Black Mirror

I’ve got a weird love/hate relationship with Black Mirror like most viewers of the original seasons do. The first three seasons stood as grim and depressing tales of technological abuse that always felt connected just enough to our current world to become uncomfortably familiar and believable. A few of these original episodes also have lost a lot of their entertainment and rewatch value because their predictions have essentially become true, and when something is exaggerated to be dystopian ends up becoming true, the dystopia becomes a lot less “fun” as a result. In fact this is one of the issues the later seasons of the show have faced: reality has caught up with the fiction. Whilst technology hasn’t gotten to the level portrayed in Black Mirror, the horrors it warns against have already peaked past what it originally envisioned and as such later seasons feel more like belated criticisms rather than foreboding warnings.

That is when Black Mirror sticks to its critical techno-thriller roots because the later seasons also simply struggle because they take a closer approach to picking a technology and then running a fun little adventure through it. Gone was the grittiness, the sadness, the ominousness and in is the funny, the quirky, the casual fun. This is where I make a distinction that most Black Mirror fans would probably disagree with but I categorise the series’ episodes in 4 categories:
1- Dark, depressing and relevant but I would not want to put myself through that again, aka a good old school Black Mirror episode
2- More fun but still grounded and overall serious, happy to rewatch it for fun even if it doesn’t hit the bleakness of the original Black Mirror
3- Quirky and ridiculous with no link with Black Mirror outside of the name, would not want to watch that shite again aka a plain bad Black Mirror episode on-top of being bad television
4- Old school Black Mirror wannabe, being dark and depressing but with no particular effort into telling a compelling story, this is usually a poor attempt at appeasing the “Black Mirror episodes shouldn’t have a happy ending” crowd.

Like most categorisation attempts there’s exceptions all over the place, particularly in season 4 where we see a lot of experimental storytelling like in the Metalhead and Black Museum episodes but overall it paints a decent picture. Seasons 1-3 being all category 1 or 2 episodes, season 4 being otherwise category 2 and 4 episodes, season 5 with category 3 and 4 episodes and season 6 being characterised by its unevenness having at least one episode for each category and adding in a magical twist that went entirely against the premise of Black Mirror to begin with.

The show has now been running for longer being “bad” than it has being good and yet I watch every season with renewed hope that maybe this time it’ll be back to being good and depressing.

Season 7 starts off solidly in that area with Common People following the story of a couple where one of the two partners following brain cancer has their consciousness copy pasted (weirdly the show never addresses that problem vs cut and pasted) before a fatal surgery and then introduced back into the body through a chip. The function of the chip is dependent on a disgustingly expensive subscription and as the story progresses the subscription keeps getting worse, introducing tiers with the brain being taken over temporarily for the body to speak through an advertisement script or sleep being replaced by a connection to the server to use the brain for other functions. This eventually culminates to the couple being unable to afford to live anymore and with them agreeing that the partner with the chip has to be killed as life on the most basic tier of subscription is unbearable. It is grim and the story it tells is entirely plausible and it hits that “I would not want to put myself through this again” feeling but it also fell victim to today’s capitalism, losing its forewarning. Enshittification is not only already happening, it already has, adding the twist of it being someone’s life being on a subscription instead of Netflix doesn’t change much that it was entirely predictable. I also just don’t have it in me anymore to watch pseudo capitalist “critiques” produced by multi billion dollar companies. As always Joyce in Disco Elysium is proven right: Capitalism subsumes all critiques within itself, all who would critique capitalism, end up reinforcing it instead.

Episode 2, Bête Noire did something I didn’t expect: it made me hope for a good supernatural twist. It’s set up as paranormal horror with the protagonist noticing reality change around her with events she saw seemingly having never occurred and peaking at “nut allergy” having apparently never been a thing. The reason behind these changes seems to be one of the protagonist’s old classmates who it turns out is on a revenge plot against the protagonist for her high school bullying. The episode perfectly invested me into feeling unnerved by these changes to reality and I was thinking that the only explanation here would be that the old classmate had done a deal with the devil or some other witchcraft and I actually was sort of on board with that because the horror strings were being plucked competently throughout. Then it turns out that the old classmate is a computer nerd who made a quantum computer than allows the user to move between infinite parallel universes where whatever they say is true and that was cheap and shit. Also apparently you can get bored of being empress of the universe.

San Junipero in season 3 was a stand out episode, offering a happy ending for once and to most it still worked really well as a real Black Mirror episode. It also portrayed an LGBT relationship which at the time was also quite a big deal. I personally never felt much for the episode, just fell kinda flat for me but that’s ok too, I’ve never had any issue with that episode having been made. Hotel Reverie in season 7 wants to be San Junipero again with a similar virtual reality set up, similar sapphic love but this time we’re adding a twist of AI becoming conscious and it’s just kind of boring for me again. It also vastly overstays its welcome running an almost full 90min. Maybe it’s good and it just missed the mark for me again but I was just mostly bored even if the premise was fun for like the first 20min.

Plaything suffers from my reading. It is essentially beat for beat Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost exploring the advent of Roko’s basilisk. My main comment on Summer Frost was that it “encapsulates the spirit of a near future dystopia and tells a fully rounded story, it reads like a Black Mirror story and follows all the story beats of the show through its premise, baiting of hope for a happy ending and the depression of it being squashed moments later”. I’d say Summer Frost was better than Plaything but I’m still happy to have seen it being adapted and for my sort of prediction to have come true. If it hadn’t been for Blake Crouch’s short story that I can compare it to, Plaything would be right up there among my favourites.

Eulogy is…fine? Similarly to Common People it’s an emotionally investing episode but I can’t say I felt much Black Mirror from it. It’s quite plain and a bit boring and there’s really not much to say about it as it simply follows a man rediscovering and reinterpreting memories through some old photographs with the help of an AI. There’s no technological twist, nor particularly marking ending but it tells a decent bittersweet (but mostly bitter) romance story.

Finally USS Calister round 2. It didn’t need a sequel, if anything the sequel robs the ending of the first episode of season 4 from impact. It really is just more of the same, there’s no surprises, no new technology being explored and it’s not even really interested in telling a particularly grim story. Remembering on how the season 4 ended, there is the suggestion that the USS Calister’s crew escaping erasure again might have killed 30 odd million people who were in the game at the same time that they escaped and erased it but the episode itself doesn’t even suggests this so it might be a case of the writers either having forgotten or having changed the rules. It’s still good fun for a one time watch but it’s also a bit of a waste of time.

So overall season 7 was in line with what one could expect. Nothing in it was amazing and it hits some of its usual lows as the show has for many years now but compared to season 5 and 6, it’s arguably getting better? I can’t say I’m looking forward to season 8, I’d be quite happy if they just finally shut the show down because I don’t think it can go back to its original roots in our current world but for some quick fast food television you could do worse.