This is a choose-your-own-adventure review of the brand new choose-your-own-adventure Netflix special, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. 

You can choose to remain entirely spoiler-free until you experience it for yourself. In which case: this is quite simply a brilliant, groundbreaking piece of interactive television. One that has cracked the code as to how you let the viewer make interesting storytelling choices without spoiling the immersive mood of good drama. 

(Important spoiler-free caveat: Netflix hasn’t yet cracked the code of how to show this interactive episode to its best advantage on actual TV boxes, not even the top-of-the-line Apple TV 4K. You’ll probably end up watching on a laptop, tablet or phone. Which is odd, because all you need to play is go left, go right and…OK — things any TV remote can do.) 

SEE ALSO: The darkest fake media in ‘Black Mirror’: A complete guide

Then there’s option B. You could choose to be very mildly spoiled (there’s little here beyond what you’ll see in the first five minutes). To paraphrase a movie that is highly appropriate to this subject matter: take the red pill and I’ll show you how deep my Choose Your Own Adventure rabbit hole goes.  

Bandersnatch manages to be many things at once: a trippy meta-mindfuck of a Black Mirror episode, simultaneously the longest and the shortest one that creator Charlie Brooker has written (it will last anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours); an homage to 1984; a horror; a time travel story; a Philip K Dick pastiche; and the most essential philosophy lesson we’ve seen since the Good Place.  

But most of all it’s something new in the world: successful interactive TV, something I’ve been waiting to see for years. 

Choose your own failure

I remember trying Netflix’s kids-only interactive stories from 2017, such as Puss in Books, and willing them to feel worthwhile, even for kids. Same goes for an interactive Dungeons and Dragons story released on DVD more than a decade ago. But both relied on cheap CGI, had clunky plots, and choppy pacing that stopped the action cold with each choice. They were hardly templates for a new age of entertainment. 

For a lifelong fan of print-based Choose Your Own Adventures, such as the classic Steve Jackson Sorcery! books (now available as iOS apps), these were baffling failures. Anyone who’s held their breath thumbing through those pages, one finger on the last entry you read in case you die on the next one, knows the power of interactive stories. We know the thrill of the do-over. 

We know the thrill of the do-over. 

Why couldn’t visual media get it right? Why had TV ceded that ground to videogames, when there is a hybrid of the two waiting to be born? 

Choose your own cereal

Brooker, a storytelling nerd who used to work at a videogames magazine, gets it. On the one hand, he keeps the story flowing with quick, light, amusingly mundane, highly realistic decisions such as a choice between breakfast cereals, or between music tapes. (As in the game of real life, such seemingly small choices will have enormous consequences for the story later on.)

On the other, heavier hand, he’s constructed something so compellingly meta it deserves some kind of meta-Oscar. It’s a sprawling choose your own adventure narrative about a kid, Stefan, who’s trying to turn a sprawling choose your own adventure book into a sprawling choose your own adventure videogame. He soon meets someone who opens his mind to what storytelling is all about.

The choices you have to make reflect the limits of free will that games designers impose on their characters — and Stefan comes to realize those limits in fascinating ways, on his way to one of five groups of endings. You will become a bigger part of those endings than you suspect. 

The in-universe book Stefan is trying to adapt is called Bandersnatch (the reference to Lewis Carroll’s glorious nonsense verse, “Jabberwocky”, seems more appropriate as the story goes on). It’s a doorstop of a space fantasy book that broke its author’s brain — imagine Philip K Dick taking a decade to write a Choose Your Own Adventure — which only increased its allure. 

I would have read the crap out of Bandersnatch as a kid, and that wasn’t the only thing that made me feel a strong instant bond with everynerd Stefan. The music tapes, the computer game tapes (Manic Miner!), the cereal (Frosties!), the 2000AD comic books — Stefan’s 1984 childhood was almost entirely mine too. For a Brit, this is even more authentically nostalgic than Stranger Things. Get out of my head, Brooker!

Choose your own entertainment future

You might think, after watching/playing it, that Black Mirror‘s creator just dropped the mic on this whole genre before it can even get off the ground. He effectively deconstructed the interactive story. What is there left to say? 

Well, just exactly as much as there is to say in stories, period. There is no life, no situation, that could not be rendered more fascinating by following all the branch points of what might have been. 

