Black Mirror season six is just as wildly variable as the first five, and extremely exciting to watch. You never know what you’re ging to get when you start an episode; even the synopses don’t give much sense of tone or genre, seeming almost intentionally misleading. They range from annoying and trite to deeply unnerving and provacative. The first episode, Joan Is Awful, follows a woman we’re supposed to think is average as she goes about her average, depressing, middle-manager life at an unimportant corporation. Her job is average and so is her fiancé—but Joan isn’t average after all, and we should have known that because of her distinct (and unflattering) hairstyle. Not only is Joan the protagonist of her own life—she is the actual heroine of a real TV drama that someone has created about her, without her knowledge, starring Salma Hayek Pinault. She realises this almost as soon as we do, and so does everyone else in her life. The whole thing is silly and pointless.
The second episode Loch Henry is a lot more believable and fun. A young Scot, Davis, returns to his childhood home in a weird Scottish village, bringing his cool American girlfriend Pia. They’re both filmmakers about to make a documentary about an egg-collector on the isle of Rum, a topic which seems to bore them as much as everyone else. They then happen upon a much more exciting true-crim story and things heat up. Pia is on the hunt for a story and now she’s found one, she isn’t letting go, even if it means encroaching on Davis’s family and past. Loch Henry is an ingenious satire about our appetite for horrific true crime stories, and about artists’ desperate need to dig them up. I cringed with self-recognition at the satirical portrait of young up artists who will push the boundaries of ethics and good taste in pursuit of a hot story. But boy will Pia pay for it. In classic Black Mirror style, the show uses the very tropes it pokes fun at, creating a horror from a satire.
[Scottish boyfriend’s mum is a frumpy lone widow, her sitting room dressed believably with porcelain knick-knacks, old VHS tapes and a kitsch Venetian mask hanging by itself on the middle of the wall. The mask returns.]
The fourth episode Mazey Day provides another modern day moral dilemma—this time following a young paparazza named Bo as she hustles for her next paycheck. When actress Mazey Day crashes and burns, disappearing from the public eye, all the photographers hunt for the first glimpse of her. The commission could mean hundreds of thousands—or maybe even millions if they catch her looking like a junkie. Young Bo is losing her stomach for the work, but she needs the money. This episode takes a wildly unexpected turn, jumping genres and morphing surprisingly well into something completely different. One could argue that the crucial technology element of Black Mirror was absent from Mazey Day—but it’s still fun.
A weak point in the series is the final instalment, Demon 79, set in 70s Britain where the Nationalist movement gains ground and Tories flourish. Anjana Vasan and Paapa Essideu star and Essideu is always brilliant—he even pulls off a blinding white disco get-up, boa and all—but he can’t save a dud script. The final climax is no more subtle than, ‘we may as well be in hell rather than Tory Britain’. The message is heavy-handed and leaves no room for moral complexity. I wanted a Tarantino homage— Demon 79 looked and was billed like one— yet it bears none of the inventiveness or surprise of a Tarantino film.
But Episode 3 is makes the whole series worth the watch. Beyond the Sea, stars Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett as two astronauts, each of whom is linked to an identical, digital ‘replica’ of themselves back down on Earth. They both play the role of stable family man in middle class American homes, while their real selves lie in a coma, tucked in little cushioned pods as they rocket through outer space. The replicas are completely indistinguishable from the real thing, except they don’t bleed or do other bodily human things. The replicas live a human life, they laugh, sketch, go to the movies with their families, make love to their wives (sort of).
For their families it’s as if their real father still lives with them—and that’s what’s scary. With fast-developing tech like holograms and AI human replication, it’s not hard to envisage a future where working men and women create self-replicas so they can work around the clock and never miss their kid’s birthday party. Wouldn’t it be great to ‘do it all’? Beyond the Sea begins with a melodramatic event that sends David (Josh Hartnett) into a grief-crazed tailspin, while Cliff (Aaron Paul) has to try to keep his indispensable co-pilot sane and functioning. The stakes are higher than your average HR problem at work. It’s also an extreme version of our inability to switch off. We’re all guilty of mixing work and home life—smart phones all but ensure that— but what would happen if we actually couldn’t switch off, if our physical presence at home depended upon technology supplied through work? What’s the HR stance on that?
The best of this series’ episodes are tight and well-plotted, leaving lots of subtle clues in the early scenes that return for the finales. They stand among the best Charlie Brooker and Black Mirror have shown us yet.
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