1-1-1: Black Mirror Season 7

created by Charlie Brooker

It's been almost two years since the last season of Black Mirror, which, truthfully, isn't so long ago but also feels like an eternity (Brooker really needs to write an episode about how our perception of time changes as we get older...but, you know, with technology). We got spoiled in those early Netflix years where Brooker cranked out three seasons of six episodes (and a special) over four years. It's probably for the best he hasn't maintained that pace. Black Mirror can be an intense show, and we probably need a longer refractory period before we thrust back into the technological trauma of Charlie Brooker's demented mind.

Except Black Mirror isn't just about exploring technology's ugly downsides or worst-case-scenarios, not anymore. Starting with "San Junipero" in season 3, an oasis of loveliness in an otherwise sea of dread at that point, Booker usurped expectations as to what the show could be. He continues to do so, and it's not just once per season. He's really adapted over the past three seasons into big tone shifts, from playful to comedic to suspense to creature feature to existential horror to romance and on. Every episode is not an absolute nightmare, and every episode is not about the twisting of the knife. 

One still has to brace themselves for each episode of Black Mirror to present to them something discomforting or even upsetting, but the show hasn't so much as lost its edge in today's nightmare world as its ceded being edgy for the sake of sustainability. I think if the bleak worldview of the first two seasons persisted, the show wouldn't have sustained its mass appeal. Brooker has ventured much deeper into science fiction territory over the years, stepping back from horror and terror. From the beginning he's balanced high concept world-building storytelling with character-based storytelling very effectively, but his character-based episodes have evolved to let the characters set the tone of an episode rather than the technology or the "twist", such as they were.

Season 7 is the next evolution of Black Mirror, with Brooker connecting new stories with past stories, sharing technology between stories but in different contexts, and even dropping a direct sequel to a past episode. unconstrained by time commitments (there are two feature-length episodes here), this season is varying in quality from episode to episode, but I think none are particuarly bad, some just are subjectively better than others.

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SPOILERS BELOW

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Common People
d. Ally Pankiw

The What 100: Mike and Amanda are a couple very much in love, and completely devoted to one another. They have a very comfortable life together, until Amanda falls ill with a previously undiagnosed brain tumour. Enter Rivermind, a company that says it will be able to fix Amanda, and for free, with a daring new technology that replaces the damaged sectors of the brain. But this new lease on life comes at a cost of a monthly subscription that Mike and Amanda can barely afford, not to mention other limitations like "service areas". The enshittification of human brains begins to wear on their once happy life.

(1 Great) The chemistry between Chris O'Dowd and Rashida Jones playing Mike and Amanda is everything for this episode. It's pretty heavy handed in its messaging so it all rests upon these actors to sell the emotional component of the story.  In the background is a couple who have built a very loving life together, remaining strong after a series of miscarriages, and, even in its current trials with Rivermind, you can sense the frustration but the love is not lost. When the idea of this brain-segment replacement is proposed, I immediately knew what the progression of the story would be, but it's the characters' journeys navigating this life-saving, but also life-crippling technology that matter.  O'Dowd and Jones are pretty effective dramatic actors, but they know comedy too, so the tone capably switches in and out like in the situations when Amanda is forced to say "contextually relevant" ads out loud that are both hilarious and terrifying.

(1 Good) Frankly, I found the marriage of tackling the burden of for-profit medical systems, the non-stop upgrade cycle of cellular service, and the progression of every service becoming a subscription to actually cohere pretty well in this story. It's not subtle in the slightest, and it need not be. Subscriptions services suck as do for-profit medical systems. The lack of humanity involved in capitalizing on other people's ill fortune seems to only be getting worse in our ever-dreadful capitalistic society.

(1 Bad) There's a tertiary aspect to this story about how, when societies start to crumble, the first thing to go is our sense of empathy. We start to feel better about our own situations by observing the misfortunes of others, whether it be putting them into a gladiatorial pit or watching them denigrate themselves for money. This story has a side-hustle on-line "only fans"-inspired website called DumDummies where people go on to humiliate and/or abuse themselves for the meagre spend of others. It's a very Black Mirror concept, but it's also a bigger concept than is given time to be explored here. The DumDummies side plot tonally interferes with the pathos of the episode once it starts becoming a more relevant part of the story. It's also conceptually unpleasant, not quite "The National Anthem" level but still, clearly, Brooker hasn't completely grown out of that gross-out sensibility.

