Black Mirror season 6: exploring Netflix’s sci-fi anthology, one episode at a time
Image: NetflixAfter a hiatus, the bleak series is back with five more episodes looking at technology and the future. Continue reading…
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After a hiatus of a few years — season 5 premiered back in 2019 — Black Mirror is back, with a five-episode season that’s streaming now on Netflix. As always, this season is an anthology, with each episode exploring different ways technology could impact our lives (usually for the worse). Or, you know, exactly the kind of thing The Verge staff is really into. Because each episode stands on its own, we’ll be exploring them individually, with different writers tackling different stories. There are five episodes in total — “Joan Is Awful,” “Loch Henry,” “Beyond the Sea,” “Mazey Day,” and “Demon 79” — and you can keep up with all of our coverage right here.
Black Mirror’s ‘Loch Henry’ can’t decide whether to indulge in true crime or critique it
Image: Netflix
Black Mirror is known as a series about the dangers of technology, but it’s often more specifically about the corrupting influence of entertainment. Spectatorship makes us cruel, the show suggests over and over, turning other humans’ real pain into fodder for our own amusement. The sixth season episode “Loch Henry” fits into this dynamic but in a way that feels surprisingly anemic, neither exploring the potential ugliness of its premise nor developing characters who transcend it.
At the beginning of “Loch Henry,” Davis (Samuel Blenkin) is a film student returning home with his girlfriend Pia (Myha’la Herrold). It’s supposed to be a brief stopover; they’re planning, to the bemusement of everyone but Davis, a documentary about a man who guards eggs from poachers. Then Pia discovers the nigh-deserted town was the home of a serial killer named Iain Adair. It’s an opportunity to make a film people will actually watch, perhaps on the lucrative video platform Streamberry, known for its wealth of true crime shows. And Adair’s crimes were indirectly uncovered by Davis’ father, a local police officer — so there’s a personal angle to sell.
Black Mirror’s ‘Beyond the Sea’ is a slow-motion tragedy in the depths of space
Image: Nick Wall / Netflix
“Beyond the Sea” is the rarest breed of Black Mirror episode: the kind driven by empathy. Carried by a cast that includes Aaron Paul, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Mara, it’s equal parts character study and Twilight Zone creeping horror — a story focused less on the series’ typical social commentary than on three people whose impossible situation leads to an inevitably tragic end.
The episode is set in an alternate 1969 where two astronauts are midway through a six-year mission. Although their bodies are stuck in a cramped spacecraft, they spend most of their time inhabiting a pair of lifelike telepresence “replicas” on Earth. David (Hartnett) maintains an idyllic life with his wife and two children, taking his Neil Armstrong-esque celebrity graciously. Cliff (Paul) has a far more brittle relationship with his taciturn son and his lonely wife Lana (Mara), who he’s uprooted to live in a remote farmhouse. The mission proceeds smoothly until a horrific tragedy destroys David’s family and his replica. And to keep him from despair, Cliff lets David begin taking short jaunts in his body back home.
Black Mirror’s ‘Demon 79’ is a stressful slice of supernatural horror
Image: Netflix
While Black Mirror started out as a series exploring the myriad terrifying ways technology could impact our lives, it has since grown into a more general genre anthology. It’s nice when episodes have that techno focus, but it’s no longer a necessity. Case in point: “Demon 79,” a season 6 story that’s pure classic horror homage. Its premise wouldn’t be out of place in a collection like Tales From the Crypt or Cabinet of Curiosities. But don’t let the lack of Black Mirror-ness dissuade you — this episode is a blast of Hitchcockian scares with just the right kind of twist.
“Demon 79” — which was directed by Toby Haynes and written by Ms. Marvel’s Bisha K. Ali and Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker — is centered on Nida (Anjana Vasan), a woman living a quiet, boring life in a small town in 1970s northern England. She works as a clerk at a shoe shop, doesn’t drink or ever really go out, and is constantly subjected to overt racism from her co-workers: a boss asking her to eat lunch somewhere else because of the smell or a fellow clerk openly reading anti-immigration pamphlets at work. She never speaks up for herself, just meekly goes about her day. But she has sharp, violent fantasies about murdering those who wrong her, including a local creep who’s become infamous for strangling his wife.
ChatGPT wrote a Black Mirror episode.
The results, according to creator and showrunner Charlie Booker, were “shit”. The product it spit out amounted to a mashup of previous Black Mirror synopses, Booker tells Empire, though it did help him spot some of the clichés in his previous work.
South Park actually did a ChatGPT-cowritten episode in its most recent season, FWIW. It was pretty funny, but “shit” would also be an appropriate term.
Black Mirror’s coming back for a sixth series
Image: Netflix
No matter how much time passes between Black Mirror’s seasons, the series always manages to feel just as unsettlingly prescient as when it first began airing. It isn’t exactly surprising that Netflix is working on yet another installment of the tech-focused dystopian series, but it seems as if our next taste of Black Mirror’s going to be a little different than what we’ve seen before.
Variety reports that Netflix has greenlit Black Mirror and is currently in pre-production for its sixth series — the details for which are largely being kept quiet. Unlike the interactive Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and fifth series that came before it, Black Mirror’s anthological sixth series is reported to consist of more episodes and be more “cinematic in scope,” which is likely a sign of the show taking even bigger swings. There’s currently no word on when Black Mirror’s sixth season is set to begin production.
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