Black Mirror season six
The sixth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror anthology series tells six stories that, in true Black Mirror fashion, show a twisted reflection of modern society: Joan is Awful, in which a tech CEO finds herself the unwilling main character of a new show; Loch Henry, which focuses on a pair of film students making a true crime documentary in a sleepy Scottish town; Beyond the Sea, a look at an alternate-history 1969 where astronauts can inhabit mechanical replicas on Earth; Mazey Day, in which a paparazza searches for an off-the-grid Hollywood starlet; and, Demon 79, in which a sales assistant finds herself responsible for averting the apocalypse.
Something that stands out about these latest entries in the wider series is that the titular black mirror – that is to say, the looming spectre of technology in the modern era – is largely absent, with Joan is Awful being the only episode with a specific focus on traditional Black Mirror topics.
While this experimental approach to dystopian science fiction does allow this season to have a distinct visual and narrative identity, the episodes also feel unfocused in their attempts to get away from conventional Black Mirror trappings. This robs the latest instalment of much of its satirical bite: the audience’s preconceptions of what a Black Mirror episode can be is challenged, but the audience themselves are challenged very little.
Another issue that affects this season is its pacing. The initial conceits for many of the chapters would work well as short, snappy stories, but each is around an hour long – the briskest being Mazey Day at 40 minutes – and the concepts simply don’t have the legs to carry hour-long stories (except Beyond the Sea, which uses its runtime effectively as an extended character study), with a lot of narrative dead air to hit those long runtimes. This makes the episodes feel as though they’re dragging their feet to get to the central thesis or twist, which adds to the lessened satirical edge and makes the twists less impactful when they finally arrive.
All of this isn’t to say that Black Mirror’s sixth season is bad. It’s well-written, stylish and bolstered by fantastic performances across the board. However, it also seems to be having something of an existential crisis, which leaves much of its storytelling feeling oddly non-committal – and if there’s anything Black Mirror shouldn’t be, it’s non-committal.
Umar Ali
Black Mirror season six is released on Netflix on 15th June 2023.
Watch the trailer for Black Mirror season six here:
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