Black Mirror is the successor to series like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, using science fiction narratives to expand and expound on themes of our everyday lives and make us think deeply about the world around us. It’s incredibly well produced and has given us some of the finest science fiction stories of the last decade. Now, it’s back with a new season and set of six episodes.

This piece does contain minor spoilers, but the full season is now available to watch, so if you want to go in blind, please bookmark this and come back after.

‘Common People’

Mike (Chris O’Dowd) and Amanda (Rashida Jones) have been married for three years. Their life is, by all accounts, pretty normal. He’s a welder, she’s a teacher. They live in a modest middle-class house. They’re trying to conceive. They have a spot they return to for their anniversaries. They are, in a word, happy. Then, out of the blue, Amanda collapses and is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour.

While his wife is in a coma, and in a moment of desperation, Mike is approached by a woman called Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross). She represents a new medical tech startup called Rivermind, who have developed the technology to replace damaged brain tissue with a synthetic replacement that is powered by their cloud service. The surgery is free, but the service comes with a subscription fee. Mike agrees to the surgery to get his wife back, but this being Black Mirror, things do not go as planned.

It’s easy to see where this one is headed. We live in a world of subscriptions for services that get continually more expensive, and often with the level of service declining at the same time. Even Netflix, the service that Black Mirror has called home since its third season, has raised their subscription fee substantially in the last few years, and competitors like Prime Video have put ads back into their services despite both the promise of streaming services being that they remain ad-free and their parent company being obscenely profitable.

As you can imagine, ‘”Common People” takes this to perhaps the furthest degree. Amanda can no longer travel outside of the range of the Rivermind servers. After a few months, she starts spouting advertising in her conversations, all while Rivermind is changing their tiers of service and upping the price, literally making her life worse in order to expand their services.

Mike, meanwhile, has to go to desperate lengths to pay for the service, joining an online platform where he humiliates and injures himself for money, a pretty bleak satire of side hustles and online subscription platforms. Both Jones and O’Dowd are excellent here, but Jones especially as her body language changes is subtle but distinct during the ad-reading portions of the story, and the depths of desperation they both fell into by the end are entirely raw.

There is sometimes discussion of whether Black Mirror is indicting technology or people, but “Common People” is one of the better examples of it indicting capitalism itself. Gaynor is a predatory salesperson working for a predatory company. There’s no CEO or tech bro shown in the episode, but it’s not hard to imagine the kind of evil people at the top when such an insidious character is the face of their organization. It’s the kind of friendly, happy image we see in our advertising here in the real world, offering to sell us something we don’t need—or worse yet something we do— for just a small monthly fee.

‘Bête Noire’

Maria (Siena Kelly) works in research and development at a food company. Her job is to come up with new recipes for candy bars and the like, and during a focus group, someone from her past shows up as a tester. This is Verity (Rosy McEwen), Maria’s former classmate at school who is a bit awkward now and who was relentlessly bullied then.

Soon, Verity is working at the company full time, and Maria starts being plagued by strange happenings. Details in her recipes are changed, she misses meetings, and things she is certain she remembers are either changed or non-existent, and Verity seems to be at the centre of it all.

“Bête Noire” is a great sci-fi take on both gaslighting and the Mandela Effect, both in the way Verity is manipulating events and the way that she’s accomplishing it. The method is a twist on a theme we’ve seen a lot in media these last few years, and McEwen is perhaps the most exciting performer in the whole 7th season of the show. The story requires her to be meek and vulnerable, but also a dead-eyed sociopath, and the way she switches between those two modes gives the episode some of its best moments –including one where she guzzles oat milk.

The end of this one might tie things in slightly too tightly of a bow, but the portrait of obsession here is ultimately relatable. The exploration of who a person is now vs who they were in the past could have been slightly deeper, which may have made the ending more powerful.

‘Hotel Reverie’

Season three’s “San Junipero” remains one of if not the best episodes of Black Mirror to date, and so it almost seems like an attempt to recapture some of that magic is a little late. “Hotel Reverie” also takes place predominantly in a simulation, this time one created nostalgia for classic film rather than our nostalgia for the 1980s.

Brandy Friday (Issa Rae) is an A-List movie star looking for a more personal project to take on. She has success, but not fulfillment with the roles she is being offered. Enter ReDream, a technology company who is remaking a classic film she loves called Hotel Reverie. She agrees to play a gender-swapped version of the main love interest, but when she arrives, she finds that she’s not on a set for a new production, but rather will be in a simulation playing against AI recreations of the characters in the original film, including the heroine Clara, played by Dorothy Chambers (Emma Corrin).

“Hotel Reverie” is probably the best-looking episode of the season; the period detail inside the simulation is exquisite, and the black-and-white photography really pops off the screen. This episode is made for the romantics, both those who like love stories and those who like old movies, and the attention to detail from all involved is evident, right down to the Mid-Atlantic accents.

