An episodic anthology series is a double-edged sword: Just as easily as a viewer can get swept up in a self-contained story, they can come away disappointed with the next episode in the queue. Swings and misses are bound to happen when crafting an anthology—at the end of the day, the key is maintaining a high batting average. There is perhaps no show more attuned to the highs and lows of its own existence than Black Mirror, which has emerged as the 21st century’s closest equivalent to The Twilight Zone, channeling the anxieties we carry in the present and imagining how they might affect our future. The fact that “This feels like something out of Black Mirror” is a popular shorthand for the latest WTF story in the news is, if nothing else, a testament to the show’s standing in the zeitgeist.
At its best, Black Mirror understands that while futuristic technology could spur major societal changes, human nature stays the same—often to our own detriment. But even a generation-defining series isn’t immune to setbacks, and while Black Mirror hasn’t been helped by the fact that the real world has become more absurd than any tech-driven dystopia could be—have you seen the photos of the classified documents Donald Trump stored in a bathroom?—the show has also become a bit too gimmicky for its own good. An interactive, choose-your-own-adventure episode felt like Black Mirror had succumbed to the allure of the new technology at its disposal, rather than having anything novel to say about it.
Thankfully, creator Charlie Brooker knows how to read the room, and he took a self-imposed break from the series at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which came soon after the tepid response to the fifth season. Not only did a longer layoff between new episodes make sense given the bleak state of the world—who wants to binge the ultimate feel-bad show in the middle of a pandemic?—but Brooker himself appeared to be in need of a creative reset. From there, the biggest question was not just when Black Mirror would return to Netflix, but what form the series would take in the aftermath of so much global upheaval.
Interestingly, while Brooker has admitted to tinkering with ChatGPT in his free time—he asked the AI program to write an episode of Black Mirror, which turned out to be “shit”—the majority of the five-episode sixth season is set in the past. (The earliest episode takes place in 1969, and the most “futuristic” installment is meant to reflect the present day.) It’s the kind of through line that would seem antithetical to the very nature of Black Mirror, but Brooker largely succeeds in subverting audience expectations without betraying the show’s core principles. All told, Black Mirror got the software update it sorely needed in Season 6—even as it spends most of its time in the analog era.
As for each episode and its merits, we may as well start in chronological order. “Beyond the Sea,” which also happens to be the longest installment of the new season, at 80 minutes, follows two astronauts, Cliff (Aaron Paul) and David (Josh Hartnett), on a deep-space mission in 1969 that will take six years to complete. The good news is that the men can stay close to their families through replicas: essentially, androids that the astronauts beam their consciousnesses into when they’re off the clock on the spaceship. (Think the tech of Severance but for maintaining a healthy work-life balance in the cosmos.) Unfortunately, David experiences a profound tragedy on Earth that also leaves him without his replica: an isolating situation that understandably gnaws at his psyche.
David’s predicament echoes the early lockdown days of the pandemic, and “Beyond the Sea” is especially intriguing as it pertains to humanity’s own ambitions to send astronauts to Mars. (On a psychological level, what would happen to an astronaut if they received bad news and were millions of miles from home?) But what really makes the episode work is how it stays rooted in the underlying behaviors and social norms of men during the Space Age. This was a generation so emotionally inhibited that Damien Chazelle made a whole biopic about how Neil Armstrong would rather risk his life landing on the moon than go to therapy—now, imagine that sort of astronaut trying to console someone during the worst moment of their life. “Beyond the Sea” goes to some really messed-up places, even by Black Mirror standards, and the episode’s brilliance lies in what could’ve been avoided had these two men actually talked through their feelings instead of letting them fester.
While “Beyond the Sea” is about how inaction can lead to devastating consequences, “Demon 79” imagines what would happen if we acted on our darkest impulses. Introduced with a bloody “Red Mirror Presents” label that implies the episode is taking a more conventional horror route, “Demon 79” follows Nida (Anjana Vasan), a meek sales assistant at a department store in 1979. As a young Indian woman in a predominantly white English town, Nida experiences different forms of discrimination, whether it’s local hooligans spray-painting the entrance to her apartment or her boss telling her to bring “normal” food into work instead of biryani. (Nida’s unapologetically racist coworker complains that the food stinks up the place.) Nida’s life is upended when she accidentally activates an ancient talisman, summoning a demon known as Gaap (Paapa Essiedu), who informs her that she must kill three people over three days in order to avert the apocalypse.
With an explicit focus on the supernatural instead of technology, “Demon 79” is a fascinating litmus test for what constitutes a Black Mirror episode. (It’s also worth noting that “Demon 79” is cowritten by Bisha K. Ali, the British Pakistani comedian who was the head writer of Ms. Marvel.) I imagine some viewers will find the experience off-putting because, well, the colead is an actual demon; personally, I was more chafed by the unnecessarily bloated 74-minute run time. Brooker has always had a political bend to his work—the very first episode of Black Mirror is about a British politician being goaded into performing [clears throat] an intimate act with a pig—and it’s no coincidence that this episode takes place in the same year that Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister. (The demon can show Nida visions of a person’s future, which is why one of her targets is a local Tory politician with grand ambitions to divide the country.) It’s a little too unwieldy for its own good, but “Demon 79” does a solid job capturing the moral decay that inevitably leads to Brexit and the rage inherent with the lack of power to stop it. For many, the Brexit era certainly feels like a sign of the end-times; the real demons just happen to be members of Parliament.
