All told, Black Mirror got the software update it sorely needed in Season 6-even as it spends most of its time in the analog era.Īs for each episode and its merits, we may as well start in chronological order. (The earliest episode takes place in 1969, and the most “futuristic” installment is meant to reflect the present day.) It’s the kind of through line that would seem antithetical to the very nature of Black Mirror, but Brooker largely succeeds in subverting audience expectations without betraying the show’s core principles. Interestingly, while Brooker has admitted to tinkering with ChatGPT in his free time-he asked the AI program to write an episode of Black Mirror, which turned out to be “shit”-the majority of the five-episode sixth season is set in the past. From there, the biggest question was not just when Black Mirror would return to Netflix, but what form the series would take in the aftermath of so much global upheaval. Not only did a longer layoff between new episodes make sense given the bleak state of the world-who wants to binge the ultimate feel-bad show in the middle of a pandemic?-but Brooker himself appeared to be in need of a creative reset. Thankfully, creator Charlie Brooker knows how to read the room, and he took a self-imposed break from the series at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which came soon after the tepid response to the fifth season. There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. An interactive, choose-your-own-adventure episode felt like Black Mirror had succumbed to the allure of the new technology at its disposal, rather than having anything novel to say about it. But even a generation-defining series isn’t immune to setbacks, and while Black Mirror hasn’t been helped by the fact that the real world has become more absurd than any tech-driven dystopia could be-have you seen the photos of the classified documents Donald Trump stored in a bathroom?-the show has also become a bit too gimmicky for its own good. The fact that “This feels like something out of Black Mirror” is a popular shorthand for the latest WTF story in the news is, if nothing else, a testament to the show’s standing in the zeitgeist.Īt its best, Black Mirror understands that while futuristic technology could spur major societal changes, human nature stays the same-often to our own detriment. There is perhaps no show more attuned to the highs and lows of its own existence than Black Mirror, which has emerged as the 21st century’s closest equivalent to The Twilight Zone, channeling the anxieties we carry in the present and imagining how they might affect our future. Swings and misses are bound to happen when crafting an anthology-at the end of the day, the key is maintaining a high batting average. An episodic anthology series is a double-edged sword: Just as easily as a viewer can get swept up in a self-contained story, they can come away disappointed with the next episode in the queue.
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