A Fantastic ‘F You’ to Humanity

Charlie Brooker once made an excellent six-episode series entitled How TV Ruined Your Life. In it, he goes through the different ways that television, with its emotional manipulation, sneaky narratives, and deceptive advertising, has made a negative impact on the world, spreading fear and warping our sense of identity and community. In a way, it’s almost a precursor to what would become his biggest success to date, Black Mirror, an equally critical and damning indictment of society, media, and technology.

Why did the former series fail and the latter succeed? Simple — storytelling. Brooker mastered the televisual medium with incredible stories in order to turn the show against the audience and society writ large with increasingly dire reflections of where the world is headed. That’s where the title comes from after all, the dark screen of a television or phone, blank but reflective, showing you watching it in its black mirror. By season six, the show has seemed to stop saying with prophetic urgency, “I’m warning you,” and now simply says, “F*ck you.”

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAYSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT

It’s a good look. Black Mirror has always been cynical, like all of Brooker’s work, but season six is downright misanthropic, with almost every episode leaving you more depressed and less hopeful about the human species. It’s more The Mist than Misery, and that’s okay, because depression and hopelessness is sometimes the correct response to the world if you’re an authentic human being, especially when a sense of clarity or even righteous anger is involved.

Black Mirror rarely descends into ‘misery porn,’ and even manages to have a lot of fun with how screwed up everything is (and how damaged the human subject has become). The order of these five episodes is clever, united by Charlie Brooker’s frequently ingenious writing, and the way season six is constructed rarely leaves you feeling just one kind of bad for too long. The series even lulls you into its sixth season gently with a great deal of humor and raucous silliness with a clever if self-indulgent first episode.

Joan Is Awful (3 / 5)

Netflix

Season six begins with what feels like Charlie Kaufman directing Black Mirror, a meta mind-melt that’s delightful but extremely self-indulgent and a little stupid. It’s undoubtedly the lightest episode, even if lives fall apart and the universe is threatened. “Joan Is Awful” follows the titular Joan (the always delightful Annie Murphy of Schitt’s Creek and Kevin Can F**k Himself); she isn’t particularly worse than anyone else, but still, she’s human, so there’s a baseline awfulness built in, as Black Mirror continually suggests.

One night while browsing Streamberry, an obvious Netflix avatar in the world of Black Mirror, she finds a show that essentially recreates her own life. Except, the latest episode contains events which happened that very day. And Salma Hayek plays her for some reason. The world gets to watch what Joan does and is generally disgusted with her, leading to the ruination of her life, which also plays out on the streaming platform (except in the show that Joan watches, Salma Hayek-as-Joan discovers a show about her life where Cate Blanchett plays her).

Things get increasingly absurd and goofy, and audiences should relish in the anomaly that is a Black Mirror diarrhea joke. The boldest thing going on here, though, is how this Netflix show takes extremely direct shots at Netflix itself, ultimately critiquing the whole institution and its algorithm. It essentially argues against Netflix, and against its own existence, which will become a recurring theme this season.

Loch Henry (4 / 5)

Netflix

Where “Joan Is Awful” obfuscated its dark critique with colorful direction, meta histrionics, and outright silliness, “Loch Henry” disposes of any pleasantries and delves deep into the darkness. It’s yet another episode, back to back, which vehemently critiques Netflix and the whole true crime craze of streaming platforms. The episode follows two young filmmakers, an interracial couple who arrive at the young man’s conservative hometown in order to make a movie.

“Loch Henry” starts off fairly slow, taking its time to introduce the characters and their world. They’re charming and likable, and when the episode takes a morbid turn just at the point where it almost runs out of steam, you actually care about what will happen. Things get very dark here as the true crime story becomes a little too true, and the episode has an extended, bitter epilogue which feels like a firm middle finger to Netflix and its fans. “Loch Henry” is ultimately one of the most quietly affecting and disturbing episodes of the season, with a powerful and heart-wrenching ending.

