Like your favorite sci-fi series, Black Mirror has evolved and matured since its fledgling Season 1 days. That first season debuted in 2011 and contained three episodes. What I recall about the early seasons is that the stories focused on technology’s dehumanizing impact on society and were often unbalanced. Where a traditional short story would have beats and a tidy wrap-up, Black Mirror’s narratives bounced off plot pegs like a Plinko chip, zig-zagging their way to an ending where all momentum abruptly stopped. I felt the writers had simply run out of time and typed “The End”. With Season 3, however, we were treated to more focused and fun narratives such as “Nosedive”, where everyone socially rates their interactions with others, causing a woman to have a true Trading Places experience when her rating plummets due to a series of ever-worsening events. Moving on to Season 4, we are rewarded with the gem of “U.S.S. Callister”, where a programmer creates a virtual Star Trek-like universe and imprisons sentient AI copies of his co-workers as the ship’s crew. We also get the memorable “Metalhead”, where a Terminator-like robotic dog relentlessly pursues the protagonists. Next, Season 5 starred Miley Cyrus in the fun “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too”, where a teen’s Alexa-like toy robot is an AI copy of the pop star it is emulating, and the actual pop star needs rescuing. The progression of stories becomes more traditional, with popular actors guest-starring, runtimes approaching movie lengths, bigger budgets for sets and special effects, and solid writing.
Much like the Outer Limits had a theme of mankind’s hubris leading to its downfall, Black Mirror has nearly always been about the perils of technology (and in particular screens, hence the series name). What’s interesting revisiting Season 1 is the consistency of the underlying message. Both Season 1 and 6 contain an indictment of the consumer as being complicit in whatever unethical thing the content provider is creating. In Season 1, it’s “Fifteen Million Merits”, where people earn merits by riding stationary bikes while watching a roomful of screens. Merits buy or skip content, and the characters in the episode end up becoming the content they were consuming, which itself is a type of jail. Compare that to the latest Season 6, where three of the five episodes are indeed mirrors for the viewer, showing his complicity (and in one episode making the content viewer the content).
The Season 6 episodes, in order:
JOAN IS AWFUL
A woman comes home to watch a new trending series on Streamberry (a fictional version of Netflix, in a nice bit of meta) only to discover that the series is all about her and that she is the villain everyone loves to hate. It’s quite a brilliant piece of writing that lands on multiple fronts. It takes series like “The Tiger King”, where a real person’s life is served up as entertainment to the masses, and flips it on the consumer, inviting them to see how they would feel if their life were served up as entertainment for others. It also shines the light on Netflix’s content creation machine, AI content creation, deep fakes, personal control over one’s image and likeness, and even a Matrix-like examination of what is real. Thoroughly enjoyable, and, well, awful.
LOCH HENRY
A film student and his girlfriend return to his home town to visit his mother. While there, he decides to make a documentary about a local serial killer who was responsible for the death of the film student’s policeman father. The technological aspect of the story revolves around an old stack of VHS tapes. I can’t say much more without divulging the plot. Similar to “Joan is Awful”, the story focuses on the intrusiveness of creating content based upon real-life tragedies, and asks the viewer to consider how he would feel if that content included him. Loch Henry was the weakest of the five episodes. Although there was some nice cinematography and terrific acting, I found my attention drifting, even after the big reveal.
BEYOND THE SEA
Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, 40 Days and 40 Nights Josh Hartnett, and House of Cards Kate Mara round out an all-star cast in this sci-fi flick set in an alternate 1969 where two astronauts are on a six-year manned space mission. To keep sane, they both have Avatar-like android replicas back on Earth that they can jack into, allowing them to spend time with their families. When one of the astronaut’s family is murdered and his avatar destroyed, he sinks into a deep depression. The other astronaut allows him to use his avatar as a form of therapy, but this involves inhabiting the body and family life of another man. This episode is slow, cerebral sci-fi with a small cast and just a few set pieces. One has an idea that all is not going to end well. It’s a bit like a reverse-Avatar, where instead of controlling an avatar to interact with Pandora’s aliens, you are interacting with humans back on Earth. One of the things I admired about the writing is that there was no attempt to explain the technology. The characters simply accept it, and so does the viewer. There’s also a subtext of 60s-era masculinity driving the problems, where neither man can talk about his emotions and both view women as possessions.
MAZEY DAY
A financially-strapped photographer has a crisis-of-conscience and quits her paparazzi job, only to take one last lucrative assignment to snap photos of a starlet-in-hiding named Mazey Day. The episode starts as a somewhat-standard the paparazzi are awful plot, showing the horde of photographers going through every devious trick to score their prize and, in general, acting like terrible people. In that way, it’s very much on theme with the other episodes’ indictment of content consumers. After all, they are getting rewarded by the consumer for their intrusiveness. About two-thirds of the way through the story the plot takes a very unexpected and delightfully bloody twist with the remainder of the episode transforming into a rollercoaster of horror. The twist itself is nothing new from a cinema standpoint, but it is nonetheless fun, and I watched it twice.
DEMON 79
The standout episode from the season is also the least Black Mirror-ish. In fact, instead of the shattered Black Mirror title logo, Demon 79, opens with a Red Mirror logo. Set in 1979 and shot beautifully in a film style that emulates 70s-era slasher films, the sets, costumes, background television clips, and color palettes are aglow in Kodachrome hues. The plot follows a mild-mannered department store worker who faces racial discrimination, retreating into dark fantasies, Ally McBeal-style, where she strangles her co-workers. When she is exiled to eat her lunch in the department store basement, she accidentally summons a demon after bleeding upon a strange talisman she finds in an old desk. The demon tells her she must kill three people in three days to prevent the end of the world. To help her, the demon (hilariously) assumes the form of the lead singer of Boney M based upon a television show the woman had recently watched, and offers to show her the sins of her potential victims to ease her own moral qualms. There is no real technology component to this episode. Instead, it is a solid horror-comedy short with a traditional story structure, great momentum, and wonderful 70s homage. It’s its own mini Breaking Bad, following the woman’s transformation from victim to predator. Worth a second watch.
All five episodes this season were excellent, and the order they were presented makes perfect sense, with the strongest two (Joan is Awful and Demon 79) at both ends, and the middle-of-the-pack (Beyond the Sea) in the middle. It’s high praise that I went back and watched both Mazey Day and Demon 79 again. It’s awesome that Black Mirror has been churning out content now for twelve years, and I hope to see a Season 7.