to their now-liberated characters. And Cristin Milioti, as both Nan and Nanette, threads the episode with warmth and razor-sharp intelligence.
The original USS Callister explored toxic fandom, creative control, and digital slavery. Into Infinity updates those concerns with new questions about data privacy, the limits of identity, and the ethics of AI autonomy. But it never forgets to be fun. It’s a space opera, yes, but it’s also a redemption arc, a heist movie, and a satire on corporate greed and gamer culture.
By bringing Jesse Plemons back as a digital ghost and letting the crew face off with the memory of their abuser, Black Mirror offers something rare: closure. But not tidy closure. Earned closure.
USS Callister: Into Infinity is not just a sequel. It’s a victory lap for a story that always deserved a second chapter. With humour, heart, and plenty of space lasers, it asks us one final question before the credits roll: What does freedom look like when you're made of code?
According to Black Mirror, sometimes it looks like Real Housewives and shared pizza in a borrowed body. And honestly? That sounds pretty good.
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