Black Mirror Season 7

Streaming on: Netflix

Episodes viewed: 6 of 6

In 2023, writer Charlie Brooker decided to do something different with the sixth season of Black Mirror, his long-running, darkly dystopian tech-noir anthology series. Worried about repeating himself, he played with the format of the series, in order to avoid simply being, as he put it, “the show about consciousness being uploaded into a little disc”. Now back with a seventh season, he has perhaps made peace with that reductive description: this is a very Black Mirror-y run of episodes, packed with several consciousness-upload stories, plenty of familiar-but-different ground covered again. It suggests a new sense of confidence — a comfort in its own identity.

That can be seen in the show’s first sequel episode, ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’, a hugely enjoyable feature-length follow-up to the 2017 Star Trek riff ‘USS Callister’. Still following the spaceship of digital clones, the gang (led by Cristin Milioti’s Nanette) are now unleashed on a giant gaming server, replacing one sociopath with “a whole universe of them”, as one character puts it, mixing typically Brooker-ian ethical quandaries with the flex of blockbuster production values. It’s a sci-fi smash.

One of the best actors ever to join the Black Mirror roster, Giamatti is a perfect vessel for Brooker’s irascible but ultimately earnest outlook.

There’s also a nicely pitched adjacent episode to the show’s ambitious choose-your-own adventure film ‘Bandersnatch’. The psychedelic ‘Plaything’ has only one possible way to watch it — not a trillion, as ‘Bandersnatch’ did — but it does have the (very brief) return of the brilliantly nasal Will Poulter. In it, Peter Capaldi and Lewis Gribben share the role of an anxious game journalist (a nod to Brooker’s earlier career) who communicates, Close Encounters-style, with an army of digital biological organisms called Thronglets, in a story far more mad, ambitious and surprising than that sounds.

That’s the special sauce at the heart of Black Mirror, even when working between the lines of its own formula: it can still be wildly unpredictable. Unsettling gaslighting episode ‘Bête Noire’ seems to operate in the usual Twilight Zone/Tales Of The Unexpected Venn diagram, before ending on such an extraordinary yes-they-actually-went-there ending, you can only applaud, jaw agape. ‘Eulogy’, meanwhile, is surprising only in how shatteringly sad it is: an Eternal Sunshine-esque exploration of memory and lost love with Paul Giamatti as a twinkly, genially grumpy presence. One of the best actors ever to join the Black Mirror roster, Giamatti is a perfect vessel for Brooker’s irascible but ultimately earnest outlook. It’s an awards-worthy performance.

There’s pathos and emotional power aplenty here, in fact: ‘Hotel Reverie’ finds unexpected romance between movie stars modern (Issa Rae) and long dead (Emma Corrin), in a story clearly aiming to be this season’s ‘San Junipero’ (though never quite scaling that 2016 episode’s magical, spine-tingling heights) — and as long as you are credulously on board with a slightly wobbly premise, it’s beautiful. There’s room for trenchant satire as well: the ruthlessly bleak ‘Common People’ has powerful things to say about the corporatisation of healthcare and the gig economy, too. Black Mirror remains the same force it’s always been: satirical, strange, and very, very sad indeed. Long may it continue.