‘Black Mirror’ Season 7 Is In Your Brain

After a 6th season that genre-surfed around and behaved like an ordinary anthology series, ‘Black Mirror‘ has returned to form in Season 7 with a series of thematically-linked episodes that has me wondering: where are my neural enhancements?

Previous seasons of ‘Black Mirror’ proved eerily prescient in sussing out trends in future tech. Biologically-accurate androids, social-media credit systems, and political humiliation as blood sport have all come true, if not in the exact form that series creator Charlie Brooker predicted them. Some things, fortunately, like swarms of android murder-bees, remain slightly beyond our reach. This season is all about brain implants, either performed by semi-sinister corporate entities, self-performed, or simply attached to the forehead like Stickum. Apparently, the future lies in electronic “nubbins” that will activate, cause your eyes to turn white, and send you deep into an alternate reality. I’ll take two poolside Key West nubbins, please!

But for Brooker and Black Mirror, fun isn’t the point of the future. No one has fun, unless they’re sadistically mocking poor shlubs who are drinking their piss for money only, in a darkly humiliating Only Fans parody called Dum Dummies. Maybe some of the teens who are on the Infinity role-playing server in virtual space are enjoying themselves, but an evil corporation is exploiting them, and they’re constantly running across virtual clones that bleed real blood and are desperate to survive.

In the highly-enhanced virtual realities of the new Black Mirror, the cruelty is the point. The season’s best episode is the first, ‘Common People,’ in which Chris O’Dowd and Rashida Jones play a middle-class couple who run afoul of the banality of tech evil, falling into the subscription trap of a company that offers increasingly expensive brain enhancements. It’s a vicious satire of modern bureaucracy, the healthcare industry, and our dependence on cell phones.

My other favorite this season is ‘Plaything,’ anchored by a brilliantly unhinged performance from Peter Capaldi, who plays a mad computer genius seduced by digital creatures called Thronglets, which are a purely Black Mirror creation, kind of Tamagotchi combined with Snorks. Thronglets is actually available as an app game, though it doesn’t require a brain implant to play. Despite what this episode, which is simultaneously creepy and hopeful, implies, the Throng doesn’t yet have the technology to take the lead from humanity.

In other episodes, people use advanced tech for personal revenge, or to wistfully recall lost love. You begin to feel like you’ve seen this episode of Black Mirror before. The themes are familiar, and so are the settings. Brooker brings back the video-game company from his interactive film, Bandersnatch,  and also, Streamberry, the wicked Netflix stand-in platform. The season’s longest episode is a genuine sequel to USS Callister, probably Black Mirror’s most beloved, well-known, and fully enjoyable creation. The sequel more than 90 minutes long, and is a proper fan-service film.

Despite the fact that Black Mirror is the darkest, saddest, and most cynical TV show ever to air, I still found myself wanting more episodes. The only thing worse than a mediocre Black Mirror is no Black Mirror at all. I’d even subject myself to a brain implant or a neural link that would allow me to live in the world of Black Mirror more thoroughly. After this season’s six episodes, I found myself craving my own ironic, tech-induced denouement.