For proof, I recommend a couple of fascinating and criminally obscure choose your own adventure books: Pretty Little Mistakes: A Do-Over Novel by Heather McElhatton, a NPR commentator, and Life’s Lottery by thriller author Kim Newman. Both are mature looks at a single life, and how small choices can send them spinning off into wildly different directions. 

Just imagine what future showrunners can do with this technology.

Just imagine what future showrunners can do with this technology. Imagine a crime drama where the team may or may not solve the case every week, depending on your guidance. Imagine a season of Game of Thrones that is wildly different from the season your best friend is watching, because you made different choices three seasons earlier, leading different characters to their deaths. 

Imagine how many times you, a total stan for your show, would want to watch and play all over again, exhausting all options to find the perfect ending for your favorite characters. Imagine how much the networks would love that, not to mention potential advertisers. 

As soon as Netflix allows this thing to go mainstream by letting it play on actual TVs, the choices for adventure are endless. 

Uber changed its logo and Lyft launched pink and purple e-scooters. It’s been a big year for the two big ride-hailing apps.

For the drivers who supply rides ordered via smartphones, Uber and Lyft might say things were pretty good in 2018. Both companies made a big push to improve the driver experience, from Uber’s new app to both Lyft and Uber’s reward programs. But pay has stagnated and driver rights haven’t improved much — issues that the companies don’t want to examine too closely.

SEE ALSO: Uber and Lyft IPOs will make a lot of people rich. But what about the drivers?

In some cities like New York, London, and throughout Australia, the fight is on with local policymakers to reach the demands of the driver community. Drivers are looking to keep more of each fare and get recognized for their work. 

So while drivers and gig workers appeared to be more of a concern this year, it doesn’t mean much if hourly rates barely keep up with minimum wage and companies keep cutting into earnings with their high commissions. 

Uber does have a long list of improvements that came after 2017’s 180 Days of Change campaign. When Dara Khosrowshahi came on as CEO in August 2017, he immediately took on driver issues as a priority. To his credit, right as 2018 started he called for portable benefits and worked with Washington state on legislation. In New York City, a fund for drivers piloted with funding for telemedicine and vision benefits. After only a year of in-app tipping, Uber drivers earned $600 million. (Lyft reached $500 million earned since the start of the company.)

By April, a new driver app debuted with real-time earnings, better notifications, and an improved surge map. Little things continually improved on the app, like hands-free voice commands for drivers and other safety features. A big push for driver loyalty arrived in October with a pilot in select cities called Uber Pro. The rewards system for drivers offers extra earnings, cash back at gas stations, and free tuition for online classes at Arizona State University — nothing to sneer at. 

Lyft closely mirrored what Uber offered up drivers this year and added their own flair with 30 new driver hubs popping up to help drivers, new app designs that changed the tipping process and bumped up tips 20 percent, and a stream of driver changes like dropping the lowest rating, demand charts, and more features coming into the new year. A subtle addition that helped drivers out was mid-ride feedback for shared rides so that criticisms about the route or number of pick-ups was separate from driver ratings.

As Rideshare Guy blogger Harry Campbell said in an email at the end of this month, “2018 brought a lot of positive changes to the driver experience, but not much was done to address the top complaints of low driver pay and high commissions.” He noted that the upcoming IPOs likely mean no rate increases in sight as the companies try to keep costs low.

Jim Conigliaro, Jr., founder of the Independent Drivers Guild representing New York City app-based drivers, is hopeful for 2019. He wrote last week, “2018 began as pretty dark year” that eventually culminated in hard-fought worker victories. 

In New York in particular, this past year saw new Uber and Lyft vehicles capped for a year to study congestion and the effect of ride-hailing apps on cities and a new law that requires a livable, minimum wage bumping up pay to $17.22 an hour for thousands of drivers in the new year.

Findings from the Gridwise driver companion app brought in data from 500,000 rides from 2017 and 2018. The hourly average rate increased less than $3 to $16.66 this year, not taking into account inflation and before costs like gas, car leasing fees, and commission. But things are moving upward.

“We expect a better 2019,” Conigliaro said. Maybe it’ll be the year of the driver. 

This post contains spoilers for Bird Box.

