The Black Mirror Halloween Special

It's the Great New Season, Charlie Brooker.

by Dick Bazooka and ANTIcomputer Staff

This article breaks down every episode of Black Mirror Season 6 and contains spoilers, but read it anyway.

L

ast month, Netflix announced that after taking a few years off, Black Mirror would be returning with five new episodes bundled together for a sixth season.

Naturally everyone at ANTIcomputer.org was excited for the news and couldn’t wait to set up the old OTA set and watch the latest from Brooker and the Gang. With the weather holding, and one staffer holding the rabbit ears just so, we were able to watch every episode. And let me tell you, it was a great time and worth the wait.

Black Mirror left off with Season 5 when things IRL seemed pretty normal, as in, back in 2019. Back in 2019 viewers could appreciate slipping into a fantastical dystopian version of modern life and explore the ideas and possibilities imagining people gone neurotic with technology, and governments colluding with media and mega corporations to fool the public into believing deceptions and lies.

Remember? Way back in 2019? It was great.

Season 6’s first of five episodes starts off with Joan is Awful, a story about Joan, a middle-management tech executive who seems to be just coasting through her life. After a particularly shitty day, she settles in on the couch with her safe and boring fiancee to watch some online streaming entertainment. While they dither on what program they’re going to see (what do you want to watch? I dunno babe, what do you want to watch?) they notice a new show called “Joan is Awful” depicted with the face of Salma Hayek but with Joan’s hair style.

To Joan’s horror, they proceed to watch Hayek portraying Joan reliving not just the previous 12 hours of her day, but events up to the minute, as if the program was being written and created in real time. Disgusted in her behavior, her fiancee leaves. The next day Joan realizes that everyone at the office watched the episode, she gets fired, and her life really begins to spiral. Eventually she teams up with the “real life” Salma Hayek to stop the dramatized depiction of her minute-to-minute existence, and with the help of a Level 1 Michael Cera, everything gets explained and wrapped up in an ironic and hilarious happy ending.

It’s just what we were missing from Black Mirror in the past few years; a story of modern technical woes exacerbated by flaws of human nature bundled into a cautionary tale.

Black Mirror is back, and read your EULAs, people.

Episode two is Loch Henry, a true crime story cleverly hinted at in the previous episode. It follows two film students, Davis and Pia, who travel to Davis’ cold and grey Scottish hometown to film a cutting-edge documentary about egg theft. Yeah, egg theft. Tensions between Pia, a young American woman with bleached eyebrows, and Davis’ mom, a middle-aged Scottish homemaker out of central casting are immediately evident, but thankfully Davis is there to keep things cordial, and they use his childhood home as a base of operations for their documentary endeavor.

As they scout out filming locations, Pia is enamored with the natural rugged beauty of the area and wonders aloud why the picturesque village of Loch Henry has no visitors or tourists. Why is Loch Henry so empty? The answer comes from one of Davis’ dad-hating childhood friends who owns and operates the town pub. He explains the tiny hamlet is infamous for a serial killer who was discovered and arrested in the late 90s. The killer’s actions were so heinous and his victims so tragic, that it was the biggest news in all of Britain. It was the biggest news of course, until Lady Di died. It’s also revealed that Davis’ father was directly involved in the investigation, and ultimately died as a result of the killer’s actions. Eventually, everyone forgot about Lady Di’s death, and continued to forget about Loch Henry.

The pair visit the killer’s modest farm, and discover that it’s pretty much left intact, almost preserved immediately after the investigation. Pia immediately insists that they forget about the egg story, and pursue this new true crime drama. Because, let’s face it, ladies love a good true crime story. She convinces Davis to do it not just for the story, but for his father’s legacy and to finally bring some justice and revitalize the town.

With his mother’s blessing, Davis and Pia begin to pull the serial killer story’s thread, and the more they pull, the more the whole town begins to unravel. Eventually it all comes apart in a series of horrifying revelations, which leads to a bittersweet conclusion. The documentary is finished. It wins a BAFTA. The town is saved.

Except for the egg theft. I guess the eggs can fuck right off.

This is not the first time a Black Mirror episode focuses more on the dark side of humanity as opposed to the dark side of technology. In previous episodes such as Crocodile or Shut Up and Dance, for example, the dangers of modern devices took a backseat in the story. However, it was a still a present and crucial component. It had the final cautionary word. In this episode, all of the tech was pretty straight forward. It could’ve been an episode of CSI Edinburgh. Maybe the final cautionary word of Loch Henry is don’t leave your old VHS tapes lying around for your kid and his girlfriend to discover.

