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I used to feel more intelligent just watching Black Mirror.
The Netflix series was clever, twisty, and deeply prophetic. It was light on happy endings but had moments of intense emotion and epiphany. Take episodes Be Right Back and San Junipero, which delt with the possibilities of digital afterlife, or Bryce Dallas Howard’s incredible performance in Nosedive, which was a joyous critique of social currency culture.
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“It’s like a Black Mirror episode!” became standard conversational fare anytime some frighteningly futuristic technology was unveiled in the news.
So, when season six was announced, I was excited. What could creator Charlie Brooker throw at us this time, particularly given many of the themes from previous episodes have materialised into reality? Would we see an artificial intelligence bot wrestling with its desire to be human? Or ChatGPT running for president? Or NFTs taken to the extreme? After all, the title itself, Black Mirror refers to our phones or computer screens when they’re switched off, a dark, cracked reflection of society.
Maybe my expectations were too high for season six. Episode one, Joan is Awful, is funny and meta, poking fun at Netflix. But I felt as though I’d eaten a hamburger from Maccas, briefly satisfying but with no lasting nutritional value. Then I watched another two episodes, Beyond the Sea and Mazey Day, and had to turn it off.
There’s a saying in the screenwriting industry that someone “jumps the shark”. It refers to a 1977 episode of Happy Days when Fonzie literally jumps over a shark in waterskis. It signifies the moment when a show has run out of creative juice and resorts to outlandish plotlines to keep the story going (think Lost, Jane the Virgin, or any soap opera, I’m looking at you Passions).
Black Mirror has officially jumped the shark by resorting to the supernatural. Mazey Day starts as an interesting story about a paparazzo in the early aughts and ends with a starlet turning into a werewolf and biting someone’s throat out with Tarantino-level blood spray. In Demon 79, a demon appears in the form of Bobby Farrell from Boney M and forces a mild-mannered woman to kill people to prevent the apocalypse. This pivot to horror and the supernatural is an unfortunate departure from the series’ technological premises, with an emphasis instead on shock value, full of bludgeonings, torture, suicide, sexual violence, and stabbings.
“The thing I was trying to do this season is divorce my own mind from what the show is meant to be,” Brooker has said. He originally wanted to create a separate series called Red Mirror, which would be a “retro-style horror anthology”.
But the violence is so extreme and the supernatural stuff comes out of nowhere. It feels as though Black Mirror is that incredibly intelligent friend who’s become a bit of a psychopath. They know how well-respected they are and start taking liberties with it, gradually losing grip of their humanity. A bit like Hannibal Lecter: a forensic psychiatrist who’s secretly plotting how to turn you into a casserole.
This is not what I signed up for. Sure, Charlie Brooker, you can make whatever the heck you want; you’re a millionaire. You got “a bit bored of writing [episodes where it] pulls out to reveal that they’re all inside a computer”. But do you know what? That’s a cop-out.
Black Mirror at its best was a careful examination of “how fragile and imperfect humans are grappling with an ever-changing world and trying to keep up,” as Geoffrey Mitelman wrote in Black Mirror and Philosophy.
We loved it because, despite its slightly futuristic premise, it addressed our present hopes and fears for technology. Would it create heaven or hell? Even the most depressing episodes offered us tangible philosophies.
It was sci-fi for our times, showing us blueprints for the future we were on the verge of stepping into. But Brooker’s boredom shows through. It’s become too nihilistic, with a shock of horror just for the scintillation of it. Mrs Davis and its A.I. ass-kicking nun is a better Black Mirror episode than the entirety of this season.
So, I think I’m done watching for now. I might tune back in if ChatGPT writes the next season.
It’d be like a Black Mirror episode.
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