Black Mirror Season 6 Takes Us to Dark Places, Brilliantly

After an agonizing 4-year hiatus, Season 6 of Black Mirror has at last dropped on Netflix and it does not disappoint. I’ll try not to spoil it for you because, trust me, there are some mind-blowing plot twists. The less you know about each episode, the better. The Wikipedia episode guide, intended to be a comprehensive source, naturally provides detailed and thorough synopses, so please don’t be tempted to read anything about the new season before you watch it.

Here is a brief overview of the episodes:

Episode 1 – Joan is Awful – A tech exec finds her comfy life turned into a ghastly TV drama that let streaming audiences witness the effects of her self-centered decisions

Episode 2 – Loch Henry – An aspiring filmmaker returns to Scotland with his girlfriend to do a documentary, but a change of plans uncovers secrets that were perhaps better left hidden

Episode 3 – Beyond the Sea – Two astronauts on a long-haul mission aboard an orbiting space station take simulated breaks on Earth to refresh their mental health, leading to lethal consequences

Episode 4 – Mazey Day – a scrappy paparazzo needs just one good photo to pay the rent, but her pursuit of a troubled celebrity drags her into revelations beyond comprehension

Episode 5 – Demon 79 – an East Indian woman facing racism in 1979 London accidentally conjures up a charismatic demon who lays the fate of mankind on her unwilling shoulders

Most of these Black Mirror episodes are, I’d say, on the whole, more in the horror tradition than in the speculative Twilight Zone tradition, as they have been previously. They are absolutely brilliantly conceived by series creator Charlie Brooker, who has written all but one of the 26 Black Mirror episodes since Black Mirror’s inception 12 years ago. With the consistent first-class direction, acting, cinematography, and production design that has made the series one of the most entertaining and often profound series on TV, the new season fires on all cylinders, with a thought-provoking quality rarely seen these days.

In general, I always find Black Mirror episodes full of resonant symbolism and depth worthy of careful analysis and long conversations, and these five new episode certainly invite that kind of discussion. But to delve into an assessment that deeply in the first week of their premiere would require spoiling too many plot points, which of course I won’t do. I have watched a few YouTube reviews and all of them I found annoying and wrong to some degree. It seems that the genre shift this season has disappointed many viewers — until we let artists out of their cages, almost everything in TV and film feels, to me, under cautious restraint — but the series still surpasses almost anything we can find on television or in movie theaters.

Here is how I would rank the episodes, each written by the brilliant satirist and series creator Charlie Brooker:

1. Mazey Day (director, Uta Briesewitz) stands for me at the top, due in large part to the wildest of the five plot reveals, but also with immense credit to the lead actress, Zazie Beetz, who is pure pleasure to watch. Since the story takes place in the days before iPhones existed, people were online but they didn’t have all-knowing computers in their pockets. Pre-GPS there was still a need for Los Angeles drivers to carry the massive Thomas Street Guide maps in our cars, and we couldn’t easily track the whereabouts people the way we can now. Among its non-stop cascade of thrills and chills, the episode is remarkably astute at a using the predatory behavior of paparazzi as a metaphor to shame us for our current thirst to slurp up the private lives of public celebrities.
2. Loch Henry (director, Sam Miller) is one of the creepier things I’ve ever seen on TV. Unless you like to feed your nightmares, don’t watch it alone. As with all Black Mirror chapters, the less you know about it, the better. It star Myha’la Herrold and Samuel Blenkinas as hip young filmmakers who head to a small town in the remote but idyllic Scottish highlands where the boyfriend grew up. They shift their intended film away from a local eccentric, to investigate a famous but unresolved serial killing, thus stumbling onto something far more dark and disturbing. This episode haunted me more than the others and, unlike the grim but more playful tone of Mazey Day, Loch Henry is not a place or state of mind that I feel eager to revisit. It’s just too dark. But brilliant. It could be expanded to a feature-length movie. The last scene is particularly powerful as we contemplate, along with the main character, where the journey to uncover the horrible truth has taken us. Just like all the best episodes of Black Mirror, it starts out one way, then throws us a curve ball, swerving along the treacherous turns of an entirely different road.
3. Beyond the Sea (director, Josh Crowley) offers us another spin on a consistent Black Mirror theme: creating an alternative universe that at first feels snugly familiar but then quickly becomes uncomfortably toxic. Once again, the episode takes us back to the past but drops us into an off-kilter parallel reality of 1969 where stunning advancements in android technology are matched by the marvels of sending men into Earth orbit. This enables two astronauts on a lengthy mission in an orbiting space station to spend time with their families by plugging into replica avatars that have been installed back home. To say much more would be to say too much. With Josh Hartnett and Auden Thornton, Aaron Paul and Kate Mara as two married couples learning to cope with the miracles of mid-century science, at its core it’s a tale of how men sometimes envy each other’s lives, and wives. With brutal echoes of the Manson cult era, it hits us early and hard with a graphic depiction of violence.
4. Demon 79 (director, Toby Haynes) – As the title suggests, this episode is yet another alt-universe time-travel, to a parallel 1979 timeline. From the very first frames we see how it intends to pay homage to the shock-fest Hammer-era horror movies of that cinematically audacious decade. Here the lovely Anjana Vasan plays Nida, a shy and abused clerk in a posh London department store. Nida finds herself unhappily on the cusp of the conservative Thatcher administration when Brit politicians were glomming onto ways to exploit the racial anxiety of immigration. That cusp becomes the tipping point to explore a grim rewrite of alternative history. It skillfully places us inside Nida’s head so we see things from her point of view, in terms of the casual racism and discrimination she faces. But before we get mired down in that message, Nida inadvertently summons a charming, flamboyant demon played by Paapa Essiedu (a scene-stealer) and is tasked with the unwanted burden to prevent Armageddon. She must abide by variety of arbitrary rules and regulations that cleverly mimic the dystopian tone that Terry Gilliam was perfecting in 1979. It’s an intense episode that I feel was already densely packed enough without the additional heavy-handed layer about race relations.
5. Joan is Awful (director, Ally Pankiw) seems to be the episode that a large number of people online seem to love most, but it was my least favorite. It poses interesting questions, but maybe because it’s deliberately absurdist and grossly comical, I found it to be less rooted in any kind of universal truth or relevant realism. At least it’s a chance to cast Salma Hayek in a role where she can cut loose and go wild, but even that feels like a great idea mostly unfulfilled. Fine, it’s funny, and I’m sure a lot of people will say it’s their favorite, simply because its packed with a gasp-inducing escalation of silliness. It just didn’t resonate with me the way the other episodes did.

