What does 'Black Museum' mean for the Black Mirror shared universe theory? 

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Shared TV universes are nothing new. Look around the box and you\'ll see a plethora of shows that share a world.

Usually, like with Warner Bros\' DC shows or the Beeb\'s

spin-offs, these are series that are designed to exist in a fictional ecosystem – characters cross over, storylines converge, references are made.

, never had an anthology show – which, on the face of it, is made up of entirely different stories, set at different times and on different sides of the globe – done the shared universe thing.

Series creator Charlie Brooker has been dropping in craftily placed Easter eggs pretty much since the first season. But season four has made that connective tissue more explicit than ever.

There are light continuity touches throughout most of the episodes here – look closely at Mia\'s hotel room screen in \'Crocodile\' and you\'ll see the \'Wraith Babes\' sex channel from season one\'s \'Fifteen Million Merits\', while the same episode gives Irma Thomas\' \'Anyone Who Knows What Love Is\' a third airing in the series after the song\'s use in both \'Fifteen Million Merits\' and \'White Christmas\'.

But it\'s with season closer \'Black Museum\' that Brooker really lets rip. For once, these aren\'t subtle touches for freeze-frame junkies, but lingering close-ups. For the first time, we\'re

As Nish (Letitia Wright) and sleazy curator Rolo Haynes (Douglas Hodge) enter the museum, we can see the police photo of child torturer Victoria Skillane (Lenora Crichlow) from season two\'s \'White Bear\'.

It\'s not her first reappearance in the series – there are blink-and-you\'ll-miss-em on-screen mentions of her in \'White Christmas\', \'Shut Up and Dance\' and \'Hated in the Nation\'.

This is a strange one. Haynes\' museum is meant to be a collection of "criminological artifacts", so can we take it that the actions of the White Bear Justice Park have, by now, been deemed criminal?

After all, it wasn\'t Michael Smiley\'s balaclava-clad fake shooter who was the evildoer here, but the convicted Victoria Skillane. So either Haynes has gotten hold of this garb and doesn\'t know the story behind it, or the justice parks of White Bear are, within the timeline of \'Black Museum\', now illegal.

memory for this one. Robert Daly used this device in this season\'s \'USS Callister\' to make digital clones of his work colleagues to populate his offline virtual reality program Infinity. It even still has the lollipop stolen from James Walton\'s son still in it.

Again, what can we deduce from this? If Haynes has the device, then presumably the police discovered what Daly had done. Which leads us to believe that the digital clones of the USS Callister

since been deleted. Which is… a good thing…?

Season three\'s \'Hated in the Nation\' featured a terror attack on the UK from a tech whiz named Garrett Scholes using Autonomous Drone Insects (ADIs) – mechanical replacements for bees developed as a response to a sudden collapse in the bee population.

Nearly 400,000 people died in the attack, which involved Scholes taking control of tens of thousands of ADIs, all of which were later deactivated.

When Haynes is proudly telling Nish about his "Digital Consciousness Transfer" invention, she replies that\'s it\'s "like when they upload old people to the cloud".

It\'s a clear reference to the events of season three fave \'San Junipero\', where, before

after they die, old people\'s consciousnesses are uploaded to a simulated reality where they can live inside a younger version of themselves.

Given that \'Black Museum\' has been the most brazenly open episode yet confirming the \'one universe\' theory of

, are any proper link-ups on the horizon? Is it possible that, one day, we might get a

Maybe an appearance from Prime Minister Michael Callow? A cameo from Kelly Macdonald\'s DCI Karin Parke? A spit-and-a-cough from Matt Trent of \'White Christmas\'? Is Brooker ready to step this shared universe thing up a gear, we wonder?

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