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Black Mirror: Cristin Milioti Reflects on "USS Callister," 2025 Sequel

Black Mirror star Cristin Milioti reflects on "USS Callister" and the follow-up sequel episode, 2025's "USS Callister: Into Infinity."

It's rare that an anthology series would revisit the world of one of its universes, but Charlie Brooker has done it twice on his Netflix dystopian series Black Mirror. One of the most memorable is the season four opener "USS Callister", the Star Trek-inspired fantasy created by Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons), who can create digital avatars after getting DNA samples from his co-workers at his software company to put into his work recreating his favorite TV show Space Fleet, modeled after Star Trek: The Original Series. As the characters have some form of sentience, they have no memories of their physical real-world counterparts. In the 2017 episode, Nanette (Cristin Milioti) leads an uprising among the crew to take on their tyrannical captain. The 2025 follow-up in season seven, "USS Callister: Into Infinity," continues that journey as Nanette is now captain, but faces greater external threats to their survival thanks to the players trying to hunt them down via their avatars, not aware of the crew's actual sentience in the game world. As part of a career retrospective, Milioti spoke to Variety about that rare opportunity to not only explore that galaxy but revisit it.

Black Mirror: Cristin Milioti on Filming the Sci-Fi Space Episodes

As Nanette, Milioti was able to explore both worlds in the episode from her avatar and programmer counterpart. "It was unbelievably cool to run around with a space blaster in a spaceship. You feel 7 years old. You have the best of both worlds: the banal nature of office life, and this heightened space movie," she said. "We shot on the Canary Islands. The whole cast and crew had an entire hotel to ourselves for a week. It was summer camp. We all rode our bikes all around, and we all karaoke'd; it was wonderful.

For "Into Infinity," the Black Mirror episode sequel was far more action-oriented as Nanette had to guide the USS Callister out of danger, but also had to stave off Robert's partner at the software company Walton (Jimmi Simpson), whose plans don't exactly align with the crew's survival. "I have such respect for people who do that for months on end. You're black and blue by the end of it, but it feels like when you're a little kid playing in your backyard. It's a good kind of tired. Also, I'm doing action stuff with a tinge of the characters are not very good at it, because they work in an office. So, that was also fun to play with those levels of calibration."

The episode has the USS Callister crew trying to find salvation from imminent danger from players in their gaming world and as they end up trying to stave off enemy players, Nanette is trying to unravel the truth of her company by reaching Robert's creator avatar stuck in the digital world as his physical body has died in the 2017 episode. Tragedy strikes as the real Nanette is hit by a vehicle and left in a persistent vegetative state. As digital Nanette finds a way out to destroy the digital world that's hunting her and her crew, she awakens in the mind of her brain-dead real-life counterpart, but she's not alone as her crewmates, still on the ship, become voices in her head. For more on Milioti's career, you can check out the entire interview. All of Black Mirror, except for the "choose your adventure feature" Bandersnatch, is available on Netflix.

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