Beyond the Sea (2 / 5)

Netflix

It’ll be interesting to see how “Beyond the Sea” plays out with audiences. It features some serious star power, with Josh Hartnett and Aaron Paul as two American astronauts in an alternate reality 1960s, but the whole thing feels kind of pointless and adrift, a little like the characters in space. In this version of American history, astronauts can spend extended years in space travel but still experience their life back on Earth; they have perfectly constructed androids on Earth where their consciousness can be uploaded into. When the men are finished with their relatively light amount of work, they can lay down and transmit their consciousness into their robotic bodies.

Related: Black Mirror: The Best Episodes, Ranked

“Beyond the Sea” covers a lot of familiar territory for Black Mirror, and we have seen a lot of this before. It combines the consciousness-uploading elements of “San Junipero” and “Striking Vipers” with the haunted critique of patriarchy and entitled men seen in “USS Callister.” Hartnett and Paul are good, as are Rory Culkin and Kata Mara, but everything is so somber and slow, so drained of anything other than one-note melancholy, that this feature-length episode seems more like a deflated indie movie than anything else. The ending is miserable in the literal sense of the word, and for once, Black Mirror doesn’t earn that misery.

Mazey Day (4 / 5)

Netflix

Black Mirror turns it around quickly with “Mazey Day.” Half the length of the languid “Beyond the Sea,” this episode is lean, vicious, and clever. The story follows a guilty member of the paparazzi whose recent photographs of a sex scandal led to a suicide. She’s debating quitting the game, but is close to being evicted, so when a ‘white whale’ of sorts named Mazey Day comes into her orbit, she can’t resist trying to take some snaps.

Related: Black Mirror: The Best Performances in the Series, Ranked

The titular actress was kicked off of a film set after an accident, and has been in hiding; there’s a bounty on her head for photographs, paying $30 thousand to get some quality pictures of her (or $40 thousand if she looks strung out on drugs). The episode oscillates between the two women (the paparazzo and the actress), wading in the murky waters of celebrity and media while commenting on the cultural moment when things began to shift back in 2006. It’s yet another painful glimpse into our collective baggage, but it’d be a shame to reveal the twists in this episode. Suffice it to say, the final 15 minutes are breathlessly phenomenal.

Demon 79 (5 / 5)

Netflix

“Demon 79” is yet another nearly feature-length episode, but this time, it pays off. While it doesn’t quite feel like a movie, the episode utilizes each minute wonderfully, telling the story of a second-generation immigrant in the UK circa 1979 who accidentally summons a playful demon with a dire message — ahead of May Day, three people must be killed as human sacrifices to the devil in order to prevent the apocalypse. Shy, uncomfortable Nida now has to stalk her prey with help from the demon only she can see.

The episode maintains a fun but tense tone, which is surprising considering its detours into comedy, horror, serial killer thriller, and allegorical fantasy about the working class and labor. It’s incredible that “Demon 79” feels so quick and engaging considering it’s mostly a two-person show. Anjana Vasan is incredible as the meek and frustrated Nida Huq and Paapa Essiedu is a delight for the ages as Gaap, a seemingly kind demon who feels more like a guardian angel, even if he’s getting poor Nida to murder people. After all, she’s preventing the apocalypse, right?

Despite being one of the most explicitly apocalyptic episodes in Black Mirror (and one of its most misanthropic), this one manages to not feel as viscerally depressing. Perhaps that’s because, by the end of this season, Brooker and company have embraced the awfulness. They’ve swum in it and they’re done fighting against the tide, opting to float toward destruction. For so long, Charlie Brooker has been warning us of a foreboding future, forecasting the apocalypse, laughing at all the ways we’re destroying our lives. Now, at the end of it all so far, the show opens its arms in embrace of that obliteration. We’re doomed, and it’s about damn time.

Hello, ruination.

Season six of Black Mirror, along with every other episode, is currently streaming on Netflix (aka Streamberry). You can check out the trailer below:

You can view the original article HERE.