Episode three is Beyond the Sea, an outer space story that is supposed to take place in “an alternate 1969” for some reason. It follows two astronauts as they trudge through an unspecified six-year long mission drifting through space. Conveniently, NASA has built them exact robotic replicas back on Earth to keep their wives and families company. What’s even better, they can beam their consciousness into the robot replica as often as they like, and for as long as they like, provided they can tend to their space duties and there are no emergencies on the space station.

Josh Hartnett easily slides into character as David, the charming and charismatic astronaut with a swagger that would suggest he was a former fighter pilot. He drives a Camaro. He likes art and movies. He listens to classical music in French on the hifi. He has a beautiful wife and two perfect children.

Aaron Paul plays his space partner, Cliff. He’s a strict but fair husband and father with the discipline and bearing that comes from being a military man. He lives on a farm and teaches his son to chop wood and spear fish. He has the love and respect of his wife and leads grace before the meal. Of course, he doesn’t eat anything because on Earth he’s a robot. Yeah, science, bitch! (This is our one and only Breaking Bad reference.)

One night on Earth, a group of Manson-esque cultists led by a very creepy Rory Culkin, breaks into David’s house and dismembers his robot self, murders his family, and then sets the replica on fire. Later that night, NASA calls Cliff to give him the news while asleep at home. Robots don’t eat but they do need to sleep. With no replica to beam into on Earth, and with four years to go in the mission, David is isolated and alone on the endlessly drifting spacecraft—just like every other astronaut drifting on a space ship in space ship stories before and after him. Cliff and his family are devastated by the news. Back on the ship, David is inconsolable, and Cliff doesn’t know what to do to help his partner.

Weeks pass, and David’s mental condition is clearly deteriorating. Cliff’s wife, played by Kara Mara, suggests that he let David use his replica to beam to the farm. Let him walk through the woods, touch grass as it were, and breathe the Earth air into his robot lungs.

Of course, David is overjoyed to have the opportunity, and finds the experience therapeutic and revitalizing. Naturally, one visit turns into two, and David comes up with reasons to make it a regular occurrence. As one would imagine, two men sharing the one robot body becomes the center of conflict; one that must be resolved with one party making a compromise.

We here at ANTI assumed that David would eventually kill Cliff’s real body at the space station and inhabit the replica, living as Cliff and enjoying his life with Cliff’s family none-the-wiser. It seems that Brooker had a simpler and more shocking idea how to resolve the dispute over the boys’ robot.

At 80 minutes, Beyond the Sea is the second-longest Black Mirror episode. Even though the plot has gaping holes (more on that in a bit), the acting and dialogue are superb and the pace has a slow attention to detail that seems to methodically and carefully walk the viewer into the airlock, and then gives them the thumbs up as they drift into the inevitable and tragic conclusion.

Still, why didn’t NASA have a backup replica body for David? It seems that if they deemed it necessary to have a robo-dad during the long days in the space office, wouldn’t they have an extra? Six years is a long time to be gone.

Also, if they could just beam their minds from one place to another, why couldn’t they put the replicas on the space station and beam to work from Earth? Not as glorious, sure, but probably safer.

No matter how far they were in outer space, our astronauts instantly beamed their consciousness from space to Earth and were able to stay “online” indefinitely without any lag or disconnection. People today lose wifi signal strength when they walk to one side of their house.

Encryption, cryptography, and biometrics had been in use long before 1969. Why wasn’t there a more complicated way to beam into the Earth robot? Perhaps some kind of bio-lock to prevent people from using the wrong replica? In this episode, beaming to earth was as easy pushing a card key into the wall and closing your eyes. It was basically as simple as entering a room at the Marriott.

Why was this supposed to be 1969 and not, say, 2169? Was this supposed to be a social commentary on the role of American fathers in the post-war era? As in, fathers were emotionally distant, or in this case, literally off-world away from their families? We here at ANTI feel that maybe this episode is a social commentary on today’s remote workers, and how isolated they feel at home. We’re seeing how more and more companies are trying to get people back to in-office work. We wrote an article about it here.

Also, who are the fuddy-duddies over there at NASA making robots in alt-’69? Two words, NASA nerds: robo dicks. They can breathe air, paint paintings, and chop wood, but not take care of some real husband duties?

