Set in fictional UK food manufacturing company Ditta, we follow Maria (Kelly), a Head of Flavour who’s poised to launch her latest invention – the aforementioned miso abomination. When Maria’s former classmate Verity (McEwen) arrives out of the blue to take a job in her department, Maria is unnerved… with good reason.
Not that anybody, from boss Gabe (Ben Bailey-Smith) to boyfriend Kae (Michael Workeye), believes her, Maria thinks that Verity is out for revenge. At school, Maria had been part of the popular group who bullied Verity and spread a damaging rumour about her. When Maria discovers that one of her old school gang recently took her own life after losing grip on reality (the very suicide reported in the TV news report playing in the background of the opening scene), she suspects retribution.
Retribution is exactly what Verity has planned. All those weird little diagrams she used to draw of systems she wanted to build led her to create a “quantum compiler” that gives her omnipotent power. Like the monstrous little boy in The Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life”, Verity can change reality on a whim. She’s used her compiler to – as she tells Maria in an expertly delivered line in their final confrontation – be everything and do everything. None of it though, satisfied her because her sci-fi superpowers couldn’t change her unhappy past. So, she’s taking action by hurting the people that once hurt her.
(Of course, changing reality isn’t only something that Verity can do with her remote-control widget; Maria does it too when she edits the story she tells to Kae about her schooldays. To avoid blame for starting the rumour that plagued Verity, Maria casually rewrites her past and recasts herself as a bystander instead of a participant in the bullying.)
Brooker’s script quickly establishes Maria as the perfect candidate for being gaslit (deliberately manipulated and misled about her sanity). She’s a pedant whom we first meet correcting her boyfriend on the location of a potential holiday destination. Used to being right, she’s so fixated on petty detail that she corrects every misuse of the confectionary term “marshmallow” to “mallow”, even when it’s done by the head of the company. Changing realities that Maria knows to be fact is a silver bullet for a character like hers. Verity’s scheme is also helped along by the casual sexism of Maria’s boss and boyfriend, both of whom put her complaints down to stereotypical female jealousy and competitiveness.
Verity’s plan works like a charm, until Maria fights back at the last moment. After an Everything Everywhere All At Once-ish demonstration of the compiler’s capabilities, Maria doesn’t kill herself but shoots Verity dead, takes control of the reality-change machine and wishes herself the Beyoncé-styled Queen of the Universe. Well, according to Kae, she always did like to be top dog. It’s a fun surprise that ends this fantasy-tinged episode on a cliffhanger that promises to become a fable about the dangers of getting what you want.