At first blush, Bird Box’s flaws seem inoffensive, if plentiful: A poorly written script, half-baked world-building, paper-thin characters, and the waste of the talents of an Oscar-winning actress on five-year-old screen partners.

But under closer scrutiny, a more sinister byproduct emerges from the failures of Netflix’s Sandra Bullock-starring post-apocalyptic thriller. 

The villainization of people with mental illness in Hollywood is far from new. But Bird Box seems to wear this stigmatization and its sensationalization of suicide like a badge of gritty honor.

SEE ALSO: ’13 Reasons Why’ proves that good intentions aren’t enough when it comes to portraying suicide

Centered around an end-of-day reckoning, Bird Box imagines a world stalked by monsters that drive people to commit suicide at the mere sight of them. 

Everyone, that is, except those with mental illnesses. Instead of killing themselves in gratuitously gory ways like all the “normal” characters, people with mental illnesses become literal agents of evil, obsessed with carrying out the monsters’ mission to destroy humanity. 

The examples of this effect are seen in characters explicitly established dealing with mental illness: former patients from a mental hospital, plus a grocery store clerk described as having gone “to prison and always a bit crazy.”

So Bird Box is evidently trying to say something about mental illness through its ill-defined monsters, brought forth as biblical judges for our moral punishment. Exactly what they mean as a metaphor, however, remains frustratingly unclear. 

What is clear is that Bird Box joins a long-standing tradition of mass media perpetuating the myth that people with mental illness are dangerously deranged villains of ultra-violence, rather than the reality that they’re actually more likely to be victims of violence.

This portrayal is everywhere. Aside from being the first topic of speculation about every mass shooter, horror movies as far back as Psycho are built on it, TV shows like Hannibal further embed the myth into our culture, and video games like Outlast dehumanize psychiatric patients in asylums into spooky enemies to be killed for fun.

Bird Box wears this stigmatization  like a badge of gritty honor.

The effect of this accumulatively terrible representation of mental illness has a demonstrable effect. People who suffer from these illnesses would rather stay silent than seek help and be seen as “crazy” social pariahs.

Then there’s Bird Box‘s rather cavalier attitude toward depicting gleefully violent suicides. 

Arguably, these are so far removed from real-world suicides that this sensationalist approach can be seen as more responsible than the more graphically true-to-life ones in shows like 13 Reasons Why. But turning that trauma into cheap, bloody thrills for entertainment certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouths of people who are survivors or who wrestle with suicidal thoughts.

It’s obvious that the creators of Bird Box did not set out to create a film villainizing mental illness or sensationalizing suicide. If you squint at its woefully confused metaphors, there might be an allegory in the monsters as a darkness that perhaps only people who’ve struggled with depression, psychological disorders, etc., would be familiar with.

Yet a lack of awareness does not excuse the harm caused by Bird Box’s flagrant carelessness in handling extremely sensitive subject matter.

In all fairness, the film does make attempts to right some wrongs in the portrayal of people with one kind of physical disability. At the end, Malorie (Bullock) and the kids find a safe haven in a community run by the blind, showing people with a physical disability not only as capable citizens but as strong leaders, guiding the able-bodied into a new world. 

It’s a rare, refreshingly positive reflection of a real-world truth: That what society often views as a pitiable weakness can in so many other ways be a strength. It’s not unlike A Quiet Place‘s laudable representation of deaf character Regan, played beautifully by Millicent Simmonds.

But this destigmatization of disability only goes as far as the physical. Because in Bird Box‘s vision of Eden for survivors of the rapture, there’s no place for people with psychological disabilities.

For one, the tone of the film encourages us to view those who fight to survive that darkness in the real world with abject horror rather than any sort of empathy

Unlike blindness, mental illness is characterized as seemingly the most unconquerable weakness, rendering those who suffer from it more susceptible rather than more resilient to the darkness that the monsters represent. If anything, the world rules set up by Bird Box should mean they’re more adept at surviving a world cloaked in that unending darkness.

In Bird Box‘s vision of Eden for survivors of the rapture, there’s no place for people with psychological disabilities

For another, Bird Box makes the egregious mistake of depicting these characters as one-dimensional caricatures defined exclusively by their mental illnesses. 