META: The end of Season 4 had an episode called "Black Museum" which intoned that there was some connective tissue between episodes in the series, and ever since Brooker has been adding more connective tissue between different episodes. It's clear that not all the realities are the same realities but a lot of them are, or at least adjacent (we'll cover this more with the next episode's "meta"). This episode, tonally, felt akin to "Be Right Back", but the brain technology used in this episode we haven't seen any logical antecedent to (at least not yet). However, Amanada is a school teacher who has been teaching her kids about the mechanical drone bees that were introduced in "Hated In The Nation", so they're possibly in the same reality.

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Bete Noir
d. Toby Haynes

The What 100: Maria is a successful food scientist for a snack food company who has her world turned upside down by Verity, whom she went to high school with, who joins the company. Verity was not a popular kid in high school, and her sudden emergence in Maria's life makes her uncomfortable. Within short order, Maria gets the sense that Verity is there to sabotage her career, and not only that, either she is going mad or somehow Verity is changing reality.

(1 Great) This exploration of the effects of confabulation is an amazing starting point for a Black Mirror episode. What if suddenly things aren't quite as you remember them? Little things like the wording of an email, or the name of an old fast food chain... especially if it keeps happening. Bound to drive you mad, but what if it all correlates with the sudden re-entrance into your life of someone whom you bullied in high school? Would you think they were fucking with you? But they can't just rewrite reality, can they...?

(1 Good) ...In effect, yes they can. This story introduces to the realm of Black Mirror the idea of parallel realities, and the character of Verity has developed a quantum computer that has allowed her to shift reality around her on the press of a button an a whim. The power one can exude with such a device is enormous, and the episode touches upon that, but also the dissatisfaction of having a "cheat code" to life, and one's inability to escape one's trauma. Instead of therapy, Verity built a device where she could jump realities.

(1 Bad) I quite enjoyed the episode, but if I were to quibble, I would have liked it to sit even more with the terror of Maria feeling like her reality was crumbling around her. The thing is, it seemed like Booker's script was sort of on-board with Maria getting some sense of comeuppance. Was Brooker bullied as a kid?  I did guess that Maria, despite being our protagonist, was the villain of the piece, and while that didn't fully come true, she's not the innocent victim either. Had she had any outward sense of complicity or remorse (you could tell in Siena Kelly's performance there was some internal struggles and repression of her past misdeeds) then I think we would have been far more sympathetic towards her, and her terror would have hit harder, but this wasn't what Booker was after.

META: Spinning on the idea of Everything Everywhere All At Once and tapping into alternate realities, Brooker has opened up the concept that Black Mirror is a multiverse (Oh no! Multiverses are so 2023). As I mentioned above, he likes to loosely thread these pretty much stand-alone tales together in their own ways, but the only way to truly connect them would be as a multiverse, since some of the stories or technologies clash with known elements of other stories and technologies. I don't sense any grand architectural scheme out of this, I don't expect any sort of "Black Mirror Avengers Endgame" upcoming where worlds start colliding and crossing over. I think Brooker may be just playing with the concepts quantum dimentions or the theoretical powers of quantum computing (the series Devs used it to, in its own way, "time travel" through digital prognostication).  

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Hotel Reverie
d. Haolu Wang

The What 100: The 1940's black-and-white classic "Hotel Reverie" is going to be remade, so to speak, but through the proprietary technology from ReDream where they've rebuilt the entire world and environment of the 1940s original, as well as its cast so that they can insert superstar Brandy Friday as the romantic protagonist of the piece. During the "filming" Brandy will enter into the digital simulated reality of the film, performing against legendary actress Dorothy Chambers, or an AI simulacrum thereof. Brandy must complete the film's prescribed journey or face potentially being trapped in the world forever, but, when an accident disrupts the system, and Dorothy obtains self-awareness, Brandy isn't sure she ever will want to leave anyway.

(1 Great) Emma Corrin as Dorothy Chambers delivers a very believable, era-specific performance that asks her to be a character in a 1940's film but also gain an awareness of that fact, and also understand that she was also a real person, not just a character in a film. Dorothy learns who that person was (mainly through digital news archives) and gains a sort of sentience as result, and Corrin plays that awakening so well. Corrin also is able to show how the character's real-life struggles influenced the performance in the film-within-the-film but also connect it to the story at hand. It's a really skilled juggling exercise which she handles impressively well.

(1 Good) The romance between Brandy (Issa Rae) and Dorothy was the heart of "Hotel Reverie" and it is a lovely heart at that. I liked the idea that Issa Rae as Brandy Friday could step into a 1940's reality where nobody would care that she was a black woman who winds up falling in love with another woman...nobody would care beyond the context of the story itself where there's a jealous husband involved, that is. For all the aspects of Rae's performance in the film-within-the-film that didn't work for me, the connection between Brandy and Dorothy really did.

