It used to be that watching Black Mirror required emotional and physical preparation. Whatever Charlie Brooker threw at his audience, there was a virtual guarantee that it would either mess them up mentally or make them want to throw their phones in a garbage disposal.
Certain episodes accomplished this better than others — the gut punch endings of “White Christmas” and “Shut Up and Dance” come to mind as salient examples — but the overall level of dread at the advent of a new season of Black Mirror was at least consistent. That’s what made it fun.
As an anti-warning: Don’t worry about that for Season 5. It’s got all the bite of an herbivorous tree frog and its messages are just as toothless.
As difficult as it is to go into why exactly Black Mirror Season 5 feels like a letdown without divulging the content of its episodes, the expectations surrounding the show are solid enough that it’s possible to hint at which of those are clumsily subverted. If a Black Mirror fan is looking for sphincter-clenching twists, Season 5 doesn’t deliver them. If they’re looking for a thoughtful and scary vision of the future of technology, Season 5 is devoid of horrifying tech. And if they’re looking for the real reason Black Mirror has been so great in the past, the idea that humans are the number one threat to themselves... Season 5’s apparent view on the situation is a resounding “meh.”
What’s odd is that all three of the new Black Mirror episodes are good in at least one aspect. One explores the fascinating potential of virtual reality and explores the limits of marriage, one takes place in a world precisely like our own and grounds its drama in the oversights of Silicon Valley, and the other is a wild, funky romp through the fame machine and its effects. The production value is high, the performances are superb (keep an eye out for Andrew Scott in “Smithereens,” who might have acted his way straight to an Emmy nomination), and the plots themselves do involve interesting “what if” situations. But each episode leaves viewers with the feeling that the other shoe is still hovering somewhere, waiting eternally to drop.
To be fair, technology has changed a lot since the first season of Black Mirror. Its newer seasons have charged on as the horrifying realities of previous episodes played out in real time. Episodes like “The Waldo Moment” and “The National Anthem” pretty much happened, and far-flung ideas like cookies and grains inch ever closer to realization. At this point, nothing Black Mirror puts out can be half as terrible as what the world has already accomplished, making it difficult to impress or crush an audience that’s already seen what tech has done to the social fabric.
At this point nothing Black Mirror puts out can be half as terrible as what the world has already accomplished.
It’s telling that the best episode of Black Mirror Season 5 is the one starring Miley Cyrus as a pop star with a dark side (seriously, her episode is very good). The previous formula to good Black Mirror always involved a teaspoon of reality, a drop or two of futurism, and a generous splash of human error. Casting Cyrus as an alternate universe version of herself places “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” in a funny, familiar world that feels a few degrees off kilter — and more importantly, goes buck wild with audience expectations of her character. Like the other two episodes in Season 5, it doesn’t stick its landing but the liminal space between knowing Miley Cyrus’ persona and watching what happens on screen is the closest Season 5 comes to replicating the magic that made previous episodes great.
In a way, creating a whole season of Black Mirror that doesn’t punch its viewers in the face and leave them for dead is a different kind of twist. Oh, y’all were expecting to be devastated? Surprise! Everything’s (mostly) cool. However, the potential for that meta-twist being intentional is undercut by the season’s annoying habit of showing the aftermath of its episodes interspersed with its credits. The “true” endings of each episode are revealed only after the action fully stops, and while the intention was perhaps to leave its viewers with a sense of ambiguity, the half-endings read as copouts instead of carrying its endings to term in the narrative.
It’s weird to feel so poorly about three arguably good episodes of television, but the short length of Season 5 only serves to highlight the deficiencies of the season as a whole. More new Black Mirror episodes may have spread the discontent around and allowed viewers to pick favorites, but with a trio to choose from it’s hard to be distracted from the toothlessness that pervades all three. With that toothlessness comes too few questions about technology instead of the usual deluge; without those questions it seems that Black Mirror has lost its edge.
