Black Mirror Season 6 review – Entering rear-view mode

It’s hard for any series, in any medium, to maintain its freshness. In terms of television, by the time you reach Season 3, let alone 6, the novelty has worn off and audiences have either developed rigid formulaic expectations, or fatigue. Which means that, with the release of its sixth season on Netflix last week, long-running speculative show Black Mirror runs the risk of feeling like “more of the same.”

It helps, of course, that Black Mirror is an anthology series, with no more than six episodes a release batch, and each episode a standalone story ranging in length from 40 to 90 minutes. Difference has been coded into Black Mirror’s DNA since it debuted in 2011 on the UK’s Channel 4. However, in its earliest years, a clear pattern developed. From creator and writer Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror earned a reputation for providing hypothetical tales about the role technology – all those ominous black mirror screens – can play in ushering in a dystopian future. Black Mirror’s stories are traditionally an unsettling mix of science fiction and horror, sometimes couched in barb-wire satire, with a sprinkling of credibility, and a twist welded onto the end.

Black Mirror is emotionally cool, often cruel, and heavy on the unhappy endings. Which makes it extremely hard to binge unless you are impervious to despair over what lies ahead for humanity.

But Season 6 of Black Mirror is different on a base level. After years of looking forward to a grim future, Black Mirror S6 mostly looks back. Of the five new episodes, only one is set in a near future. Everything else takes place between the 1960s (an alternate-history version, to be fair) and the present day. So, if you’re watching for fictional explorations of how technological innovation – from perfect instant recall and self-learning robot dogs, to social status based on user scores – will imprison us, you may find yourself disappointed by the new season.

That said, Season 6 does kick off with an episode that is peak “traditional” Black Mirror. Joan is Awful is the single near-future story already mentioned, and dives into the controversy shaking up every artistic industry right now as AI-generated content comes to the fore. In Joan is Awful, ordinary woman Joan (Annie Murphy) finds her life transformed into a Streamberry TV series, and herself played by Salma Hayek. Considering how humanity stands on the cusp of custom entertainment at an individual level, made possible by digital likeness rights, advanced computing and simply not reading Ts&Cs, Joan is Awful is extremely topical. It’s shocking, satirical and also laugh-out-loud absurd.

Also humorous, in a pitch-black and surprising way, is Demon 79, the greatest departure from the Black Mirror formula. In fact, Demon 79 is classified as a “Red Mirror” episode, as it is completely free of sci-fi and technology themes. Instead, this near film-length episode presents a supernatural horror tale. In 1979 in Northern England, as the far-right National Front rises, timid department store sales assistant Nida (Anjana Vasan) finds herself bonded with a demon, Gaap (Paapa Essiedu) who is styled after Boney M. With Gaap’s assistance, Nida must kill three people in three days to avoid the Apocalypse. Demon 79 is like Good Omens put through a hard R-rated filter for violence.

In terms of episodes that linger in the mind, probably most impactful is Loch Henry. Again, no future focus here. Set in our present day, Loch Henry sees an aspiring documentary maker Davis (Samuel Blenkin) and his girlfriend Pia (Myha’la Herrold) return to Davis’s hometown in Scotland to revisit the brutal murders committed by the village’s most notorious inhabitant. For extra visual effect, they decide to film on VHS. Loch Henry holds the mirror up to our sensationalist true crime obsession (so incredibly popular in South Africa), and the ease with which we erase the pain of the real people involved. Loch Henry is both haunting and nuanced, and is the one tale in Season 6 to really point the lens back at viewers, prompting uncomfortable self-reflection.

As for the other two episodes in Season 6 of Black Mirror, they share a thematic cohesion with the rest of the batch. Beyond the Sea, starring Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett, takes place in an alternate 1969 when astronauts on deep space missions can continue their lives on Earth through robotic replicas. Beyond the Sea takes an early chilling turn, and only gets darker from there. Meanwhile, episode Mazey Day is a wild, completely unpredictable ride as, in the mid Noughties, paparazzo Bo (Zazie Beetz) pursues a troubled movie star, armed with her camera, Nokia slide-phone and dial-up Internet.

Because of its subject diversity and flashes of humour to lighten the mood, Season 6 of Black Mirror seems more binge watchable than usual. It’s no less cynical than previous seasons, though. Although that seems to be the point. Viewing all episodes together, Black Mirror S6 asserts that humans are, and have always been, inherently flawed, self-motivated beings. It’s not a future thing. And technology certainly isn’t to blame. It’s simply a tool to make selfish desires a reality. And we have a long tradition of doing that, even as we try to ignore the reflections and recordings of our monstrous actions.

Watch all five episodes of Black Mirror Season 6, in addition to all previous seasons and special content, on Netflix now.