Black Mirror S6 thoughts
Wow, it’s been over 5 years since I last did a blog post on Black Mirror. Evidently I neglected to do one for season 5, but it wasn’t the best season so nothing of value was lost.
Anyways, onto season 6! Spoilers ahead.
Joan is Awful
A relatively light-hearted episode with a few well-known faces. Notable as the most high-tech of this new season and does touch on the whole “are simulated lives as valuable as real ones?” quandary that we’ve seen done to death in previous seasons. I particularly enjoyed the jab at Netflix (as Streamberry) trying to branch out into other forms of entertainment, but otherwise a quite forgettable entry.
Loch Henry
The first half has you wondering if you accidentally switched to watching another TV show, but by the end the classic Black Mirror feeling of shame and dread kicks in. There’s yet another dig at Netflix with its ever-expanding catalog of true crime content, but as the CEO of Streamberry says in the previous episode, it engages the viewers! So really it’s all our fault for demanding exploitative material. Beautiful drone shots of Scotland also help.
Beyond the Sea
Anyone who’s watched Black Mirror in the past knew how this almost feature-length story was going to end by around the 20 minute mark, but powerhouse performances from the three leads in this episode helped keep it interesting. One does have to suspend disbelief for the premise to work (where the fuck was ground control in all this? Why aren’t there contingencies for this sort of thing?) but overall a solid episode somewhat let down by the predictability of a love triangle.
Mazey Day
This episode is getting a lot of hate for straying into paranormal territory, but the people spouting that hate also seem to be labouring under the delusion that Black Mirror is necessarily about high-tech stuff. It never has been. It’s always been holding a mirror up to society and showing us how horrible we can be, oftentimes enabled by technology. The way the paps hover around Mazey recording her suffering bring to mind how Princess Diana died - sitting in the back of a wrecked car struggling to breathe while paparazzi around her just continued taking pictures.
Demon 79
As if to reinforce my point about technology not being the focus of Black Mirror, this episode doesn’t have any since it’s set in 1979! Nevertheless this episode is a lot of fun. It’s great to see depicted on screen how a person from a minority group would have experienced England in those days. I always approve of the inclusion of Boney M.
Final thoughts
I enjoyed this season much more than I did season 5 (which admittedly is not saying much). The long 4 year wait was worth it for a batch of episodes that are much more social commentary and less “what if phones but too much?”. There’s only so many ways you can spin human consciousnesses trapped inside machines until it gets boring, and this season was definitely not that!
The episodes, ranked
- Loch Henry
- Demon 79
- Beyond the Sea
- Mazey Day
- Joan is Awful