One of the only professions as loathsome as politics might be the paparazzi, the focal point of the sixth season’s weakest episode, “Mazey Day.” Set in the early aughts, the episode begins with Bo (Zazie Beetz), an L.A.-based paparazzo, taking photos of a closeted male celebrity leaving a motel room with another man. The aftermath of the incident—the celebrity kills himself—leads Bo to reconsider what she should be doing with her life. (Congrats on finally growing a conscience.) Meanwhile, a movie star known as Mazey Day (Clara Rugaard) is shooting a film in the Czech Republic before she’s involved in a hit-and-run, prompting her to go into hiding somewhere in California. Despite swearing off the paparazzi life, Bo is roped into taking One Last Photo that could lead to a massive payday if she can track down Mazey’s whereabouts.
The period that “Mazey Day” takes place in, before the prevalence of smartphones or social media, underscores the disturbing influence that paparazzi once wielded and how they treated celebrities like prized property waiting to be exploited for personal gain. (Being a celebrity isn’t exactly smooth sailing in 2023, but at least people have more ways to cultivate their image and control the narrative surrounding them.) The carnivorous nature of the industry becomes a bit more literal by the end of “Mazey Day,” which is far too bonkers to spoil. Really, the biggest problem with the episode is that it ends up going for the sort of mindless shock value that once made paparazzi so powerful in the first place—right down to its climactic snapshot.
Of course, turning real-life atrocities into content isn’t always frowned upon—depending on what you can get out of it. “Loch Henry,” which is set in a quaint Scottish town closer to the present day, concerns two young filmmakers, Davis (Samuel Blenkin) and Pia (Myha’la Herrold), as they set out to make a local nature documentary. For Davis, the trip is a homecoming—they’re staying with his widowed mother—but the entire situation puzzles Pia. Despite the picturesque location, Loch Henry is practically a ghost town. As she soon finds out, there’s a reason for that: The town was once home to a serial killer, Iain Adair, who picked off tourists and tortured them in a hidden basement. (The news was soon overshadowed by Princess Diana’s death, but Loch Henry’s economy never recovered.) Throw in the fact that Davis’s late father, a police officer, was shot by Adair—he later died after contracting MRSA in the hospital—and Pia decides that Adair should become the focus of their documentary.
Tackling the enduring popularity of true crime series, “Loch Henry” is at its most compelling when it zeroes in on the callous nature of making someone’s trauma a form of entertainment. As Davis tells Pia when she uses his father’s involvement to make the case for the documentary: “That’s real; that’s not fucking content!” Yet the most telling moment in “Loch Henry” comes when the two are pitching the documentary to a producer, who worries that Adair won’t have the same mass appeal as someone like Ted Bundy because nobody’s heard of him. Treating serial killers and the gruesome acts they’ve committed as IP is abhorrent in and of itself, and by the time the documentary falls on the radar of a streaming service known as Streamberry—a cheeky Netflix stand-in—the episode underlines that all the success in the world isn’t worth the human cost of dredging up ghosts of the past.
Streamberry has a more prominent role in what may be Black Mirror’s single funniest episode: “Joan Is Awful.” It follows an ordinary woman named Joan (Annie Murphy) on a day in which she fires a colleague at the behest of her superiors, visits her therapist, and meets up with an old flame at a bar—they briefly kiss before she realizes it was a mistake. She comes home to learn that Streamberry has adapted her life into a series. (The TV version of Joan is played by, of all people, Salma Hayek.) The sheer invasiveness of the predicament notwithstanding, the Joan Is Awful show takes certain creative liberties with Joan’s behavior. As the title prophesied, Joan Is Awful makes Joan seem like a truly terrible person, rather than a flawed yet relatable individual trying to make sense of her life. And it’s right there for all of Streamberry’s subscribers to see as the show quickly climbs the streamer’s viewing charts.
Commenting on everything from the rampant spread of misinformation to deepfakes to AI-generated content, “Joan Is Awful” is admirably unsparing in depicting Streamberry and its power-hungry executives as the villains of its story. (At one point, Hayek laments that the company has “taken 100 years of cinema and diminished it to an app.”) Fair play to Brooker for biting the hand that feeds, especially when the episode is coming out in the middle of the ongoing WGA strike, which is predicated on similar anxieties around the future of art being dictated by algorithms instead of artists. What’s most harrowing about “Joan Is Awful” is that, even as viewers react with horror, the streaming powers that be might see something else in the episode’s nightmarish future: a business opportunity.
Suffice it to say, a four-year layoff has done little to dilute Black Mirror’s reliable brand of cynicism—even its most comical hour is suffused with the kind of dread that currently looms over the very industry the show is a part of. Whether Brooker will take as much time between new seasons—if there will be any more Black Mirror to begin with—remains to be seen. But 27 episodes and one interactive film into its run, Black Mirror has proved that it’s an exceedingly rare breed of anthological storytelling: a series that can traverse decades and genres and still feel like it’s channeling the same frequency.