The love story involved is sweet and touching as well. Rae and Corrin have a lovely chemistry, but it’s Corrin who really shines here. She plays both of her characters –Clara and Dorothy– with very distinct vibes, and scenes in the simulation where the AI Clara becomes fully self-aware are a delight to watch. The character Clara assimilates the actor Dorothy’s backstory, and the way you can feel that going on in her eyes, face, and body language is beautiful.

“Hotel Reverie” is a sweet episode, but while its ending is designed to feel hopeful, it slightly misses the mark. It’s not bad, it just isn’t as powerful as it very easily could have been, and there are some themes left on the table that would have tied in more deeply with a later episode. This doesn’t, however, take away from it being a mostly lovely episode.

‘Plaything’

“Plaything” has the distinct disadvantage of sharing DNA with “Bandersnatch”, the experimental choose-your-own-adventure episode of Black Mirror from 2018. This isn’t meant to imply that “Bandersnatch” is bad, but rather that any follow-up has big shoes to fill. Does it fill them? Kind of!

Peter Capaldi plays Cameron Walker, a man who hasn’t been seen since the 1990s. As a younger man (played by Lewis Gribben), he was a game journalist sent to review a new title from Colin Ritman (Will Poulter reprising his role from “Bandersnatch”) called Thronglets. This game has no goals other than to help its titular creatures survive and multiply and evolve, something that Walker becomes obsessed with.

Eventually, he’s an aged recluse with an apartment full of scavenged technology and gets himself arrested by the police, which is where he narrates the story from. Capaldi is a great actor and creates an interesting character in Walker, but that’s about all this episode has going for it. The ideas of artificial intelligence that the episode explores are thoughtful, but also perhaps a bit naive, and when the plan comes together—of course, Walker wanted to be caught— it ends up being a little unsatisfying.

‘Eulogy’

Black Mirror is always about characters, but “Eulogy” might be the most straight-up character study they have produced to date. Rather than a technology being used insidiously by some nefarious corporate entity, instead, we follow a man through his own memories of a lost relationship. 

This man is Phillip, played by Paul Giamatti. He receives a phone call about the death of a woman he used to know called Carol and the chance to participate in a memorial by sharing his memories of her. The technology they send allows him literally to step into his old photos to better remember events, but this won’t work because in the wake of a break-up with Carol, he scratched or cut out her face from every photo he has of her.

Phillip has been angry at Carol for decades, and while it is initially presented as her having broken his heart as he explores the photos with the help of an AI guide (Patsy Ferran), it becomes clearer and clearer what the situation was and who he was in it.

The setting of this episode is beautiful. The technology works as it generally does in Black Mirror now, a small circular interface on the temple that puts you in a virtual space. When Phillip looks at a photo and plugs in, he is initially presented with a large projection of that image, but slowly as he remembers more, the photos gain depth, breadth, and motion, and the way this is all woven together beautifully as Giamatti and Ferran move through the scene as it is built around them. It’s wonderful stuff.

Eulogy is a lovely and honest examination of a flawed man. Giamatti is one of our best working actors, and watching him come to a point of acceptance of Phillip’s past is melancholy and heartbreaking in all the right ways. It’s the kind of self-examination that most of us could probably learn from, and perhaps make us better people by realizing our part in conflicts as well as who to forgive and when.

‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’

If you are a fan of Star Trek, then the fourth season episode of Black Mirror, “USS Callister”, was made for you. The story of a lonely, bitter man who digitally clones coworkers he doesn’t like into his own private world based on a science fiction series from the 1960s that he loves, where he can make them do anything he wants, unlike in real life, until the digital clones escape from the private virtual world they were stuck in to the wider internet.

“USS Callister: Into Infinity” is a direct sequel to that story. The crew of the Callister (Cristin Milioti, Jimmi Simpson, Billy Magnussen, Milanka Brooks, Osy Ikhile, and Paul G. Raymond) have indeed escaped from the private torture they had been enduring, but as it turns out, only to a more public one. Now a part of a larger, procedurally generated massively multiplayer online game, they are struggling to survive and resort to digital piracy to obtain enough credits in the highly monetized world to buy fuel and stay one step ahead.

As their exploits become noticed, the company that runs the game begins looking for them, and all kinds of hijinks ensue. Though much less like Star Trek, “Into Infinity” does retain some of that Star Fleet feel that Galaxy Quest also captured so well, aesthetically. The cast is game this time, with many of them once again playing both the digital clones and their real-world counterparts, and seeing how they’ve all diverged from one another is some great storytelling and acting from all concerned.

Milioti remains the MVP of the storyline; her energy is infectious, and you can’t help but root for her, and Jimmi Simpson gives not one but two hilarious performances. They couldn’t be more different, but they also couldn’t be more the same. This is a running theme in the episode and asks questions once again about who we are vs who we were and whether we stay the same people at our core. This question is answered very explicitly through one of the characters, and you watch “Into Infinity” back-to-back with “USS Callister”; the impact of that answer will be all the more powerful.

“USS Callister: Into Infinity” is another fun episode of Black Mirror with a purposefully hopeful ending that leaves room for more stories, which should be exciting for everyone who loves good, weird, funny, pointed sci-fi.

Black Mirror Season 7 is now streaming on Netflix.