"Black Mirror" reflects on itself

Either Charlie Brooker has run out of ideas, or pop culture has finally eclipsed "Black Mirror," his technophobic-cum-miserabilist science fiction series that just dropped its seventh season on Netflix. After a decade and a half spent giving Luddites nightmares about the many ways our gadgets, gizmos and gigabytes may betray us all, the show is at the edge of obsolescence; gimmickry only goes so far for so long, especially when drawn from the same sling bag of tricks. 

Granted, it’s fitting that Brooker’s fearmongering approach to speculative fiction should outdate itself; our phones, computers and video game consoles are likewise outdated by tech consumers’ hunger for shiny new toys, which the tech industry is too happy to feed. Maybe it’s inevitable that "Black Mirror," once upon a time a show of unnerving political and social prescience, would become not simply passé but past expiration. Technology, after all, advances quickly. In fact, it’s advancing faster than ever. Pop culture develops at a sluggish pace by comparison, but the clip that TV and movies have kept up for the last couple of years has pushed them ahead of "Black Mirror" by a wide margin in the “future is bleak” space. Brooker, meanwhile, appears content playing the hits. 

The best evidence of this apathy is the first-ever sequel in the series’ lifespan, "USS Callister: Into Infinity," carrying on the plot of Season 4’s “USS Callister.” For fairness’ sake, Brooker’s unsavory "Star Trek"-inspired adventure still maintains a high ranking on “best 'Black Mirror' episode” listicles across the internet; add to that an open ending and suitability for serialization baked into its DNA, and “USS Callister: Into Infinity” makes sense commercially, but not creatively. Picking up the threads of “USS Callister,” “USS Callister: Into Infinity” cuts between the real world, where game programmer Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti) deduces that her boss, Robert (Jesse Plemons), deceased per the events of “USS Callister,” kept digital clones of herself and her coworkers to torment in his private build of the game; and "Infinity," where Nanette’s clone struggles to keep her crew alive in an MMORPG world that’s grown increasingly hostile toward them.

Cristin Milioti in "Black Mirror" (Nick Wall/Netflix)“USS Callister” gravitated toward the ongoing accusations leveled at, and public scrutiny placed on, Harvey Weinstein for his nigh-endless abuses against women throughout his career; the episode didn’t predict the mogul’s future fortunes, but captured, to an extent, the moment’s atmosphere through its observations about powerful men exploiting their positions and authority. “USS Callister: Into Infinity” makes no such remarks on power; the sharpest comment Brooker offers us is that, when implicated in wrongdoing, men are willing to do unconscionable things to shield themselves from accountability. That’s hardly a blockbuster insight. Read the news. Tech CEOs — hell, entire companies — have a history of breaking the law to cover up their lawbreaking. “USS Callister: Into Infinity” and "Black Mirror" aren’t future-facing here. They’re gazing at the past instead. 

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Earlier this year, Drew Hancock’s "Companion" drew similarly banal conclusions about how men in power interact in relation to technology. They lie. They kill. They play the victim. Josh (Jack Quaid), a nice guy on the surface and a cockroach underneath, cooks up a murder scheme, intending to pin the act on Iris (Sophie Thatcher), his girlfriend, but actually a jailbroken “companion” android. Hewing to genre conventions, Iris frees herself from Josh’s control and fights back, forcing him to whip up a plan B involving a fine-spun alibi made of stuff and nonsense. He might’ve gotten away with it if not for the meddling recording hardware built into her abdomen. Last resort? Kill everybody in the vicinity who can report Josh to the police. 

The escalation from pathetic incel to pathetic, murderous incel is an expected leap, but "Companion" raises questions to the audience on the way about the role technology plays in our daily lives and the social gaps it both can, and cannot, fill. If the film has familiar bones, at least they have meat on them. “USS Callister: Into Infinity” lacks even meager sustenance. Even the finale, where Brooker, his co-writers (Bisha K. Ali, Bekka Bowling, and re-teaming with him from “USS Callister,” William Bridges), and his director (Toby Haynes, also re-teaming from his stint directing “USS Callister), drive the same points home made in the original episode, about the personality profiles of men like Robert, as if that hammer needed be swung again. It’s one thing for "Companion" to recycle ideas from other sci-fi narratives — Hancock’s film is fun but hardly original — and another for "Black Mirror" to do the same with ideas the show already recycled eight years ago, when “USS Callister” premiered.