Sure, everyone “normal” who looks at the monsters becomes a brainless zombie. But turning people with mental illnesses into the exact opposite — zealots who survive only as extensions of a monstrous evil — has the incredibly othering effect of denying them even the humanity afforded to all the other characters.

None of this is to say that every “negative” depiction of mental illness, particularly those in horror movies, should not be allowed. In the same year as Bird Box‘s release, Hereditary addressed mental illness and trauma through the lens of horror to increase the audience’s empathy for that internal and generational struggle.

What it comes down to is Bird Box‘s lack of care toward almost every element of its filmmaking. And when it comes how it tackles a real problem through its fantastical premise, it’s a movie that keeps its eyes stubbornly shut.

If you want to talk to someone or are experiencing suicidal thoughts you can text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Alternatively, a further list of international resources is available here. 

When sweater weather is in full effect and all you want to do is stay inside by the fire, Netflix’s new animated series Hilda brings the magic of exploring the wilderness to your couch.

Based on the acclaimed British graphic novel by Luke Pearson (an Adventure Time veteran, as you might be able to tell from the animation style), with a synth pop intro written by Grimes, its the kind of cartoon that’s as much for millennials as it is for kids. 

SEE ALSO: Saying goodbye to ‘Adventure Time,’ the show that taught us to let good things end

But there’s an unwavering sincerity to Hilda that makes it stand out from the other shows of its ilk, like Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, and even Steven Universe. 

A fearless explorer, Hilda lives in the woods with her mom, along with an ever-expanding cast of folklore creatures and legends. Until, that is, a neighborly mishap forces them to move to the nearby city of Trolberg. And metropolitan life turns out to be the only beast Hilda can’t tame.

Watching Hilda feels like going back to that time in childhood when you only needed your imagination for company. You’d play outside with nothing but the intent of fun, only to come back several hours later thoroughly spent and covered in dirt. The world felt big and scary, you tiny and defenseless. But confronting that thrill of the unknown is exactly what made you feel invincible.

With a backdrop of Scandinavian myth and and scenery, it creates a universe where fantasy and reality exist side by side. And nobody questions it. From giants to elves to thunder birds, the fantastical is commonplace — but feels no less magical. 

Watching Hilda feels like going back to that time in childhood when you only needed your imagination for company.

Elves are sticklers for bureaucratic paperwork, for example, but how else are they supposed to protect their invisibility spell without all those forms? And granted, the ill-mannered Wood Man barges into the house uninvited at all hours of the day to use your fireplace without asking, but at least he brings his own wood.

Every rock left unturned in the world of Hilda feels like a new wonder waiting to be discovered — or most likely, a troll baby who’d rather be left alone. Every episode exudes so much warmth and life that you can practically envision Twig, the deerfox, curled up next you.

Without a doubt, Hilda is an ode to the weird kids. You know, the ones who never quite figured out the whole people thing but knew every possible fact about frogs and their social habits.

Like every great fairytale, the stories in Hilda teach important lessons you can bring into the real world without beating you over the head with it: about the value of all life, the magic in the mundane, the power of perception. 

One visual and narrative theme the show often returns to is the question of scale, showing how the world looks so different to an elf versus a human versus a giant. The things that loomed so large and important in your life become indistinguishable dust to a giant. Meanwhile the behaviors you never thought twice about can be experienced as acts of terror to an elvish town.

Hilda is as powerful as it is simple, as fierce as it is gentle-hearted, and as extraordinary as it is ordinary. It’s a quiet adventure. And it rings with all the more resonance for it.  

This post is part of our High-tech High series, which explores weed innovations, and our cultural relationship with cannabis, as legalization in several U.S. states, Canada, and Uruguay moves the market further out of the shadows.

Marijuana has long been celebrated in the world of music and song. In the world of movies and TV, meanwhile, the majority of cannabis-loving characters tend to slot in somewhere between bumbling idiots and dangerous outcasts. 

This divide in media representation stretches all the way back to 1936. That was the year a hit jazz song called “If You’re a Viper” provided a positive view of marijuana use that still checks out (“you know you’re high when your throat is dry / everything is dandy”). But it was also the year of Reefer Madness, the infamous propaganda film that depicted pot as a precursor to lunacy and murder; its users were crazed buffoons to be laughed at or pitied.