As you can see, there’s a more gory element of violence in this season of Black Mirror that’s an unsettling departure from past seasons. It veers far more darkly away from psychological “what if” scenarios, and punches us in the gut with the visceral physical brutality of Fuck Around, Find Out consequences.

Overall, this is a strong season, but you’d have to be a Black Mirror novice not to notice how dramatically the season has changed over time. The creative masterminds of the series have proven the range of their fertile imagination, but if there was one show I would hope could meet the moment we face right now it would be Black Mirror. To me, it feels as if they aren’t yet ready to go there. What I mean by that is we’re living through a time of extreme fear, self-censorship, and what appears to be dogmatic thinking that casts a gauzy cloud on all film and television.

Conservatives might say Black Mirror, like all of Hollywood, has “gone woke.” I’m not sure I’d go that far but it would not be hard to tag this season as existing within the prescribed guidelines of the new mindset in our post-2020 culture. It’s everywhere and easily recognizable. The only people who don’t see it or won’t comment on it do so either out of fear or because they’re true believers.

Black Mirror has always had a social justice slant to its cautionary tales, though it’s never been quite so overt as it is in this latest season, for better or worse. None of the episodes in Season 6 can top what I think are the two best episodes of Black Mirror, Most Hated in the Nation and Nosedive. I have watched these two episodes on repeat more than any other because they say so much about the moment we’re living through now and are untouched by the dogma that colors almost everything.

As I watched these new episodes it was easy for me to see the difference between how it used to be and how it is now. A lot of filmmakers seem to believe that America, and much of the world, is systemically racist and that “white privilege” dominates all aspects of life. So they hope “woke” storylines might reverse that. Meaning, the bad characters are almost always white and good characters aren’t. For example, this scene in Nosedive (2016) probably wouldn’t be made today because the film industry has an agreed-upon worldview that sees things in the reverse power hierarchy.

That wasn’t the case in our pre-Trump, pre-2020 Hollywood, as you can see:

The beauty of Nosedive is that it exists entirely outside those strident rules, which is why I love the ending so much — an ending we would likely never see today:

Although nearly all the new episodes this season take place in past decades, the point of view represents a decidedly post-2020 mindset, and anyone watching the series over the past dozen years would be able to recognize that shift in perspective. It confirms, rather than challenges, the accepted worldview.

Perhaps that makes everyone involved feel more safe and secure — both the brilliant filmmakers who create the series and the eager audiences who watch it — with the hope that they can somehow control the challenges they most fear.

But regardless, Season 6 of Black Mirror is still better than almost anything else out there, and at this point I’ll take whatever fleeting pleasures I can get.