Many of us assumed that ending Black Mirror's sixth season with an episode surrounding a supernatural demon in 1979 marked the show's farewell to its tech-dystopian legacy, and yet, here we are again, with an additional six episodes within the anthology's seventh season.
Thankfully, the mixed-bag show arrives with a lot more bite this time around, presenting reflections on grief, power, the definition of "life" when personifying AI, and callbacks to older episodes. Episode 5, "Eulogy," will go down as a series highlight (and a major tearjerker), with the lowest point swinging somewhere between "Bête Noire" and "Plaything," both bright ideas that prove more absurd than unsettling. The villains of Season 7 are either classic capitalistic corporate greed or formally isolated tech nerds abusing their new-found power — the latter theme an ode to a certain oligarchic tech billionaire and his vindictive victim complex.
As we collectively watch the West crumble beneath our feet, Black Mirror's philosophies have shifted. The anthology usually manages to sneak in some warm and fuzzy stories, but the show became a household name for its signature pessimistic bleakness. The phrase "Black Mirror-esque" used to denote something including violent or exploitative tech, and similarly morally deficient people creating and using it, but these days, the stories are a bit more human.
The characters in Season 7 are, for the most part, people trying to do their best within worst-case scenarios introduced by predatory and/or profit-driven tech advancements. Everyday working-class folks, too busy trying to afford grapes and teaching their boomer parents how to stop falling for AI dancing cat videos, don't need a lecture on the dangers of the collapsing world around them — they know it, they see it, and they're the ones losing.
Squid Game, The Handmaid's Tale, Severance and now some new Black Mirror provide a lot of escapist television warning us of evolving techno-fascism, featuring the commodification of our consciousness, neo-slavery, the disappearing of dissenting voices, and the extermination of the poor. When we watch Mike (Chris O'Dowd) in the first episode of the season, "Common People" directed by Ally Pankiw, desperately harm himself to try to afford the increasing subscription prices of the microchip program keeping his wife (Rashida Jones) alive, we're all too aware of our reality. We know that the American oligarchy deem the life of a wealthy insurance CEO more valuable any of us regular folk, à la Luigi Mangione.
In Season 1, the episode "15 Million Merits" showed Daniel Kaluuya's character resisting against the dystopian game show he's trapped inside. He attempts to hurt himself on a live broadcast, but instead of disrupting the system, the game makers reward him, giving his faux-revolutionary poems a platform within the same system he originally attempted to break free from. The sense of urgency — of foreboding danger — that the series used to spark has been dulled.
Black Mirror used to warn us of an unpredictable future, but its time has run out. The television show now merely serves as a comfortable return to format, a sedative, some good ol' content slop for the Netflix trough during our spiralling descent into worldwide fascism. At what point do we decide to stand up, turn the TV off and do something about it?