here is an irony, is there not, in the show that has spent the past 12 years endlessly inventing ways in which the techpocalypse might eventually manifest itself becoming the first show to be rendered obsolete by the techpocalypse.
While out and about promoting the sixth season of his anthology series, Charlie Brooker has more than once said that the perpetually evolving threat of AI and suchlike – or maybe more significantly, everybody now perpetually droning on about the evolving threat of AI and suchlike – has forced him to rethink what Black Mirror is. And, aside from a first episode (titled Joan Is Awful) that feels like what AI would dream up if you asked AI to write an episode of Black Mirror, he has done just this: pivoting in the remaining four episodes to a kind of pulp-y sci fi horror instead.
The problem is that once you strip an episode of Black Mirror, past or present, of its future tech gimmickry, you are not left with very much else. It’s rather like swapping out WayStar RoyCo for a mid level management consultancy agency. And at least then you would still have the zingy insults.
Before, two types of people populated each and every Black Mirror episode. Type one: brainwashed, ultra-normo automotons who don’t watch enough Christopher Nolan films/listen to enough Radiohead albums/read enough Guardian op-eds to realise they are sleepwalking into some kind of Orwellian nightmare. Type two: emotionless corporo-sociopaths – or sometimes just big computers – who would slaughter a village of toddlers if it meant raising their stock price even half a penny.
Annie Murphy in Joan is Awful
/ Nick Wall/NetflixNow, though, that’s been stripped back to basically just ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Everyone we meet feels one dimensional and underdrawn. In Mazey Day, we get some paparazzi peeps who make the Princess Di guys look like Greta Thunberg (one of them shouts “You f**king whore” at a Black woman he is trying to get a reaction shot out of). In Demon 79, an oily Tory MP in the seventies talks in “I’m only joking, love” Bullingdon Club-isms and quotes Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech. In Loch Henry, there’s a small town Scottish barman who greets his returning childhood friend by jeering, “Are ya gonna tell me ya pronouns?” and “I thought ya were in London, studying woke film theory!”, then making a joke to his mixed raced girlfriend about diversity hiring. And so on and so forth.
You end up feeling a bit sorry for the numerous quite-big-name actors who signed on to this CV-enhancing little show. Paapa Essiedu is an absolute hoot, but Aaron Paul, Rob Delaney, Kate Mara, Josh Hartnett, Michael Cera and many, many others are pretty forgettable in stories that move very slowly before, inevitably, ending very badly for everyone involved, every single time.
It all just feels like a series that has said all it ever needed to say, and should stop now. Unless they end with one last hurrah in which a show about how the march of technology is going to kill us all one day ends up one day being killed by the march of technology.
Black Mirror Season 6 will air on Netflix from June 15
