The latest season ofBlack Mirrorhas been controversial. While it’s usually focused very heavily on technology and how the tech we have right now could plausibly be used against us in the future, season six of Black Mirror has taken a surprising turn into supernatural horror that nobody could have predicted. Understandably, audiences were taken by surprise, and some were upset about it. Some spoilers for the season follow.
I would have been the last person to think that Black Mirror would have demons and werewolves, and yet, I loved it. I’vewrittenmanytimesabout how I’m a big horror fan, so this didn’t feel super abrupt for me – Black Mirror has always been very dark, anyway, with some episodes verging on horror. It’s just never been so overtly supernatural before. It’s not the best season of the show by far, but it’s by no means bad. It just focuses on different things than every preceding season has, swapping out visions of a technologically terrifying future for… different things.
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Only two out of five episodes of season six focus on technology. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, considering the show’s title. The Black Mirror in the title refers to the reflection of yourself you see in a black screen – it reflects ourselves, through the filter of technology. It reflects our worst impulses and the worst parts of our society. But the episodes that aren’t explicitly about technology are just as much reflections of society as it stands now. It’s still a mirror, it’s just less filtered through the frame of futuristic technology.
I’ll focus on the three episodes that aren’t tech-focused. Loch Henry is more straightforward. While almost a gothic horror, it touches on racial tensions, the true crime craze, and the trauma that mining your own life for content can create. Like the first episode, Joan Is Awful, it places platforms like the fictional Streamberry (an analogue for Netflix) as content farms, using people’s lives to make a profit.
Demon 79 also touches on race, but its technological reference is more obscure. The easiest connection to draw here is the possibility of nuclear war and the total destruction of cities worldwide. I see it more as a framing device for the rest of the series – the Tory politician that she fails to kill and the glyph on the talisman that summons the demon Gaap show up throughout the season. I like to think that, as the Easter eggs present throughout the series show, all the Black Mirror episodes take place in the same universe. If that’s the case, Demon 76 is the origin story of it all, the source of a country’s descent into fascism, and an alternate universe where it all never happened because of nuclear destruction.
Mazey Day, though, is the most interesting, at least in a formal sense. It ends up in lycanthropy, but its themes are largely about celebrity culture, the parasocial relationships we form with famous people, and the harm that paparazzi culture causes. I didn’t think it was a particularly good episode, though it had its interesting moments, but it did the job it set out to do: it held up a mirror. That’s what Black Mirror is, at its core, even when it strays from its dystopian sci-fi roots into straight-up fantasy and horror.
Brooker said it himself in the Black Mirror production notes. “Partly as a challenge, and partly to keep things fresh for both me and the viewer, I began this season by deliberately upending some of my own core assumptions about what to expect,” he said. “Consequently, this time, alongside some of the more familiar Black Mirror tropes, we’ve also got a few new elements, including some I’ve previously sworn blind the show would never do, to stretch the parameters of what ‘a Black Mirror episode’ even is. The stories are all still tonally Black Mirror through-and-through.” I’m inclined to agree with him, and that’s why I’ll insist Black Mirror is still Black Mirror. We’ve changed in the years since the last season, and so has the show – but at its core, it’s still examining the same things: the worst parts of us.
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