Fast forward 82 years. Even after widespread legalization and societal acceptance of weed, it doesn’t seem like much has changed. Because yes, marijuana in music is cooler than ever; a recent study found that 75 percent of U.S. top 40 tunes feature positive shout-outs to weed — often for enhancing the creativity or prowess of the songwriter. 

But on screens? Well, even including recent indie movies that landed with a thud (see: Hansel and Gretel Get Baked), our cinematic cannabis canon contains a litany of bro-tastic stoner dudes on couches. The pot smoker is here presented as a hapless fool who keeps getting into scrapes — all brought on, in the immortal words of Afroman, because they got high. (Not to mention hungry.) 

Which is not to say stoner comedies can’t be funny. They’re often hilarious! Take the negative sides of heavy pot-smoking — short-term memory loss, paranoia, poor motor skills — exaggerate them, and you have seams of comedy gold for talented moviemakers to mine.

It’s just that, well, we’ve seen that movie so many times. What Cheech and Chong were doing in Up in Smoke in the 1970s is pretty much what Harold and Kumar did in the 2000s, and what Seth Rogen and James Franco did earlier this decade in Pineapple Express and This is the End, not to mention Mark Wahlberg and a CGI bear in the two Teds. If we’re going to keep doing this, Hollywood, how about some more female leads in stoner comedies? 

If a character gets high in a comedy, it’s generally shorthand for them being a doofus. If they get high in a drama, it’s still code for them being a weird outcast. They may be the hero or a sidekick, but there’s definitely something wrong with them — some kind of arrested development.

SEE ALSO: OK, everybody: Stop pot-shaming Elon Musk

Granted, screenwriters don’t always show alcohol in the best light either; we have the Hangover movies as Exhibits A-C there. But at least there’s more balance, even romance, in its portrayal. For every drunk-ass W.C. Fields, there’s a suave Jay Gatsby or James Bond. (Alcohol, which has been found to do more damage to your brain than marijuana in at least one recent study, is surely less deserving of this fair and balanced treatment.) 

And yes, you could argue that alcohol and weed have differing impacts psychologically, but if we can embrace both James Bond and the Hangover bros, we should make room for more nuanced portrayals of weed, too. Yet we more readily think of grand old celebrities who can hold their liquor and use it in their performance — Peter O’Toole being the archetypal example. For the equivalent in the marijuana-user world, you’d have to look to the music business again; someone like Paul McCartney, casual consumer of at least one joint a day since 1965, has no equivalent in movies. 

For a brief time in the 20th century, cinematic stoner heroes could be cool, too (see Easy Rider for the best example). But in the 21st, there is no sign of a mainstream movie hero that can do for weed what Bond did for martinis — that is, to portray it as a refined pleasure often consumed socially. 

Not a central part of the plot, nor an important flaw in the main character (as marijuana was for Joaquin Phoenix’s detective in Inherent Vice) — just a totally legal thing people happen to do on an evening, without it necessarily turning them into the Big Lebowski. 

When someone like Daniel Craig appears in a movie as a character who takes a languid hit off a vape pen and nothing more is said of it, that’s when you know Hollywood is taking weed seriously. (Appropriately enough, Craig opened his 2004 movie Layer Cake doing a long monologue about future drug legalization and how it would prevent mobsters like his character; it’s looking more prescient with each passing year.) 

Good joints, bad joints

Our ongoing Golden Age of Television should provide us with more nuanced portrayals of marijuana usage, right? Well, yes. Sort of. With big caveats.

TV went to pot relatively late in the game, and seemed cautious about putting cannabis front and center in the story even when it went there. The highly bingeable eight seasons of Weeds (2005-2012) made a lot of peripheral use of the plant, and had plenty of marijuana users who weren’t clowns or weirdos. 

But the show was also oddly clear about the fact that its hero Nancy Botwin (the peerless Mary Louise Parker) rarely got high on her own supply. She was just a suburban mom, forced into dealing the green stuff by circumstance. Her personal drug of choice: venti frappuccinos. 

Then there was Broad City, which successfully updated the stoner comedy concept for the small screen (and gave us the female protagonists that the movie business didn’t). Tellingly, Broad City was not developed by network executives, but was born as a series of web shorts. Season 5 will be the last, and attempts to spin off the same schtick into other formats — such as co-creator Ilana Glazer’s short-lived Time Traveling Bong — haven’t gone anywhere so far. 