Regardless, we felt it would’ve been a far more disturbing ending to the episode if David assumed Cliff’s robo-identity and enjoyed his partner’s earthbound existence. But it seems that Brooker felt David had done it enough, and he couldn’t keep getting away with it. (Okay, one more.)

Episode four, season six of Black Mirror is titled Mazey Day. It starts with a young Hollywood paparazza named Bo, who in a pang of conscience, quits the life after one of the celebrities she staked out and photographed commits suicide after her photos are published. She clearly didn’t like the life, and felt that the other shutterbugs were scumbags.

Cut to the Czech Republic, where young actress Mazey Day is wrapping her day of filming on set, and decides to spend her evening drinking and taking drugs in her room. She realized she’s out of cigarettes, and she decides to drive into the dark and stormy night. On her way to get cigarettes, she hits someone or some thing, and she flees the scene. The next morning, a hungover and disheveled Day is being driven to set, but upon approaching the scene from the night before, her car is stopped because the road is blocked off with police and police tape, and the word is that there’d been a hit and run accident the night before. Seemingly distraught with guilt, Day reaches for a prescription pill bottle.

Back to Bo in California, she’s making an honest living as a barista. However, making ends meet is more difficult when you’re selling coffee vs selling lewds. An old friend from the paparazzi days finds her and tells her about the disappearance of Mazey Day, and says that there’s a price of 25k for the first photo. 30k if she looks like a junkie. Just when Bo thought she was out, they pull her back in.

Bo turns out to be an OSINT expert, and tracks Day down to a nearby Hollywood mansion of a friendly and sympathetic film producer, and decides to do a stakeout. Meanwhile, we get a glimpse of Day, who indeed looks like a junkie. She’s taking drugs and trashing the place. She’s getting visits from shady Hollywood “doctors”. Things aren’t looking good. Day wants to get better. She wants her problems to end.

Bo spots a large black SUV leaving the producer’s mansion, and decides to follow it. It leads her out into the California mountains where it stops at a roadside diner. The driver of the SUV gets out and slashes all of Bo’s tires, returns to his vehicle, and drives away.

Bo goes into the diner and makes small-talk with the staff, and figures out there’s an expensive celebrity rehab retreat not too far away. Bo reaches out to her paparazzo friend, and together they ride out to the secluded retreat, only to find the grounds guarded like a fortress, with high walls and gates.

While they’re trying to figure out how to get in, they’re joined by a couple of their former low-life paparazzi cohorts who low-jacked their motorcycle and had been tracking their movements.

The word was out. Mazey Day was somewhere nearby, and now it was just a question of how they were going to get into the compound, and who was going to make the big payday.

The small crew make their way into the compound and locate Day, but to their shock and regret, only half of them make it out alive. Bo and her friend haul ass back to the roadside diner where more mayhem ensues, and eventually Bo gets the money shot she was looking for.

At only 40 minutes, this is the shortest episode to date of any season. Sure, it’s fun and violent, but it’s more of a story you’d see told on Tales From the Crypt or The Twilight Zone, than from Black Mirror. There was no moral to the story other than don’t drive under the influence, and paparazzi are scumbags that deserve to get what’s coming to them, which is fine with us.

The last and final episode of Season 6 is titled Demon 79, which starts off with retroesque opening titles like something you’d see on a Tarantino film. The story is set in 1979 and follows a young, single Indian woman living in Northern England named Nida. Nida lives alone in her small apartment, in a neighborhood full of unfriendly faces and where she is subject to racist harassment. Add to this, the backdrop of heightened global tensions between NATO and the USSR, and the stockpiling of nuclear arms.

Nida has a thankless job at a department store where she’s surrounded by rude and casually (or blatantly) racist coworkers who look down their nose at her, and demand that she eat her lunch in the dark, locked, and neglected basement because they don’t like how her food smells. “Can you just eat a ham and cheese sandwich?” Nida finds herself trailing off entertaining intrusive thoughts about viciously murdering her shop mates, only to be blipped back to her reality of her dovish amenability.

In the basement she finds herself eating at an old roll-top desk with some macabre newspaper clippings and other ancient ephemera. Naturally, she decides to open drawers and search through the contents of the desk. In the process, she nicks her finger, and gets some of her blood on a small tile with exotic markings. Later at home, to her horror, the tile starts talking to her. It explains that it’s a demon-possessed talisman, and now she’s obligated to fulfill her task of killing three people in three days. If she doesn’t, the world will be consumed by fire. It’s like Aladdin, but with murders instead of wishes, but first thing first, of course, Nida must invite him into her house.

