The first episode of “Black Mirror’s” new, sixth season features a tableau with which its viewers will likely be intimately familiar: A couple, sitting on their couch, deciding what to stream in the evening. This being “Black Mirror,” their choice of programming will have mind-bending consequences; this being latter-day “Black Mirror,” it’s also a reflexive comment on its medium.
In “Joan Is Awful,” a woman (Annie Murphy) watches a series that seems directly cribbed from her life, one in which she’s played by Salma Hayek Pinault and in which every interaction she has is blown up to show her to her worst advantage. Everyone else watches it too: Such is the power of the fictional-but-barely “Streamberry,” a service with Netflix’s aesthetic, reach, and industry-conquering ambition.
It makes sense that streaming would, eventually, come to be not merely the fact of “Black Mirror’s” distribution — it’s been on Netflix since 2016, after beginning life on the U.K.’s Channel 4 — but part of its text. Netflix technology, for instance, allowed the 2018 “interactive film” “Bandersnatch” to exist. Its particular culture allows for long breaks between seasons, with the four years since the last batch of episodes the longest time the show’s ever been off the air. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the 2019 outing, three episodes that each read like a bad joke stretched to near-feature length, was easily the series’ weakest, and a break has plainly done the show some good.) And its implications, with global distribution and algorithmic pushes capable of catalyzing conversation and minting hits and celebrities out of thin air, are plainly catnip to a show that is all about the ways technology has altered human interaction.
Or that’s sort of about that. In “Joan Is Awful,” Streamberry ruins poor Joan’s life, but without particular malice. She’s a Warholian superstar for the #Scandoval age, a figure of disgust at the center of the entertainment universe, but the same could have easily happened to anyone: Joan is just a widget. Other episodes in the season address the concept of fame with technology growing increasingly tangential to the story: In the chamber drama “Beyond the Sea,” two astronauts, capable of transferring their consciousnesses back to Earth for brief visits, cope with grim news brought on by the notoriety of their mission. In “Loch Henry,” two filmmakers dream of success and awards for a documentary that uncovers the unsavory history of a Scottish town, and persist even after sense dictates they should turn their attention elsewhere. And in “Mazey Day,” a period piece set in the Peak Lohan media moment, a starlet is pursued by a paparazzo who wants to know why she’s fallen off the grid.
These latter two, “Loch Henry” and “Mazey Day,” use tech no more advanced than, respectively, VHS tapes and telephoto lenses. Both take on the potent danger of human inquiry, with people with a professional interest in nosing out secrets (documentarians played by Samuel Blenkin and Myha’la Herrold, a shutterbug played by Zazie Beetz). In both cases — “Loch Henry” quite elegantly, “Mazey Day” clumsily — it’s made clear that we cannot resist pursuing knowledge and pursuing fame, even when it was safer and more pleasant not knowing and existing in anonymity.
That’s a good approach for a show that has often had its protagonists the passive victims of their circumstances: I’ll admit I was more engaged as the show moved from metacommentary on Netflix out into more general, and less specifically “Black Mirror-y” concerns. To rate a season on the whole is a challenge — I’ve noted that this is an improvement, but the episodes vary quite widely in quality from worst (“Mazey Day”) to best (“Beyond the Sea,” probably, on the strength of Aaron Paul, Josh Hartnett, and especially Kate Mara’s performances acting out big emotions with delicate restraint, but ask me again tomorrow!). Say this much for this collection of episodes: One senses show creator Charlie Brooker, who wrote or co-wrote every episode this time around, stretching out, seeing what his anthology series can accommodate, different ways it can be.
Perhaps the most pronounced example of this impulse is “Demon 79,” billed in its opening credits as “a ‘Red Mirror’ film.” This viewer took the note that this installment, which comes as the final one in the season’s official order, was intended as a deliberate shift: Indeed, it’s an outright horror story, one in which a shopgirl (Anjana Vasan) must tangle with a hellish presence (taking the form of Paapa Essiedu) in order to forestall the end of the world. What this devilish figure makes her do in order to prevent the apocalypse is the stuff of pulp thrillers (indeed, it’s not dissimilar to the plot of the most recent M. Night Shyamalan film). But what’s on Brooker and episode co-writer Bisha K. Ali’s minds proves the power of pulp to port in all manner of concerns: Prejudice in Thatcherite England, reckoning with one’s own sins and the sins of others, the question of when it is justified to take a life.
Heavy stuff! And sold well, through Essiedu’s wicked charisma and Vasan’s wide-eyed gumption, her ability to think through, onscreen, what is ethical to do to prevent disaster and what she’s even capable of doing. Which brings us back to “Joan Is Awful.” There, we learn, Streamberry makes the show about Joan’s negative qualities rather than her positive ones because viewers are addicted to feeling bad about themselves. One wouldn’t like to think so, but negativity helps engagement. “Black Mirror” is among the shows on Netflix that feels least algorithmically driven — its qualities, from its questing imagination to its tendency toward pessimism to its consistent application of Bugs Bunny cartoon logic to questions of physics in chase or fight scenes, are recognizably human. But it can, at times, indulge in the dour: As strong as “Beyond the Sea” is, its pitch-dark cynicism about our inhuman treatment of one another and our willingness to betray to claim what’s ours could feel at times like a put-on, an attempt to prove dramatic bona fides by going as grim as possible. (Wait, maybe “Loch Henry’s” really my favorite of the season.)
Which makes “Demon 79” an especially pronounced and welcome example of a tendency that hasn’t always been top of mind for this show: a strange sort of hope. With great frequency, characters in Brooker’s universe either are utterly the victims of shifts in reality or take advantage of those changes to indulge their worst and most venal impulses. They’re the punchlines, or they’re the aggressors. It’s a cynical worldview that persists in moments here, but that ends up getting leavened with curiosity, with amusement, with novelty. Brooker is trying new things with his art and with his characters, and even when they’re awful, we more clearly see the humans within the machine.
“Black Mirror’s” sixth season is available to stream on Netflix now.