More problematic were the two seasons of Disjointed (2017 and 2018) on Netflix. Kathy Bates stars as Ruth Whitefeather Feldman, proprietor of a recreational dispensary in Los Angeles, ringleader of a motley crew of stoners including her son and his crush. Netflix opted not to pick it up a third time. And it’s not hard to see why.

Disjointed is, as its title suggests, a strange show and something of a mixed baggie. It is a very 20th century-style studio sitcom, complete with a laugh track. Nothing wrong with that — it’s actually great that pot got its mainstream laugh-track workplace sitcom, its Cheers moment at last. Move over, alcohol! The problem is more that this format seems to have led the writers to go for the weaker, safer, more frequent kind of jokes, usually ones that reinforce marijuana stereotypes. 

Take Disjointed‘s two most clownish, over-indulging stoner characters, Dank and Dabby. In the Season 1 finale — spoiler alert, I guess? — this couple gets stuck on the roof of the dispensary, and we learn what happens when they’re deprived of weed for a few hours: They remember their former lives as academic geniuses. 

It’s intended as a joke, of course, but suddenly Dank and Dabby become tragic figures, chronic underachievers, no less victims of the demon weed than any character in Reefer Madness. 

Still, there’s a lot to commend the show for in terms of representation. Ruth’s son Travis, a black man, is also that rarest of characters: a rational, normal, non-hippyish, level-headed, business-running, occasional marijuana user. There’s Maria, a suburban mom who takes to vaping with the zeal of the convert. 

And then there’s Carter, the Iraq vet security guard whose internal struggles with PTSD are illustrated with dramatic, trippy animations. His journey, from adamantly refusing to even try pot to discovering that it quiets the bad stuff in his head, is the most touching arc on the show. Carter, a Muslim, is by far the most complex character; had he been the focus of Disjointed, Netflix may not have canceled it. 

Maintenance Man

A more successful show, and the only one to truly represent marijuana users on a regular basis, is High Maintenance — which returns for a third season on HBO on January 20, 2019. 

Like Broad City and unlike Disjointed, which was a top-down network-style show from Big Bang Theory guys, High Maintenance floated from the bottom up — starting life as a series of web shorts on Vimeo. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious hipster, the old, obscure ones are still clearly the best; a 15-minute format is the way the show should have stayed.

Each webisode was utterly fresh, a realistic slice of life of a different quirky New Yorker. At some point in the story, usually incidental to the action, each character receives a weed delivery from a bearded bike messenger known only as The Guy (Ben Sinclair). 

In these shorts, The Guy was often the foil for the strangeness of his clients; he was a very New York type himself, a working dealer hustling to make a buck, and he bowed out quick.

When the show stepped up to HBO, a half-hour runtime requirement created a need to stitch the short stories together. The Guy became that stitching, and started to look like more of an eternal stoner type in the process: smoking out with his clients every episode, taking mushrooms and running around the city, and in the final episode of Season 2, even revealing that he has a name. (Unimaginatively, it’s Ben.)  

But the show has opened up a seam of storytelling about New York City, one of the richest character mines in the world. It could dig for years and keep coming up with gold — because how many millions of New Yorkers continue to need a Guy, in the absence of legalization? (New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called for legalizing recreational marijuana in 2019, but nobody knows yet whether he’ll actually follow through or is just associating himself with a popular program.) 

Nearly every High Maintenance character is striving for something that makes them sympathetic. They’re trying to make it in the big city, to create something, to find themselves, find love or explore a new fad. They are flawed and fascinating and just so happen to need, or like, the flawed, fascinating uplift that THC provides. They read the news today, oh boy (as in the Season 2 opener, which deals with a never-specified international catastrophe) and they’d love to turn you on. 

In terms of anti-fascist political messages, however, there’s nothing to beat Reefer Madness. Not the 1936 version — the 1998 musical parody, immortalized in an Emmy-winning 2005 Showtime movie starring Alan Cumming and Kristen Bell. 