(1 Bad) The conceit of this story does not work for me at all. "Remaking" a classic black and white movie, beat-for-beat, scene-for-scene just with a modern actor in one of the roles will not be a success. A curiousity, yes, but not something that would a sustainable vision for film releases going forward. Especially from what we see in this episode, the results of sticking a modern actor in a classic movie are not at all pretty, especially when you can't have multiple takes and your star is stunned or surprised by so much of what's going on around them.

META: The gang over at The Weekly Planet podcast suggested that the story here is not bad, but the reason for the story is, and I wholeheartedly agree. This could be a technology where *anyone* (with enough money) could get inserted into a movie and live out their dream of being part of the picture (could you imagine getting to play, say, Han Solo in a technological dreamscape where the Star Wars galaxy feels real and not a set? It's a real fantasy to be sure). Have the episode be it's expensive and some regular person has scrimped and saved only for the the experience to go a bit haywire, and this romantic thing happens as a result... it seems even more Black Mirror that way if it's a technology that the masses can access, even if it's somewhat out of reach.  I felt like this conceit could have tightened the narrative and slimmed the episode down, making for a more sweeping romantic tale.

I also thought, at one point, is this going to wind up being the origin story for the San Junipero technology ("Juniper" is mentioned both in this episode and in "Common People" and "USS Callister: Into Infinity" as well), but no, not really(?)

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Plaything
d. David Slade

The What 100: A dishevelled man walks into a convenience store, tries to steal a bottle of liquor but is stopped by anti-theft automations at the store. When the police arrive they find out the man is also a DNA match for a cold case murder from the 90s. Taken in for questioning he tells his history of being an awkward, nervous, social outcast and gaming nerd. He worked for a video game magazine and was assigned to preview the latest offering from legendary programmer Colin Ritman, Thronglets...an anti-game about raising and nurturing a digital civilization of creatures that start to grow beyond their parameters. The unfolding of the story bridges past and present, and holds the key to the future in a very Black Mirror fashion.

(1 Great) Peter Capaldi holds the reigns of this episode from his first moments on screen and just carries it through. A lot of it is the knowledge his character Cameron has that nobody else (including the audience) does, but Capaldi is so charming and effective as a nervous tick of a man who has only somewhat outgrown his nerves with some very specific confidence. I never really did watch Capaldi as Doctor Who, but I don't think there's a performance of his that I've seen that I have not enjoyed.

(1 Good) Most Black Mirror episodes are very well directed but David Slade's episodes (previously "Metalhead" and "Bandersnatch") are standouts. The X-Files, Hannibal and Breaking Bad director has a history of making visually striking episodes of television, something which hasn't necessarily translated into a bold cinematic career, but damn does he make TV look good. This episode is set in the same world as "Bandersnatch" (the Black Mirror "interactive film" where the user can choose the direction of the story as it progresses) so much of the visual style was established with that production, but here Slade carries that style forward and has to juggle a second time period. It's all within an aspect ratio that doesn't seem to be standard widescreen, nor classic 4:3. And that interrogation room, the angles are just insane and captured perfectly. And, of course, Slade has real fun with Cameron's acid trips.

(1 Bad) I was anticipating a Bandersnatch sequel, and this isn't that, which is probably for the best.

META: Of all the Black Mirror episodes, Bandersnatch is the one I've returned to the most...for obvious reasons. It's a wild pick-a-path style story that is super fun to puzzle over all the alternate realities that it presents, and the way it lets you reset to "save points" (just noting that "save points" are mentioned in "Hotel Reverie") and back up to pick a different option to the abrupt story's end. As far as I know, there is no "true path", and so doing a direct sequel to Bandersnatch would entail ascribing one to that story, which would ruin it, so it's best they didn't.  

Brooker used to work as a video game reviewer for PC Zone magazine, so it's tempting to say there's a bit of himself in this one, but there's probably not much beyond having the same job as Cameron in the 90's.

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Eulogy
d. Christopher Barrett, Luke Taylor

The What 100: Phillip is called up by a service called Eulogy to see if he would provide his recollections of a woman whom he once dated and has recently passed away. The service entails him interacting with a virtual assistant who steps him into the photographs he has of the era and helps him draw out his memories which would then be shared with those in attendance at the funeral. It's an emotional journey about the fluidity of love and memory.

