The final season of Black Mirror set fire to a large segment of fans. “Mediocre and weirdly supernatural,” one viewer complained on Twitter. “Black Mirror doesn’t need to do anything supernatural. Hold on to technology, ”another was indignant. On social media and discussion forums like Reddit, the same complaints surface over and over again: Show creator Charlie Brooker broke Black Mirror's magic formula.
It's as if Brooker is trapped in his own dystopian hall of mirrors, having to revisit the same themes of technological excess and the idea that the smartphone is the most dangerous invention since the atomic bomb over and over again.
In fact, Brooker changed course for the show's sixth season, which debuted on Netflix last week. He took Arthur Clarke's old quote about «any sufficiently advanced technology» being «indistinguishable from magic» and ran it backwards. Instead of advanced technology this season, it works wonders.
Or black magic (warning: spoilers ahead). The gear shift becomes most egregious in the final two episodes, starting with Mazey Day, the 2006 paparazzi critique that ruined the lives of Britney Spears and others.
His central argument that early internet culture doused dads in gasoline and made celebrity life miserable is very Black Mirror (as is the implied critique of the public that devoured these shots). But then, in the last 15 minutes, Mazi Day literally turns into an old-school werewolf movie — an exploitative ripper somewhere between Howl and An American Werewolf in London.
It's a shock, but Brooker laid the groundwork. Earlier, we see Mazi driving down a Central European country road at night (she is filming her latest film in the Czech Republic) when she has an unfortunate encounter with a pedestrian. Back in Los Angeles, she is clearly out of her mind — spending her days alone and sabotaging her apartment at night. Brooker anticipated the furry ball that dominates the end of the piece.
What follows is an even bigger departure from what some fans see as the «proper» Black Mirror with Demon 79. A collaboration between Brooker and screenwriter and comedian Bish K. A roaring retro romp set in the north of England during the darkest days struggle of the National Front for the legitimacy of the elections.
But while it's about the racism that was all over the place in the late seventies, it's also a lot of fun. Paapa Essiedu is a radiant disco ball of enchantment in the form of the demon Gaap who came to earth to help Nida (Anjana Vasan), a mild-mannered saleswoman, commit a series of ritual murders that will prevent Armageddon.
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There is speculation everywhere that Gaap is not really there, and is in fact a manifestation of the trauma Needa experienced in this era of undisguised racism. But in the end, Brooker and Ali are essentially saying, damn it, let's go out with a bang and confirm that Gaap is real and send him and Nida into the sunset as the apocalypse manifests through Soviet nuclear weapons.
Brucker has always said that Black Mirror is not just a technology warning. If there's a big idea, it's not that gadgets are bad, but that humans are imperfect and self-destructive. He repeated this message while promoting the sixth season.
“Sometimes I get a little upset when people describe the show as a technology warning,” he said. “And I don't think it's that big. Okay, we shot a sequence with a bunch of killer robot dogs — maybe it wasn't focused on the benefits of technology. But, as a rule, in stories, everything is spoiled by a weak person, and not by the fact that a deliberately evil device is used. > Paapa Essiedu in Demon 79 Credit: Netflix
Brooker didn't talk about it, but he'll no doubt know that the message that technology has a dystopian downside is nowhere near as damaging as when Black Mirror tiptoed into Channel 4's schedule in 2011. Parents today are paranoid about their kids having too much screen time, and everyone has their own opinions about artificial intelligence and «bots» like Chat GPT that can write a soulless essay on any topic in seconds. Meanwhile, tech gurus like Elon Musk seem to be actively enjoying playing the mime villain. How do you make fun of an industry that has moved light years beyond parody?
Tellingly, the most sluggish episode of the new Black Mirror, «Joan is Terrible,» is the one that sticks to the old «technology is a monster» plan. Joan (Annie Murphy of Schitt's Creek) is a hard-working but morally flawed IT manager who turns on «Streamberry» — Brooker's take on Netflix — and finds her life has been reduced to a one-time streaming soap. What follows is incredibly predictable — the big twist is that all the melodrama has been concocted by the ubiquitous computer. Ironically, this episode is so formulaic that it looks like it was created by artificial intelligence.
Nothing stays the same forever, not even a dystopian streaming hit. Brooker understands this and wisely opened a new chapter in Black Mirror by taking a look at the supernatural. The theme of the show is terrible people, prejudices are the same everywhere. All that has changed is how he does it. Ironically, like Black Mirror, a series so often set in the future is being criticized by those who want it to be a thing of the past.
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