The musical is mostly 1936 propaganda exaggerated to absurdity. An opening number warns that marijuana is “turning all our children into hooligans and whores.” A gangster’s moll laments her addiction to “The Stuff.” Young innocent Mary Sunshine (Bell) has a handful of puffs and turns into an insatiable dominatrix. 

The American president himself (Cumming) shows up at the end to tell everyone how to combat the green menace. And then comes the sting in the musical’s tale: Once they’ve rounded up all the pot-smoking freaks, the cast vows, it’s time to round up everyone who deviates from the norm based on race and religion as well. 

It’s fair to say this ending is rather more resonant in 2018 than it was in 1998. Life may be good for American stoners in some states right now, but others are still getting arrested and incarcerated by a plainly racist justice system. 

The public may no longer associate marijuana with Mexican immigrants, as they did during the early part of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the current president squeaked into office after demonizing Mexicans for bringing unspecified “drugs and crime.” Fear of The Other is alive and well, and remains a factor in marijuana policy. 

We really aren’t as far away from 1936 as we think, both on screen and in real life. But if moviemakers and showrunners can give us more than stoner comedy tropes, if they can stop giggling for long enough to give us more even-handed, realistic representations of a mostly harmless intoxicant, then society at large will follow. 

2018 was a year for bad takes, but also for pretty awful fashion trends. 

The ’90s revival has been fun, but let’s leave the aughts in the aughts. This year saw a resurgence in horrors like low-rise jeans, boot cuts, and the most disastrous of all, Uggs. And in addition to reviving trends that we wish had stayed in the early 2000s, 2018 saw a slew of new terrible trends, too. 

SEE ALSO: 8 terrible jeans that prove denim has gone too far

Here are seven fashion trends of 2018 that just shouldn’t exist. 

1. Boot cut jeans

Sorry, but what human being looks good in boot cut jeans? They’re not as secure as skinny jeans and they aren’t as saucy as flared jeans — boot cuts are just awkwardly large. Twitter users immediately trashed GQ for claiming it was “only a matter of time” before a comeback for the hideous pants. 

2. Thigh high Uggs

Worn by pop culture icons like Rihanna and Dua Lipa, Uggs are making a comeback in the worst possible form: thigh highs. YouTuber Safiya Nygaard called wearing them “like wading through peanut butter.” The monstrosity, a collaboration between Ugg and Y/Project, costs a casual $1,380. 

3. Oddly tiny fanny packs

Oh, so we’re back to those weird cellphone holsters that every dad seems to own. A cross between fanny packs and the pouch that held your father’s flip phone in 2010, these absurdly tiny “belt bags” can hold little more than an iPhone. What’s the point? 

4. Sock sneakers

Cardi B may have immortalized the sock heel with “I like those Balenciagas, the ones that look like socks,” but it’s time for the sneaker version of the trend to die. At least you’ll never have to scrounge around your dresser for mismatched socks again — these babies have them built in! 

5. Tiny sunglasses 

If you’ve ever wanted to look like a vengeful evil genius seeking reparations for a traumatic childhood, maybe the trend is for you. But Mindy Kaling tweeted what we were all thinking: “We will regret this tiny sunglasses look.” The absurd tiny sunglasses need to fade into oblivion into 2019 — seriously, do they even protect your eyes? 

6. Low-rise jeans

Unless you’re pop sensation Britney Spears, it’s physically impossible to comfortably exist while wearing low-rise jeans. You’re either stuck with a horrific wedgie or flashing your buttcrack every time you sit down. Can we leave this trend buried in 2006, please?  

7. Plastic boots

Top Shop infuriated the internet with its clear jeans last year, if the plastic horror show could even be considered “jeans.” But the fashion industry has been churning out clear plastic apparel all through 2018, and created the most cursed accessory to fall upon this world: clear plastic boots. And as Vogue points out, these heeled boots, although kind of cool, are awful for your feet. The more your sweat, the more these heat traps steam up. 

Can we leave all of these awful trends in 2018? 

Regardless of what side of the proverbial Brexit fence you’re sitting on, I think there’s one thing we can all agree on: things are a little bit of a mess right now. In the past few weeks alone, it’s been an exceptionally tumultuous time in UK politics — from a leadership challenge to the growing prospect of leaving the EU without a deal. 