(1 Great) 90% of the time Black Mirror is about the terror of technology, how invasive it is or how it can spin out of its intended use into something nefarious, but sometimes Brooker crafts an idea that finds technology providing something so beautiful as helping someone to remember the past. The start of this journey takes a distant trauma and reawakens it for Phillip (Paul Giamatti in all his masterful, jowelly power), as he hesitates to fully recall this woman from his past, and slowly transitions into needing, more than anything, to seeing her face again, only he has no photo reference of her.  The episode powerfully builds up the sensations of recollecting beauty and pain and longing and regret, amongst other emotions on a truely beautiful roller coaster ride.

(1 Good) The visual effect of the AI assistant bringing Phillip into the pictures he's looking at was absolutely terrific and I would 100% love to be able to explore photos like that. I loved how it could visualize only what was seen in the picture and any details it had to assume were kind vectored in, looking surreal and unnatural. I could watch any number of stories with this device in any number of genres.

(1 Bad) We find out about halfway through that the AI interface is a representation of the deceased's daughter. I struggle with whether this is a good choice or if it would have been more resonant if the digital assistant were actually connected to the deceased's daughter, to provide a new emotional connection between people, even if a short term one. Otherwise, no notes. A new Black Mirror favourite.

META: The temple device is back! I cannot remember all the places where the temple device is used (it's used again in "USS Callister: Into Infinity"), but it's one of the regulars of the world of Black Mirror. It's the device that connects one's brain direct to technology (although unlike in "Common People", it's easily removable) and it's one of the show's mainstays. The question to ask is every use of this technology in the same world, or is each use of it a deviation and thus a parallel reality?

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USS Callister-Into Infinity
d. Toby Haynes

The What 100: Black Mirror's first true sequel picks up a few months after "USS Callister" left off. Their abuser Robert Daly is dead both in the real world and in the game, "Infinity", and having escaped his pocket dimention and into the full scope of the open world of the game, the digital clones aboard the USS Callister find they've left one sadistic abuser behind only to find tens of millions of others who will kill them in a digital heartbeat. Needing the in-game currency to survive, they're forced to ransack players for their credits, only their activities have set off alarm bells in the real world that something may be wrong. Where clone Nanette has become a confident leader, Nan in the real world is riddled with anxiety, particularly having been present in Daly's apartment the night he died. She takes on the role of finding the in-game clones, but corporate head honcho James Walton just needs them out of the game as fast as possible, and death will do just fine. Except Walton is hiding a very big secret about the heart of the game which the crew discover is their only way to escape their grim fate.

(1 Great) The longest episode of Black Mirror yet (by 1 minute over "Hated in the Nation"), "Into Infinity" is the episode of Black Mirror that most feels like a proper movie, epic in both scale and adventure with a big, big denouement and some very exciting, effective and weighty action sequences throughout. It's full of consequences and big moments which never feels like its being careful. Let's put it this way, I watched the first 3 episodes of Andor Season 2 the same night, something I had been buzzing in anticipation for a couple years now, and frankly I enjoyed myself more with "Into Infinity" (though still feeling a lot of love for Andor). 

(1 Good) It's been almost 7 1/2 years since "USS Callister" led Black Mirror's fourth season, and in that time, wow has the (American) cast kind of exploded. We've seen a lot more of Cristin Milioti, Jesse Plemons, Jimmi Simpson, and Billy Magnussen in the years since (sadly Michaela Coel did not return for the sequel) and so their increased profile lends much more to the sense of scale of the production, and they're all great playing duel roles in the "real world" and cloned versions of themselves.

(1 Bad) Did "Into Infinity" introduce anything new on top of the story of its predecessor, thematically at least? I mean, the visualization of "Fortnite"-style gaming into a "real life" setting was pretty great, but there was only a nominal commentary on the enshittification of MMORPGs. It hits the "corporate greed" and the toxic evil of the rich button much more than the first, but doubles down on toxic masculinity and white male entitlement (if you find yourself saying you're a "nice guy", ask yourself, do you actually respect women or are you just afraid of them. The answer will determine whether you're really a "nice guy"). 

META: I've had Galaxy Quest on the brain since the Blank Check podcast released a Special Features commentary on it this past weekend, and this episode felt not far off from Galaxy Quest. They're both satires of Star Trek with a meta story involving characters who are forced into a reality they did not ask for and step up to the roles they're asked to play. Honestly, I feel like this episode could have been a Galaxy Quest reboot/legasequel as much as a Black Mirror episode.

I also think Brooker did a pretty great job of sequelizing "USS Callister" without necessitating a re-watch. Most of the background to this episode is delivered in episode. And it's fun!