She reluctantly agrees, and Gaap the demon materializes into her living room looking like a walking depiction of Levi’s Baphomet. Seeing that his appearance upsets her, he gazes into her soul and transforms into Boney M’s frontman Bobby Farrell, whom Gaap first assumes is a clown.

In spite of fantasizing about brutally murdering her co-workers, Nida is a good person and doesn’t want to kill anyone. Gaap realizes she needs convincing and in a Halloween version of It’s a Wonderful Life, confides in her that this is his initiation phase to becoming a demon. If she helps him, he’ll get his wings, and won’t be tossed into the eternal abyss for eternity and for all time. Of course, if she does, she’ll be a serial killer. It’s a lose-lose-lose situation for all of us.

“Roit, you got’a kill free people by midnight onda fird day.”

“But I don’t want to…”

“Yeah, tough lot, innit?

Reluctantly, Nida goes into the night with an only-visible-to-her Gaap hovering over her shoulder, looking for a few people to murder. With Gaap using his convenient look-into-the-mind trick, he convinces Nida to kill three men, two of which really deserved it. Sadly, according to Hell HQ, only two of the three killed really counted because one of them was a murderer to begin with. Rules is rules.

Just like George Bailey standing on the bridge, it’s down to the wire. Gaap lays out some easy options: murder her racist coworkers. Instead, Nida decides to go for the really big fish, and insists on killing a far-right politician running for her local seat in Parliament. Gaap tries to talk her out of it. Apparently the politician has some fans in Hell, but she’s made up her mind. She’s especially determined after he uses his demon mind trick to show her how the politician’s future is a mix of Pink from Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Chancelor Sutler from V for Vendetta. Hey, it’s his first time. Rookie mistake.

So with the clock ticking, the Nida the Bradford Basher hunts down her final victim, with a reluctant Gaap in tow. It becomes a battle of wits, and instead of helping, Gaap ultimately decides to vanish in a poof of sparks. Nida runs her final victim off the road and gets a couple of good bashes in, only to be stopped at the coup de grâce by a gentle veteran police detective who’d been close on her trail for the second half of the episode. Bad luck, chummy.

Nida finds herself alone in an interrogation room with minutes to midnight, explaining to the detectives across the table how she summoned a demon who explained that she must become serial killer and how if she failed, the world would come to a fiery end. Unmoved and unconvinced, the patronizing detectives run out the clock. The second hand sweeps past midnight, and nothing happens.

Gaap reappears and reveals that both of them failed, but here’s the silver lining: if she chooses, she can join him in the eternal abyss. There’s no rules about humans tagging along.

Outside, alarms are sounding and missiles are approaching and landing with massive mushroom clouds following thereafter. The fiery apocalypse has arrived as promised. Nida and Gaap slowly walk hand-in-hand toward the camera as the hallway around them vaporizes in a wave of nuclear destruction.

Oh yeah, this is a Black Mirror episode after all.

For the last decade or so, Black Mirror has brilliantly filled the niche of episodic programming like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, or even Tales From the Crypt did before it. What makes Black Mirror the show we need today, is it forces us to confront our technological addictions and sociopathies, but in just enough of a dose for us to be able to reasonably disassociate. Who doesn’t like to watch short films of people falling victim to the inevitabilities of industrial society and its future? We sure as hell do.

Netflix is currently running a series of episodic horror shorts by the brilliant Guillermo del Toro, and we here at ANTI aren’t convinced that there’s room for another. Young celebrities turning into werewolves is fun and all, but that’s it? Is the monster on TikTok? What’s her @? A young woman summons a demon and must kill to satisfy its existence in this realm, but it’s 1979? So like, it happens on an Atari?

Black Mirror returning for Season 6 is one of the bright spots in 2023 and easily the best thing to watch on Netflix. Each of these episodes stand up with any of the previous episodes as quality entertainment. But for Season 7, can we have more of what made us love the show in the first place? More MPs with animals and robot dogs that hunt us down while we capture it all for that sweet, sweet endorphin rush that comes from faux-social engagement in our life pod next to our unfaithful android life partner that we created in the tub built from previous interactions on social media?

More tech terror and less terror-terror? Is that too much to ask?

Good grief.

Dick Bazooka is a writer-at-large and still uses an iPhone 5. He can be found on Twitter @DickBazooka.

artwork by mxadam.com.