Is Black Mirror season 6 worth the time?

The sixth season of Black Mirror premiered on June 15.

This is a unique project. The anthology series, assembled from dystopias, became a cult hit almost immediately after the release - for 2011 it was really unusual. The first two seasons, as well as a bonus series (a total of 7 episodes in total) were released on the British TV channel Channel 4. Then the series moved to Netflix, where 16 episodes have already been released (including one interactive).

The new season has 5 episodes:

• Horrible Joan is about a girl whose personal life is being shown on a streaming service.
• Loch Henry is about a couple making a true-crime series.
• "Beyond the Sea" is about astronauts and their counterparts on Earth.
• Maisie's Day is about the paparazzi and a star hiding from the limelight.
• Demon 79 is about 1979 and racism.

With each new season, the series increasingly abandoned technology as a main theme. The trend has continued - only the first and fourth episodes have plots with which Black Mirror is associated. As before, Charlie Brooker is working on the project - he wrote the script for all episodes of the sixth season.

Cast: Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), Zazie Beetz (Atlanta), Josh Hartnett (The Wrath of Man), Kate Mara ("House of Cards"), Salma Hayek ("From Dusk Till Dawn"), Michael Cera ("Scott Pilgrim vs. The World") and other.

Storytelling ruins everything

Charlie Brooker is a big fan of surprise endings. In pursuit of the cliffhanger, he is willing to ignore logic, character development, and all the rest of the nonsense (for him, that's just nonsense). The plot, suspense, unexpected twist - that's what matters. The sixth season shows why this approach is disastrous.

The episode "Beyond the Sea" tells the story of two astronauts. They perform their tasks on a spaceship, and at this time their mechanical copies live on Earth. That is, the astronaut goes to sleep on the ship, and his consciousness is transferred to the Earth, to the android. Thus, a person both does work and lives with his family. Question: why send a man into space, and leave his mechanical copy on Earth, if you can do the opposite? The episode lasts 80 minutes, and the whole viewing turns into a search for answers to this question (and still there are none).

In the episode "Maisie's Day", the paparazzi are looking for an actress that no one can find. The journalist learns that the star loves food from one cafe, and comes there. And he immediately meets a worker who says: “I brought food to her yesterday.” This is the detective. However, the detective line of the episode "Loch Henry" is no better - the lead is shown ten times on the screen, after which it unexpectedly (SUDDENLY!) leads to the disclosure of the case.

Not only the logic suffers, but also the characters. Characters have always been the weak point of Black Mirror, the sixth season has not changed anything. Brooker still uses bus-wide strokes. Heroes (absolutely all) are completely devoid of individuality. The actors play either themselves or their past roles (Zazie Beetz is even dressed as her Atlanta character).

The series has lost relevance.

The first episodes of Black Mirror could shock the viewer - it was 2011, the TV series industry was just turning into a giant. By the way, then House of Cards, the first original Netflix series, had just started.

Against this background, Charlie Brooker looked solid. However, over the next few years, the series has changed (and the world too), and Brooker remains in 2011, as as if filming episodes for those who have not seen "Westworld", "The Handmaid's Tale", "Maniac" and others "Separations". Any plot seems familiar.

The Terrible Joan series is a satire on streaming services, people's personal lives and digital technology. The main character visits Streamberry (a parody of Netflix) in the evening and sees a series based on her real life. The problem is that back in 2018, the horror “Webcam” was released on the same Netflix with a very similar plot. After 5 years, Brooker shoves the viewer the same story.

But the episode "Loch Henry" is a straightforward parody of True Crime. Offhand - in recent years, the American podcast A Very Fatal Murder, the TV series "American Vandal", "Roy" by Donald Glover have been released. True Crime has been ridiculed for a long time and successfully, it is generally easy to ridicule. When Charlie Brooker enters this territory, he resembles a schoolboy who repeats the jokes of high school students.

The episode "Across the Sea" looks like an attempt to repeat the success of "White Christmas" - the most successful series in the history of "Black Mirror". However, Brooker never explained why people are in space and androids are on Earth, so it's impossible to watch this nonsense.

Maisie's Day feels unfinished, as if some important pieces have been cut out of it. It seems to be a criticism of the paparazzi and journalism, but everything is so head-on that it’s even embarrassing.

Demon 89 is a stylized racist horror that is worse than any horror you've seen in recent years.

Lack of freshness is a problem. However, Black Mirror also renounces identity. Only two series are tied to technology. One is on CGI (computer generated images), the second is on the transfer of consciousness, which has been repeatedly shown in past seasons.

Neural networks in the spirit of Chat GPT are ignored. That is, Brooker's fantasy is limited by his ideas about technology. It can be assumed that now he is writing a script for a series about Chat GPT to release it in five years - when everyone forgets about this neural network.

Paphos remained

Despite the fact that the “Black Mirror” does not at all draw on a denouncer of vices, and even has a mediocre relation to modernity, it amazes with pathos. Sometimes stories resemble social advertising. In fact, this shift occurred as early as the third season, since then the instructiveness has only increased. And this tone looks wild against the background of the plots.

For example, in the first series, fictional Netflix steals the life of its client because she did not read the license agreement, and therefore transferred the rights to herself. In 2011, a South Park series called HumancentiPad was released, which was based on the same plot. Only there was humor (and a human iPad), and here - as if subtle satire.

The intellectual content of the episodes is comparable to Jacque Fresco's documentaries. Once a season, Brooker tries to speak out on the topic of racism, but stuffs the characters with racial stereotypes. And self-irony (“I criticize Netflix by releasing a series for Netflix”) looks too ridiculous.

Charlie Brooker and his "Black Mirror" have long been turned into a meme. Comments in the spirit of "it's like in the Black Mirror" have long become boring. But the news itself, as a rule, turns out to be much worse than Charlie Brooker's attempts. Perhaps the scripts for the seventh season should be written by Chat GPT - and then at least interesting characters will appear in them.