‘Black Mirror’ Review: Charlie Brooker Delivers a Hit-or-Miss Sixth Season

© Provided by The Hollywood Reporter Black Mirror Season 6

In retrospect, it was probably inevitable that reality would catch up to Black Mirror. Not in the literal sense (we still don’t have cookies or grains, and thank goodness for that), but in a spiritual one. When the series launched in 2011, it stood out for its deep skepticism in the age of tech optimism. Now actual headlines about AI replacing human workers or entire democracies being upended by social media algorithms feel like the stuff of Black Mirror plotlines, much in the same way the Trump era outdid Veep and Peak TV brought some of 30 Rock’s most cynical gags to life.

Add to that the general sense that creator Charlie Brooker might be tiring of the whole exercise, going by season five’s uninspired entries, and it’s little wonder that the newest batch feel less prescient than they once did. But Black Mirror has one final trick up its sleeve: Over season six, it unshackles itself from its core premise to emerge as a less predictable version of itself.

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As in previous years, each of the five new installments on Netflix (running 40-80 minutes each) functions as a standalone narrative, linked only loosely through sporadic Easter eggs. Taken as a whole, though, it’s striking how much less emphasis is placed on extrapolating from TikTok or ChatGPT, and how much more on our already realized past and present. To wit: Three of the tales are set in earlier decades, while a fourth unfolds in the present but mainly focuses on events of the past.

The lone exception to this rear-facing perspective is the premiere “Joan Is Awful,” which takes a puckish, Charlie Kaufman-lite approach to the current moment. By that, I mean the exact moment that finds you sitting down to watch “Joan Is Awful” on Netflix: Its heroine, Joan (Annie Murphy), is an ordinary woman who opens up Netflix (sorry, “Streamberry”) one evening to discover the service’s latest release is a Salma Hayek Pinault drama based on the most intimate details of the day she’s just had. Embargoes forbid me from saying too much about how her predicament plays out, but suffice it to say it’s classic Black Mirror — a darkly funny mind-bender that weaves together modern anxieties about surveillance, the emptiness of “content,” and what precisely we’re signing away in those terms-and-conditions pages we never bother to read.

This set’s only other true sci-fi outing is “Beyond the Sea,” set in a stylish alternate version of 1969 in which astronauts can transfer their consciousnesses between their space-bound real bodies and their realistic robot replicas on Earth. Black Mirror has always focused on the intersection between human nature and scientific advancement, and its smartest chapters have zeroed in on the intricate ways that each feeds into the other. But “Beyond the Sea” wastes its juicy central concept and Aaron Paul’s finely calibrated lead performance on a relatively mundane personal conflict, and offers disappointingly little insight into how these miraculous mechanical forms might transform the way people think of themselves or relate to each other. (The conclusion offers a shocking jolt, however.)

If anything, the most pressing concern this time is what our frivolous entertainments are costing us. Alas, only “Joan Is Awful” proves a successful execution of the theme. “Mazey Day,” about a paparazzo (Zazie Beetz) chasing a troubled starlet (Clara Rugaard) in 2006, should in theory slot right into the present trend of entertainments reckoning with the most toxic excesses of aughts celebrity culture. But despite a particularly gnarly twist, it covers little ground that hasn’t already been picked over by the likes of Pam & Tommy or Framing Britney Spears. Similarly, “Loch Henry,” a plodding horror piece about a trio of young filmmakers (Myha’la Herrold, Daniel Portman and Samuel Blenkin) shooting a documentary about a string of grisly murders from the 1990s, feels at least three years too late with its scold-y commentary on the sick thrills of true crime.

Both do, however, herald a new chapter for Black Mirror. It’s one rooted not in any particular fear about what the Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon Musks might cook up next (indeed, “Mazey Day” and “Loch Henry” mainly revolve around the VHS tapes and digital cameras of bygone eras), but in a more general sense of unease. In that context, “Demon 79” is ideally situated as the finale, as it represents the final stage of Black Mirror‘s transformation from an anthology about technology to an anthology about whatever the hell Brooker (who penned most of the season alone, but “Demon 79” with Ms. Marvel’s Bisha K. Ali) wants it to be about.

It tells the story of Nida (Anjana Vasan), a timid salesgirl who’s forced by a disarmingly friendly disco-glam demon (Paapa Essiedu) to commit heinous crimes in order to prevent an apocalypse. The plot has nothing to do with Black Mirror‘s sci-fi beginnings, or its usual worries about the future; it’s a straightforwardly supernatural horror plot unfolding amid the xenophobia of Thatcher-era Britain. Even the labeling is different; this one is announced as a “Red Mirror” episode in its opening credits, presumably to mark the change in genre.

In short, it’s a radical change of pace from Black Mirror as we’ve come to know it. It’s also the freshest this series has felt since at least 2017. Director Toby Haynes gives the installment a grainy ’70s style that veers into a scratchy video-nasty look whenever Nida’s fantasies veer into pulpy violence, while Vasan and Essiedu’s piquant chemistry yields lots of dark laughs. And though it offers no earnest solution to the real issue at its heart — Nida’s marginalization as a woman of color — it does click, convincingly, into her feelings of exhaustion and rage.

For Nida, catharsis ultimately comes in the form of an opportunity to tear down the suffocating life she’d been relegated to, in hopes of finding something better. Over season six, the show she’s on traces a similar arc. Fans of the show’s tech-dystopia thought exercises might be disappointed to see the series cast them off altogether, and the shift in focus still yields as many misses as hits. But by breaking from those old constraints, Black Mirror sets itself up for a freer, wilder, more intriguing future.

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