Why Black Mirror Season 6 is the Best Yet
My favourite episode is Black Christmas. I just want to get that out of the way before I try to convince you that this is the best season. Ready? Here we go: is Season 6 really worse than than the previous one? I didn’t think so. But maybe you need more convincing.
The first thing to note is that this is the first season that is held together thematically. This season of Black Mirror is about the everyday technologies that sit out of sight and out of mind. It isn’t about what super cool freaky tech could be coming down the pipeline and ruin our day. It’s about the sinister nature of the camera and the VHS. It’s about that very famous line, ‘sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. Oh, you don’t like the supernatural elements of this season? That’s the point. It was time to shake it up. Black Mirror doesn’t want to be known for it’s tech message, but it’s deeper message that you are watching a spectacle at all times.
People think the black mirror title is just about looking at your phone, but the problem is that the black mirror is always busy, always crowded. You can never see yourself. You can never reflect. That’s why the title card cracks - the show wants to force you to look inside yourself, not to be solely entertained.
Each of these episodes is then about a little narcissism that plays at human hearts. The season is also a lot lighter despite explicitly taking its inspiration from horror films. The only episode that had a truly harrowing ending was Beyond the Stars, which also happens to be the closest to a ‘traditional’ Black Mirror episode. Each is situated at a specific moment in time and only one of those is remotely close to ‘the future.’ The settings are deliberate, as evidenced by the throw away line in Mazey Day about the new ipod. (Just an aside, but it’s lines like this that show how talented of a writer Brooker is - these shows are tight and delightfully paced.) We don’t need grand technology to explore narcissism. After all, narcissism is only possible with a tool, a technology - the mirror.
Let’s look at each of the episodes in turn:
Joan Is Awful
A great place to start the season. It’s self-referential and heavily meta. It’s Charlie poking fun at himself, at his gracious streaming host AND at us the viewer. It’s taking a completely whacky technology of super-advanced AI that might well as well be magic, utilized used by a mere CONTENT company and marrying it with the very simple idea that humans are massive narcissists. We want everything to be about ourselves, and yet when our private lives are revealed to the world it invokes pure horror and disdain. Honestly, I think this is all the best ideas Black Mirror has ever had wrapped into one cheeky morsel.
Loch Henry
This is when I knew I was witnessing something a cut above. A story about film makers trying to make a true crime story only to become part of the story itself. It’s a nod to all the ghouls who lap up true crime and tragedy stories on Netflix (even Tiger King). What if it were you? The technology aspect is specifically in regard to the nostalgia we hold for old technology and how some things are better left buried. A very metamodern masterpiece.
Beyond the Stars
You might be thinking that this is the story with the real technological wonders, but did you stop to ask how exactly this technology works? The astronauts just lie down and *zap* they’re consciousness has been transported thousands of kilometres into a robot replica? That really is magic. The story is set mid-century during the space race, so you know there’s much more metaphor at play. Despite our best advances in technology including going to space, we can’t help but being jealous little bitches. This is a well-drawn out exploration of not appreciating what we have right in front of us.
Mazey Day
The tightest of the lot, this is just a straight up horror-flick. Cameras are an everyday technology that seem innocuous, but again our obsession with story, other peoples lives and money-making lead them to become tools of death and obsession. Our main character feels remorse as a paparazzi, feeling some responsibility for the death of a male celebrity, but at the end of the episode she still ‘shoots’ the titular Mazey Day - with her camera of course. A very clever and fun genre piece.
Demon 79
Ah, this is the controversial one. This looks like a revenge flick, but really it’s a Western version of Deathnote. I kid - or do I? It deals with the same themes, more or less. Either way, it’s more subtle than first appearances. Again we are stuck in a retro world, 1979 to be precise, and technology does not take a role. Except for the whole nuclear war thing playing out in the background of the episode. You see, when a little brown girl and a black man walk off into nothingness, failing in their duty to stop the apocalypse, I don’t see a racially charged attack against white people. I see two incapable POCs and a writer whose message is, fundamentally, ‘can we stop caring about racial grievances, quotas and hierarchies when we are at real risk of killing ourselves?’ Maybe that’s too liberal-boomerish, but it seems more of a poke in the eye of wokism than anything. Right now nuclear weapons are back of mind, but with a push for diversity we might need to start worrying about incompetent POC having access to the red button.
What about a step deeper? The girl has one more kill to make to save the world. She could make it easy and choose her co-worker. Instead, she makes it incredibly difficult for herself by targeting someone - the right-wing politician - as a noble cause. We see that she has an irrational hatred of someone she doesn’t even know because in the future he will simply tell the truth. We see flashes that include real footage of refugee boats heading to Britain. Nothing offends the woke more than the truth. So she puts the fate of the world aside and hunts down her petty grievances to protect her in-group and naturally is unable to finish the job. She sacrifices all of humanity because of her own narcissistic hero complex, aiming to kill someone who will simply be replaced because there will always be a white man willing to tell the truth.
Now that I’ve laid that all out, I hope you will agree that this is the best season of the show so far. And if not, at least maybe you can view the episodes with a slightly different perspective - namely, these episodes are more about you and me that we would like to believe.