SEE ALSO: Theresa May getting locked in a car pretty much sums up how Brexit’s going

But, just when you thought you couldn’t bear to hear that cursed six-letter b-word again, Channel 4 is serving up a dollop of referendum-themed drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rory Kinnear. 

The idea of sitting through a fictionalised version of how the Brexit sausage got made is probably enough to make any of us expire through sheer exasperation. Brexit: The Uncivil War is a feature film delving into the data-driven political campaign behind the most seismic and divisive referendum in modern British history. Cumberbatch stars as Vote Leave’s campaign director Dominic Cummings — a man David Cameron is said to have called a “career psychopath” and who many Remainers might consider a real-life villain. Cumberbatch’s rendering of the political strategist behind the operation is slightly more nuanced and, well, unvillain-like, however. 

When the trailer for Brexit dropped, an almighty uproar descended as many viewers felt the trailer smacked of glamorisation of a figure who spearheaded a campaign that was subsequently found to be in breach of electoral law. Among other criticisms, there’s also, ya know, the fact that we’re still actually living through Brexit — and the outcome is, to a certain extent, still up in the air. Too soon?

“Whether he was motivated by political ambition or not, by the time I met him, I met an incredibly happy man who certainly wasn’t posing.”

Despite being a Remainer himself, Cumberbatch wanted to show the human side of Cummings. He brings Sherlockian elements into his portrayal — you see Cummings sitting in a broom cupboard in the dark, scribbling his musings onto the door. You see him, in the very nascent beginnings of the campaign, calling out the names of famous leaders from history to draw inspiration from their leadership strategy. Is this the work a somewhat scruffy, understated genius or the self-aware musings of a pseudo-intellectual? Hard to tell. 

The real-life Cummings hired Canadian digital firm AggregateIQ — a company that reportedly had “undisclosed links” to Cambridge Analytica — to unleash targeted political advertising on Facebook. Cummings was quoted on AIQ’s website as saying, “we couldn’t have done it without them,” and attributes the success of the Leave campaign to AIQ’s contributions. 

The Vote Leave campaign was this year found to have broken electoral law by the UK’s Electoral Commission after a nine month investigation. The investigation found that Vote Leave broke the law by exceeding its £7M spending limit by channelling £675,000 into a pro-leave youth group. 

So, how exactly does one go about trying to get inside the head of the man who spearheaded the aforementioned campaign? Simple. Cumberbatch went and met him, of course.

Screenwriter James Graham told Mashable that Cummings was reluctant to meet initially because he was concerned the script would be heavily pro-Remain — an idea Cummings was eventually disabused of. When Cumberbatch finally met Cummings, he met a man who, funnily enough, was pretty unhappy about the way Brexit was panning out. 

“Whether he was motivated by political ambition or not, by the time I met him, I met an incredibly happy man who certainly wasn’t posing,” said Cumberbatch. “He seemed to be incredibly content being at home with his family. So I was surprised but I didn’t feel I was meeting a politico.”

“I felt I was meeting someone who still had great convictions and idealism who is pretty distraught about how it’s turning out,” Cumberbatch continued. “That was in the summer and he was most distraught about what he felt he wasn’t being delivered because of the way the politics was grinding down the results in his eyes.”

“I felt I was meeting someone who still had great convictions and idealism who is pretty distraught about how it’s turning out.”

But, aside from his current take on how Brexit’s going, Cumberbatch also wanted to get inside Cummings’ headspace to understand questions like: “What makes you tick? Who inspired you at school? What’s your favourite colour? Do you prefer bitter or lager? Who do you support? Are you a swimmer or a walker? What do you do to burn off steam?” 

Cumberbatch also watched two pieces of footage of the man himself on Youtube ad nauseum to try to mimic his mannerisms, posture, and his “very particular Durham dialect,” and “his way of holding himself in public.” And he spoke to staff who worked alongside Cummings on the campaign to gain an idea of what the man was like behind closed doors. “One of the most striking things was how calm and composed they said he was throughout the entire campaign,” said Cumberbatch. “He has a very even spirit level.”

Watching Brexit: The Uncivil War you’ll notice the campaign directors of Remain and Leave are agreed on one thing: regarding Brexit as a binary is very misguided. Both appear to agree that it’s more nuanced and complicated than that. Your relationship with this film will likely be just as complicated.