After a four-year hiatus, Black Mirror finally graced our screens again this year with its sixth season. However, the mind-bending social drama wasn't welcomed with open arms by everyone.
Soon after the episodes landed on Netflix, fans and critics alike were quick to condemn the show, and the 43% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes proves it. "Did someone forget to tell the season 6 writers what the series was about?" wrote one Rotten Tomatoes user, another added, "Definitely not the same old dark sci-fi movie series anymore."
Audiences didn't seem to like the fact that the show's creators had replaced tales of evil machines and futuristic settings with real-world horror and social struggles. In turn, the change was met with complaints of the show becoming dull, unmemorable, and very un-Black-Mirror-like.
Well, now that many months have passed, it’s about time to look back at the season and give it another chance. This new era of Black Mirror is actually a more perfect reflection of our current society than ever before, whether that be our post-COVID lives or our obsession with true crime.
Times are changing
One reason why the newest season of Black Mirror feels so different from past episodes can be put down to the fact we live in an ever-changing society.
Created in 2011 by director Charlie Brooker, the anthology series is a social commentary on the dangerous and complicated relationship between technology and mankind. The show was first introduced via UK television broadcaster Channel 4 where it explored the dangers of AI, CGI, and social media over five episodes. It later turned even more sci-fi-esque when it moved to Netflix in 2015, taking audiences to post-apocalyptic lands like the one in ‘Metalhead’ and deeper into cyberspace.
However, interestingly enough, most of the recent batch episodes stray away from robots and futuristic gadgets and focus more on current technology and the horrors humans inflict on each other and themselves through this.
I’d argue that this is a perfect reflection of our changed lives after COVID. With the pandemic came a lot of turmoil in the way we view our lives and what we fear, as we soon realized that rather than robots, aliens, and the paranormal, there are many more real factors to fear, such as disease, the way we treat one another and the effects of capitalism. In the newest season, Brooker condensed these themes perfectly.
The first taste of the new Black Mirror plays upon every ounce of social anxiety you lingering after the ever-so-isolating days of national lockdowns. In ‘Joan Is Awful’, a businesswoman’s whole world unravels when a global streaming platform launches a TV adaptation of her life, screening her darkest secrets for the whole world to see. It held a mirror to society's obsession with drama and reality TV and played upon the fear of being watched. Using a streaming service as the villain makes the situation much more possible and therefore more frightening. And that was just the beginning.
Brutality without technology
Another complaint many viewers had is that the show just wasn’t scary or shocking anymore. Now, I know we all remember the sickly feeling we had in our stomachs when we heard Kenny’s phone call at the end of ‘Shut Up and Dance’, or witnessed the torturous tendencies of the tour guide in ‘Black Museum’. Well, season 6 has an episode that may just top all of this and be Black Mirror’s most disturbing episode yet.
Playing upon our generation's obsession with true crime and the damming effects this can have, ‘Loch Henry’ follows a young couple on their way to a quaint Wicker Man-esque town to film a seemingly boring documentary, but soon find themselves in the middle of a gruesome local story that will drag up shocking events of the past. The dark, raw camera work puts the audience amid the drama, witnessing the terror unfold.
Technology certainly takes a backseat in this story besides the use of cameras, old tapes, and the premise of making a documentary, but the evil in this story was not caused by the apparatus, but by the people behind it. The ending leaves a sour taste reflecting the modern obsession with true crime and cashing in on death. The tapes reveal mass murder, torture, sexual assault, and false imprisonment acted out by two of the most heinous killers the series has ever seen, making the critiques that the show has lost its edge even more perplexing.
Brooker himself even defended the new season at the SXSW event in Sydney commenting that ‘Loch Henry' may be the darkest episode of them all and, as he describes it "fucking nasty – nasty as anything we’ve ever done." I couldn’t agree more, and this episode certainly feels like a major shift in the overarching Black Mirror theme that we may be seeing more of in the future, especially with the introduction of Red Mirror.
Red Mirror
If you made it to the last episode of the season, you will have noticed that ‘Demon 79’ opens with a new title sequence labeled Red Mirror, a tell that this story will not be like the others.
That’s right, Black Mirror’s spooky sister has entered the building. Set in 1970s Northern England, Demon 79 follows a shy sales assistant who conjures an ancient entity that forces her to commit terrible acts. This ghostly episode ditches the usual Black Mirror high-tech-dystopian code entirely and gets back to basics with an almost biblical tale of ethics and morality.
Now I know what you may be thinking, what on earth is Red Mirror? When the episode first dropped I was sure a Red Mirror spin-off was on the way, but it seems as though the title change is down to a change in themes. Well, according to the show's creator, as reported by The Tab, this is all down to the shift in focus from stories that center around technology, to tales exploring the horror genre. This marks a new direction for Black Mirror that I can’t wait to see more of.
Of course, it’s understandable that if viewers were expecting familiarity with the new episodes that these latest entries didn’t land the same - but that’s the point. The reinvention of Black Mirror was long overdue. It has been over 12 years since the first episode dropped and shocked audiences with its far-fetched technological tales and warnings of the future, but now we are living in a society practically run by robots, where smartphones are permanently attached to our hands, making these tropes seem obsolete.
Tackling horror and more human-focussed problems, the latest season of Black Mirror breathed new life into the social drama. And now that more episodes have been commissioned by Netflix, I for one can’t wait to see what Brooker does next. Roll on season 7…
Black Mirror is available to stream on Netflix in its entirety. For more check out the best TV shows of 2023, or see our list of upcoming TV shows coming your way in 2024 and beyond.