At least “USS Callister: Into Infinity” is Season 7’s closer, and the remaining handful of episodes spark brighter. With one exception, though, none of them ignite new thinking about the technologies represented in each. Deepfake software has ushered in a new era of digital gaslighting ("Bête Noire"); tiered payment structures nickel and dime their users into spending money they don’t have and still stick them with the indignity of ads ("Common People"); generative AI can’t make movies the way a crew of humans can ("Hotel Reverie"). The season’s most engrossing concepts are worked into “Plaything,” a morality tale where the antidote to mankind’s primitive genetic cruelty lies in digital life, and Peter Capaldi plays against type with his captivating portrait of an LSD-addled and twitchy shut-in; and “Eulogy,” a character study fixed on a man’s fractured recollections of the love of his life, where Paul Giamatti reminds us why he’s one of our great actors.

Cristin Milioti and Jimmi Simpson in "Black Mirror" (Nick Wall/Netflix)“Plaything” doesn’t say much; “be kind to pixelated critters in life simulation games” is a nice enough sentiment, backed up by air from Brooker and director David Slade, who at least builds eerie tension to unbearable levels as Capaldi’s character recites exposition at Michele Austin and James Nelson-Joyce. By the time the plot arrives at the point where it gets to be an actual story, instead of a forty-five minute flashback sequence, the credits start rolling. It’s “Eulogy” where "Black Mirror" hits hardest, painfully unpacking Phillip’s (Giamatti) decades of resentments over his relationship with Carol, heard in voiceover (via Rebecca Ozer) and seen, briefly, in Phillip’s memories, played by Hazel Monaghan. "Black Mirror" most often contextualizes technology straightforwardly as “bad.” “Eulogy” is the rare entry to give holistic consideration to its tech, in this case, a device that allows users to “enter” old photographs. The effect forces Phillip to look inward, acknowledge his own actions, and, ultimately, make a discovery that briefly shatters him but also lets him fully reform his memories as well as his affection.

But that’s one episode — one and a half, if we treat “Plaything” as the preamble to a robust and morally knotty drama about humanity’s next stage of evolution — out of half a dozen. Those remaining numbly reiterate the greats from "Black Mirror"’s yesteryear: “Common People” and “Bête Noire” echo themes from “Fifteen Million Merits,” “Hated in the Nation,” and “Nosedive"; “Hotel Reverie” attempts to riff on the “ghost in the machine” romance of “San Junipero"; and “Plaything” makes a muddle of “Smithereens,” “White Christmas,” and, frankly, “USS Callister” — which arguably makes it this season’s Polaris. Treading old territory to make new paths is a fine exercise, though that’s not what "Black Mirror" does, per se, with this year’s slate of episodes. Rather, it cannibalizes old ones.

Repetition is one of "Black Mirror"’s two misplays in Season 7. For a show comprising a scant 27 episodes to salvage itself for spare parts is unbecoming, not to mention dull; a show can only play the same note so many times before the piano string snaps, whether that means going with the most obvious resolution possible or with a resolution reached in older, better episodes. What compounds Brooker’s incuriosity, his hesitation to tackle unexpected and complex plot progression, and clinging to the safety of the most obvious developments possible instead, is that his contemporaries appear wise to "Black Mirror"’s formula, and have outdone it with their own projects, whether they’re in theaters or at home.

Dan Erickson’s corporate dystopian thriller "Severance" reads as if he cultivated the seed of a "Black Mirror" episode into a full-fledged show. "OBEX," the latest invention from Albert Birney, one of our contemporary mad geniuses of low-fi indie sci-fi, debuted at Sundance, and is on its way to theaters later this year; stripped down, sparse, and scary as hell, the picture gives empathy to people that "Black Mirror" shows contempt, namely, people with crippling social anxiety and a distaste for reality, for whom video games are a refuge from a hostile world. Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s documentary "Eternal You" confronts death capitalism where it lives, with David Cronenberg’s "The Shrouds" not far behind. Forget digital cloning: think about physical cloning and its ramifications, as Bong Joon-ho digs into in "Mickey 17" with ruthlessly absurd zeal. And lest we forget that we live in conservative times, Fleur Fortuné tracks the arc of female bodily autonomy in "The Assessment" and finds that even under liberal rule, powers that be will still legislate uteruses as a solution to a global catastrophe.

If there’s a common thread through these titles that can lead us back to "Black Mirror"’s structural problems, it’s humanity. Brooker seems to have lost interest in people by now, focused as he is instead on the tech itself; at its worst, "Black Mirror"’s seventh season favors lines of code and shiny gizmos over human emotion, which, as a small mercy, explains why the episodes feel like their priorities are disjointed. Bad as the outcomes that the different forms of tech typically produce, it is nonetheless incredibly cool to see the tech do what it is designed to in "Black Mirror"’s world. 

But admiration is not the essence of the show. "Black Mirror" is, always has been, and should always be, about the woes that new tech visits on us when what we expect it to do is make our lives better or easier. It certainly shouldn’t glorify its make-believe tech or otherwise put it under so much scrutiny that we forget, ultimately, as Brooker has, that we’re meant to care about the people at the series’ center and not about the machines.