Reflectively recalibrating? Black Mirror series 6 review
‘What even is ‘Black Mirror’ anymore?’ asks Time Magazine in response to the anthology series’ newest output of episodes. With Charlie Brooker, the show’s creator, having found the title in ‘the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone’, Black Mirror has been long thought of as a dark reflection on how we use technology and how technology uses us. Yet Series 6, for the most part, bids farewell to the devices that have driven forward the programmes’ best episodes. It instead takes on streaming platforms, Boney M.-fashioned demons, and… werewolves?
The first two episodes are Black Mirror at its most self-reflexive and reminiscent of former installments of the show. Joan Is Awful catastrophises the privacy threats hidden within terms and conditions when exploited by automated technology in the entertainment industry. We watch as every second of Joan’s life, from her work and therapy sessions to adultery with an old partner, becomes the subject of a new hit TV show released on the red-logoed ‘Streamberry’. You can even become the next star of a show, here. While Brooker coolly takes aim at Netflix with this episode, the star-studded cast and shit jokes also show Black Mirror at its most Netflix—the streaming platform that Black Mirror moved to from Channel 4 at the beginning of its third series. With Netflix currently under fire from the Writers’ Guild of America for, among other things, the use of automation tools in the writer’s room, Joan is Awful is Black Mirror’s attempt to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.
Yet, the ending is unsubstantial. The destruction of the AI-driven ‘Quamputer’ invites a happy ending for the not-so-awful Joan. What happens to the CEO instructing the technology’s use? The lawyers protecting its use? The programmers creating it? Black Mirror disappointingly resigns to a conclusion that blames the machinery and not its agents. The master’s house remains very much intact. The question remains whether Netflix would have platformed a more radical ending.
Loch Henry, the second episode of the season, takes further aim at Streamberry/Netflix, but with a focus on true crime. We see a filmmaker’s personal connection to a crime exploited by media executives into a marketable documentary, ending with a twist that rivals Shut Up and Dance. By dramatising the construction of a true crime documentary, Loch Henry shows the genre to sensationalise stories of suffering and, in doing so, to personalise those involved. While its premise is fresh, the episode teeters between satire and horror, never fully landing in either camp.
Joining Joan is Awful and Loch Henry in implicating its audience in an insatiable appetite for content is the third episode of the series, Mazey Day. Here, we follow the mistreatment of celebrity Mazey, who is hounded by paparazzi as she struggles with addiction. It bizarrely descends into the supernatural when, seven minutes from the end, Mazey turns into a werewolf. A generous armchair critic might think of this as Black Mirror’s nod to the noughties’ franchises that harassed actors, like Mazey represents, were often playing in. In this spirit, perhaps the episode is a wider illustration of how the paparazzi’s lens turns actors into the commodifiable content that they act. Yet, the episode’s handling of this is rushed.
Even ignoring its end, the episode’s subject feels tired. Documentaries about Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, and the late Caroline Flack, Princess Di, and Amy Winehouse (to name a few) do a far better job of developing a narrative about the pitfalls of fame and indicting the forces to blame. It is as if Mazey Day was pitched to be a part of a reconceptualization of Black Mirror that wrests the series away from what it does best: engaging patiently with bad decisions made by people in a technologically changing world.
In his exasperated insistence to criticisms of the new series, Brooker has denied Black Mirror’s allegiance to technological subject matter: ‘the show isn’t saying tech is bad; the show is saying people are fucked up’. I disagree. As Black Mirror’s title suggests, the show has always been, and will always be, somewhat concerned with technology. It is more productive to understand this new series as a redirection from the technological, and as an expansion of its remits.
Beyond the Sea wonderfully, and understatedly, exemplifies this. The episode, set in 1969, traces the downfall of two astronauts, David and Cliff, whose bodies are stuck in space, yet can inhabit their ‘replicas’ on earth. With David’s replica and his family destroyed in the worst circumstances, we see David feel increasingly at home in Cliff’s replica and amidst Cliff’s family. Tragedy brews as the episode jolts between the claustrophobic rocket ship, vacuous earth homes, and the infinite spacescape beyond it all. Such a depiction of life beyond the sea felt particularly compelling in the wake of the implosion of the Titan submersible. In the episode’s exploration of surrogate bodies, it treads in the footsteps of San Junipero and Be Right Back, yet draws you into the performances rather than the conceptual framing of the technology involved. It is quiet and questioning.
Less quiet but equally brilliant is the final episode of the series, Demon 79. In a camp tale set amidst rising anti-immigration rhetoric in 1979 Tory Britain, we watch shop assistant, Nida, and demon, Gaap, go on a murdering spree to avoid an apocalypse. The episode is, above all, a tender depiction of Nida and Gaap’s growing companionship, a relationship in which we are kept guessing about the real nature of it until the episode’s very end. This is proof that Black Mirror does not need memory implants, autonomous drone insects, or a social credit rating system to be memorable. Like Beyond the Sea, it shows that Black Mirror can effectively redirect from a focus on the technological. This redirection is more successful than more diluted depictions of tech-adjacent subjects, as in Joan is Awful and Loch Henry.
To answer the question posed by Time Magazine, Black Mirror is recalibrating. Perhaps Brooker is responding to the increasing oversaturation of discussions about technology–after all, I’m not sure I’d tune into an episode about Chat-GPT or NFTs. Or perhaps the show is preparing for a more formal diversification, in the form of spinoffs. The title sequence of Demon 79 designates it ‘a Red Mirror production’, which elsewhere has been described by Brooker as ‘a companion piece to Black Mirror’. With the presentation of technology taking a backseat, the future of Black Mirror looks to be one of colourful refraction.
