I am a masochist. I’ve loved Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror since its shocking first episode, embracing the dread and anguish it skewered into me with the precision of a neural interface. Maybe that’s why I felt underwhelmed by season four’s offerings. If I don’t feel like flushing my phone down the toilet, swearing off social media, and seeing the future as a dark technological abyss coming to swallow society whole, then Black Mirror hasn’t had the effect I crave.
I think everyone should watch Black Mirror with few preconceptions. Even though this review contains no spoilers, I suggest watching season four before reading. If you’re not quite the Black Mirror fan I am and want to get a sense of whether season four is worth your time, then read on. Return soon if you want my in-depth review of each episode.
1: USS Callister
Season four opens with a bang – a surprisingly funny and upbeat look at virtual reality gaming. Jesse Plemons, of Breaking Bad fame, stars and gives a terrific performance as an awkward programmer who is berated by his colleagues. But by night, he lives out his fantasies as a Star Trek-inspired space captain on a VR game.
It’s one of the more fun Black Mirror entries, with frequent doses of comedy to balance the episode’s darker turns. And it never strays into the formulaic, cleverly playing off tropes to defy audience expectation and inserting its customary punches to keep you on your toes. It’s one of the season’s best entries, with plenty more going on than its story may initially suggest.
2: Arkangel
Straying into more familiar territory, Arkangel follows a single mother Marie who almost loses her toddler daughter Sara. Marie signs up to the Arkangel programme, implanting Sara with a chip that allows her to track Sara’s whereabouts, see through her eyes, and even block distressing content.
It’s the first of three episodes this season that veer into the category of missed opportunities. The first half of Arkangel is fascinating, exploring helicopter parenting on steroids and its unpredictable effects. Most of its biggest emotional punches strike here, with some surprising turns that had me squirming. Then we jump forward a few years and see Sara in her adolescence, and the story stumbles through a clichéd teenage rebellion plot. It’s not a bad episode, but with such a great Black Mirror premise, I wanted more from its conclusion.
3: Crocodile
An attempt to capture the gut-wrenching thrills of season three’s Shut Up and Dance, Crocodile follows a couple who attempt to cover up a hit-and-run accident. And that’s all I’ll say, because while it’s far from perfect, its thrills are worthy enough that you should go in blind.
Another missed opportunity, Crocodile features a device that can access people’s memories, setting an insurance investigator on the trail of the couple. While this episode has a tense journey worth taking, I’m not sure it does enough with its premise. We’ve already seen this sort of tech in The Entire History of You, which masterfully explored such a technology’s impact on a societal scale before honing into a more contained story. Crocodile does neither, shoehorning in some comments about the broader implications of the device while giving us a story that, while tense, leaves little lasting impression.
4: Hang the DJ
It was only a matter of time before Black Mirror tapped into the world of online dating. In Hang the DJ, a dating app known only as “the system” matches users into relationships of prescribed length. Some couples meet for a day, others have to stay together for months, all in the hope that the system is learning enough about their users that it can eventually pair them with “the one”.
It’s probably the funniest episode to date, making a mockery of awkward dating encounters and our reliance on the technologies that facilitate them. It has some heart, but it’s far from this year’s San Junipero, with a third act that – to me at least – makes little sense and undercuts much of what was established earlier. So much so that in the end, I share none of the love my peers have for this episode and place it as the weakest episode of the season.
5: Metalhead
Now, this episode is me all over. Maxine Peake stars as a woman making a supply run in a post-apocalyptic land. It goes wrong, leading to a forty minute white-knuckle chase sequence pitting her against a relentless killing machine.
Shot entirely in black and white and offering no big reveals or answers, Metalhead is a departure from the traditional Black Mirror format. Funnily enough, it’s one of the episodes I enjoyed the most. It’s the first episode that strays into minimalism – not only is there a bleak, greyscale aesthetic, but the ideas woven into the narrative are left very open to interpretation. The answers are left to the viewer, and so are the questions.
Aside from all that, Peake is up there with Plemons as giving one of the best performances of the season, and the intense action and break-neck pacing all made this one of the most memorable episodes. At forty minutes, it’s also the only episode of the season that’s the correct length – all the others are too long for their stories (possible exception for Black Museum). Be sure to return for my interpretation once you’ve seen it.
6: Black Museum
A tourist decides to venture into a museum while her car charges. Inside, the museum’s mysterious, charismatic host takes her on a tour of artifacts, many of which will look awfully familiar to many Black Mirror fans. What follows is a White Christmas-style anthology of darkly comic, intertwining stories.
I adored the tone of this episode. The first mini-story, apparently based on a story by none other than Penn Jillette, is one of my favourites of the whole season, and features Brooker at his best: Getting me to laugh giddily while my jaw is dropping at something so nasty and fucked up. The other stories are great, too, all raising some interesting ethical dilemmas and dropping nuggets of information that add up to a satisfying conclusion. The episode has its issues but it sits alongside Callister and Metalhead as my favourites of the season.
In Conclusion
There’s plenty of good going on here. Every episode features at least one female lead character, there are still plenty of new ideas to chew on, and a fresh dose of dark comedy in many of the episodes. Despite some flaws, none of the episodes left me frustrated like season three’s lacklustre and predictable Playtest or Men Against Fire.
Sadly, there are signs that ideas may be running dry, as it threatens to fall in love with itself and become a self-referential nightmare. There are only so many more times I can hear Anyone Who Knows What Love Is and see 15 Million Merits comic books plastered onscreen before I lose faith in Black Mirror. Nods and Easter eggs – sure. Fuelling the fuckwits who are begging to see a creativity-stifling Black Mirror shared universe – not so much.
For the next season, I’d like to see a return to some more grounded stories. Let’s have bleak stories that aren’t just bleak for the sake of it. Let’s have a fresh look at something that doesn’t involve a gadget inserted into the temple. Six over-produced and over-budgeted episodes each year isn’t working. Dial it back to what made Black Mirror great.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to check out my reviews of Black Mirror seasons one, two, three, and White Christmas.
All image credit: Netflix
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