Herein, I adapt Kent's One's format for reviewing TV, because its always hard to find something to say about each episode of a show, that you have watched in entirety. To summarize: 100 words to describe the show/season, 1 Great Thing, 1 Good Thing, 1 Bad Thing.
And Spoilers motherfucker. (Sorry, that was me channeling Salma Hayek as Joan)
2023, Netflix
What 100: Joan is Awful is the best of the season, with Joan finding herself depicted as a terrible person on a Netflix-like show. Loch Henry is just a murder-mystery horror short. Beyond the Sea is an alt-timeline spaceflight story which leads us down a terrible garden path. Mazey Day is a wonderful horror short that needs to be a proper (SPOILER!) werewolf movie. Demon 79 is another horror movie short that is the second best of the lot. Do we see a theme here, from a series that was originally about technology gone wrong?
1-The Great: The proper chilling, disturbing, proper cautionary scifi tale of Joan is Awful which I thought was just going down the cringe fiction for the sake of cringe, but emerged a layered nuanced layered story of determination and reality. And funny AF. And cringe, let's not forget the cringe. But the idea of Annie Murphy (Kevin Can Go F**k Himself) playing Joan but also herself against Salma Hayek (Desperado) playing Joan, on TV, but also herself ending with a quantum computer (those new almost steampunk depictions of computers that are all glass and brass are The New Thing) that is building endless layers of reality is just ... well, pure Black Mirror. Also, we cannot overlook the use of recognizable faces such as Ben Barnes, Himesh Patel and Michael Cera as background characters is also a statement.
Meanwhile, Demon 79 is just a splendiferous pair of performances in a very dark, comic tale of demonic pacts. Set in 1979 in small town England, Nida imagines murdering her racist coworker at the department store. And also the local perv. And probably, eventually, the local MAGA-style (MGBGA?) political candidate. Hiding out in the basement with her "smelly biryani", she finds a talisman and awakens a demon, who at first is all scary AF, but then puts on the face of one of the Boney M gang. Still, he's a demon, and she has to murder three people in very real life, or The World Will End. Does she want to do it, does she NOT want to do it? Why do demons who put pacts upon people have the ability to make THAT pact the world ending pact for EVERYONE? Is this just a comment that we are indeed the Main Characters of our own stories? You wouldn't think the Powers That Be would put such massively powerful pacts out there in the Temptation Game. One fuckup and POOF, the game ends for all the players. And what if the screw up the game by accident? <big evil grin>
1-The Good: Loch Henry is only disappointing in that it is a rather classic horror short story but it is still so very tightly told and performed. It could easily have been one of the flicks we watched during a UK entry for our 31 Days of Halloween run, but I guess I agree, that it might not fit entirely into the whole Black Mirror world.
Meanwhile, Mazey Day only ends up in the Good because it was just too short, and I could really just enjoy an entire movie on the concept. But I admit fully, I am partial to werewolf stories. A paparazzo (not often you see the singular) chases down a story involving a celebrity (what else?) who may have had a breakdown, may have done something bad. Probably both. But what she ends up finding is both what she needed to find, and the nail in the coffin on selling her soul to the industry she was trying to get out of.
1-The Bad: I would only lump Beyond the Sea into the Bad because I really did not like the toxic masculinity explored. The actual telling of the movie-length story, an alternate history of the American space race where the astronauts can project themselves back to Earth for brief periods, enclosed in robot shells that perfectly mimic the astronauts, is great. It was a tale of its time, the American Space Race of the late 60s, including the intervention of an anti-tech cult that take the lives of one astronaut's family, leaving him forever stranded in space without relief. Forever? Well, until their journey is over.
David (Josh Hartnett, The Lovers) is a classic American astronaut: handsome, outgoing with an adoring family. Cliff (Aaron Paul, Westworld) is quiet, introspective, reads science-fiction and is utterly domineering to his wife. When David loses his family, Cliff offers to let him ride his robot body and spend time back on Earth with his wife Lana (Kate Mara, Fantastic Four) in the isolated house in the country. Soon, just being on Earth is not enough for David, especially since he thinks he's better than Cliff. That leads down a very dark, tragic path that I really didn't care for, but if anything, was the only other on-brand story in the season.
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