The disturbing anthology series returns with a look at video games, internet shame, and the totally tubular 80s.
This is a review for all six new episodes of Black Mirror, debuting Friday, October 21st on Netflix. There won't be any discussion of deep spoilers for any episode though, so as to not ruin story elements.
Now a Netflix original series, Charlie Brooker's thought-provoking, fear-inducing anthology, Black Mirror, is back with a grab bag of new episodes that range from the fundamentally moving to the explicitly terrifying. Not knowing what you're going to get is part of the thrill with Black Mirror - a show whose stories contain the loose connective tissue of how technology and society may be a toxic relationship.
The term "five minutes from now" has been used to describe the worlds on Black Mirror. Future societies, but not too far from the present. It varies though. In some cases, you'll get a wildly different landscape that may be a century away. In others, it pretty much feels like the here and now. You also never quite know what type of tale it'll be as the chapters can take on many different shapes and forms. Plus, depending on the tech involved, there's a discovery process for the viewer. What morbid take on social media are we in for this time? Do these characters have implants of some kind or an unhealthy obsession with their online presence? What's the devilish twist?
So yes, each episode of Black Mirror is its own journey, requiring a bit of patience at the outset for exploration. I'm happy to say too that these six new episodes are excellent. In, perhaps, the same way, the first seven (two British series of three, plus a Christmas special) were excellent. There are some outstanding ones and then some lesser offerings. But - man - the exemplary stories really stand out and stick with you, their dark desperation getting trapped in your mind like white shavings in a snow globe. Sure, it can depend on the person and their proclivities, but I think most fans wind up loving and admiring the same Black Mirror episodes - whether they touch our hearts or freeze our souls.
Starting with the Season 3 episode that resonated with me the least, "Men Against Fire" still managed to paint a scary portrait of a world where soldiers are implanted with battle-enhancement mind/sight technology that supposedly aids their missions. Of all the stories on the new slate, this one was the least engaging emotionally, yet it also still reminded me a little of the world on CBS' Person of Interest, had the bad guys outright won on that show and time pressed forward. Maybe it's the inclusion of Michael Kelly or the notion that global DNA screenings could have dire consequences.
I suppose a viable question when it comes to Black Mirror is "Do I need to watch them in order?" As in, is there an actual thematic reasoning behind the sorting? The episode "Nosedive" is the first one listed on Netflix for the season, but do you need to watch it first? Is it, say, the perfect entry to these six new installments, in that it's not too horrifying, but also disturbing enough to prime your pump? I can't help but think back to the first episode I ever watched, "The National Anthem," and how much it seemed to feel like an outlier. Sure, it dealt with terrorists making a frightening (and gross) point about a voyeuristic public doomed to destroy itself with distraction (Season 3's "Hated in the Nation" also hits us with a terror attack born of similar design), but it was so different from "Fifteen Million Merits" - the episode that followed if you watched in order.
In this respect, Season 3's first three - "Nosedive," "Playtest," and "Shut Up and Dance" - work much better as a thread. In "Nosedive" (written by Brooker, along with Parks and Rec's Rashida Jones and Michael Schur), Bryce Dallas Howard plays a woman living in an exhausting future world in which every single social interaction you make is given a score. It's not a horror story, yet its filled with some very scary realizations about our obsession with how we appear online. It's part Brave New World, part that one Community episode with the MeowMeowBeenz app, and features a very compelling score by Max Richter. It's both fun and frustrating and it works well when you consider that the next two episodes get a lot more grounded and grim.
Having recently screened at NYCC, "Playtest," directed by 10 Cloverfield Lane's Dan Trachtenberg, takes place in our world but operates more like a straight up horror movie - complete with a main character (Wyatt Russell) who comes with a vague amount of personal baggage in his backstory. Baggage that will get thematically woven into his one-off stint as a video game tester who's about to engage in a programming genius' latest experiment in VR terror. You'll never know what's a glitch and what's part of the planned nightmare until the nesting doll fully pares down to the core. It's a trip.
It's "Shut Up and Dance" though that may leave you utterly shaken. In fact, we have "The National Anthem" to thank for this episode's ability to take place in the world of right now and deliver a remarkably heart-pounding episode about a teenager who's blackmailed into following instructions from text messages after an unseen enemy records him pleasuring himself through his laptop camera. "Nosedive" contains scarily relatable insight into social media, but "Shut Up and Dance" actually feels like something that could happen as is. We don't need to shuffle ourselves five minutes into the future.
I'm not exactly sure why I'm breaking Season 3 up into two halves, but that's how I watched it. Maybe I'm just following the British series model of three episodes. In that regard, if we're talking halves, the first half works best. That being said, the second set of three has the season's best episode, "San Junipero." Yes, it's got a few twists here and there, as all Black Mirror episodes do, but it's also the most hopeful. There's pain present, but ultimately its a love story that literally transcends consciousness. Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis do an outstanding job in this story that involves a mysterious Pacific Coast town steeped in everything '80s - from Max Headroom to arcades to that "Living in a Box" song by Living in a Box. It's a marvelous episode.
If you go by the order presented, only certain aspects of the season's final episode, "Hated in the Nation," have a Black Mirror vibe, beyond its basic messaging. Playing the most like a feature-length thriller with a sci-fi bent (it's the longest of the new episodes), it stars Kelly Macdonald and Game of Thrones' Faye Marsay as investigators looking into the mysterious deaths of people who are the target of mass internet outrage and the hashtag thread "#DeathTo." The beats in this one are the most traditional, playing out like a B-movie rented from Redbox. It's not bad (there's actually a very powerful moment set to a song by Alev Lenz), but it feels the least disturbing in a way - despite the sheer severity of events.
The Verdict
The fact that Charlie Brooker can give us such wildly varied stories -- in both theme and tone -- is one of Black Mirror's strengths. It also makes the outset of each episode very exciting for the viewer since we never quite know what we're getting into (though something twisted and troubling is often a good bet). It's also the reason though why some episodes pop more than others. It's just the nature of the anthology beast.
Here, the first four episodes -- particularly "San Junipero" and "Shut Up and Dance" -- scorched their way onto my brain, though for different reasons, obviously, since there are some huge differences between them. Overall though, these are all solid, sinister stories with important takeaways.
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