Welcome to “I’m Watching!” This is a series where I post my thoughts on shows I’m following as the episodes air. These write-ups are more like in-depth reactions than full-on “reviews”, so expect it to be a little unrefined.
This time I’m watching the newly released sixth season of Black Mirror on Netflix, featuring five new installments of Charlie Brooker’s soul-crushing anthology. I previously reviewed Black Mirror five years for the blog I had before I started this site, so revisiting it here is a nice full-circle moment. Obvious spoilers ahead!
“Joan Is Awful”
That felt a lot like the Miley Cyrus episode. Campy, superficial, illogical bullshit riding on star power and little else. At least the premise for this one was a lot more compelling and Black Mirror-y, but they didn't do nearly enough with the idea, and it overall felt like a very lecturing, surface-level take on data privacy/consent. (The scene with the lawyer felt exactly like the episode "Smithereens" where they just explicitly spell out the themes of the episode using today's language and buzzwords, which feels so shallow and low-effort compared to what this show once was. Brooker is really phoning it in these days.) There was also a fairly masturbatory level of Netflix self-parody and Black Mirror-related Easter eggs, which added to the episode's gimmicky feeling. I also have no idea what the point of it was - it all built up to a fairly anticlimactic and confusing ending centered on the "real" Joan (who we just met and have no reason to care about as a character.)
I didn't outright hate the episode as an hour of TV, because it was entertainingly constructed and Annie Murphy was a fantastic lead, but it's thin gruel as far as Black Mirror goes, and pretty far down the bottom quality-wise compared to other episodes. Salma Hayek's performance was also god-awful, though I'm willing to accept that she went so over-the-top because even the "real" Hayek was actually in a simulation, I don't know. Felt more like a failed attempt at comedy. The writing got progressively worse as the episode went on.
“Loch Henry”
Wow, that was an excellent, if still flawed, episode, and definitely one of the best hours this show has served up in at least a few seasons. Interestingly, its greatest limitation was the fact that it was a Black Mirror episode, because for 99% of its runtime, it was a very solid horror/thriller flick in its own right that felt like a mix of the "White Bear" episode and the film Barbarian (with a little shade of X as well). And then the last few minutes turned it into something much more tacky and sermonlike, out of some misplaced obligation to spell out the episode's "societal punchline".
I feel like the show in its early years would've had the restraint and respect for its audience to not do this, or at least not make the sequence quite so drawn out and self-indulgent (I really rolled my eyes when this was indeed revealed to be the Streamberry documentary seen in "Joan is Awful". Not everything needs to be a shared universe!) The documentary being so cheesy and exploitative definitely made its point effectively, and reminded me of (Barry spoilers) the movie in the Barry series finale showing a generic Hollywood retelling of the series' events, but it still felt way too over the top, and the tonal shift from the rest of the episode felt unearned.
Also, I'm not usually one to complain about such things, but I wasn't really a fan of all the explicit Netflix parallels between both this episode and the last (here there was the lampooning of the true crime genre, fresh off the outcry over Dahmer), as well as the shallow and indeed hypocritical theme shared by both episodes about exploiting personal tragedies for "content churn". The corporate hypocrisy is unsurprising, but what bothers me more was how it reaffirmed the way Netflix has turned this show itself - what was once Charlie Brooker's ingenious, transgressive, scrappy brainchild - into a branding tool. The irony I'm sure is the point.
Some other notes:
The ending wasn't the only thing wrong with the episode: the beginning, for one, was a bit rough, with stilted dialogue and not enough time to get to know the characters before Pia is rushing to turn the story into a documentary. There were also some tropey beats like the drawn-out sequence of them singing in the car before the obvious crash, Pia being horror-movie stupid and not immediately leaving the house after discovering the tapes, and Pia's death, which was just dumb.
Equally dumb was the fact that the mom would just leave the tapes lying around for them to use without thinking they'd discover it. Not sure if she felt guilty and wanted her son to find everything (i.e. the note at the end) but that didn't come through enough.
Other than those things though, the episode was definitely a great one, and a satisfying callback to the early days of the show with small, relatively unknown actors, and of course the gloomy overcast British setting. The sense of dread in the second half was also superbly built up, even if Barbarian did a lot of the same things better.
Stuart is one of the best and most entertaining characters the show has come up with in quite some time! The show has gotten a lot of big-name actors to do great work in recent seasons, but the characterization itself has often felt thin and lackluster. This guy was great though, just 10/10 lines all around.
Stuart name-dropped Netflix in this episode, which means both Netflix and Streamberry exist within this episode's universe.
Davis came off exactly like Cousin Greg during their first meeting with the movie producer. "It, uh matters a lot to me, as, um, a son."
Nice little Easter egg at the end with the actress who approached Davis at the BAFTA afterparty being played by Weruche Opia from I May Destroy You (which the episode's director, Sam Miller, also directed.)
The BAFTA afterparty set looked very similar to the Mar-a-Lago set from season 3 of Mr. Robot.
“Beyond the Sea”
FUCK man. This episode had the unique quality of being one of the almost-best episodes of the entire series. The premise was terrific and ripe for dramatic potential, a lot of which was very compellingly explored but some not nearly as much. Its biggest flaw, even at 80 minutes, was that it still wasn't long enough - I really feel it should've been a two-hour film. Would've given its many concepts much more time to breathe and properly register. I think all the building blocks of the episode were perfectly arranged, but the execution felt tragically rushed during crucial segments. While I greatly enjoyed the episode nonetheless, I couldn't help but see flashes of the episode it could've been during many scenes.
The episode narratively and visually reminded me of so many other films (in a good way), with the main one I kept thinking of being Enemy (2013) starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The only time it felt derivative of that film rather than inspired by it was with the wife angle, which I'll get to in a moment. It also had shades of Westworld (the synthetic bodies, similar to "Be Right Back" as well), The Lighthouse (two men trapped in physical and psychological isolation), Freaky Friday (the body switching), and Ad Astra (a contemplative slow burn set in outer space that examines the male psyche).
It was also kind of like "USS Callister" in reverse, where this time the people aboard the spaceship are real and their representations on Earth are virtual. Both episodes also examined the dark side of masculinity.
Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett were absolutely fantastic leads. Paul is an inspired casting choice because we're not used to seeing him play a character quite as insidious and chauvinistic as this. This has to be the least "Jesse" role he's taken so far, and he did a brilliant job playing two distinct characters. He must have been so grateful to receive such a meaty part after previously doing the “USS Callister” voice cameo only if he was allowed to reappear in the show. He's clearly been a big fan and Brooker rewarded him mightily. (It was also a relief seeing him get a good role in a sci-fi setting after the utter misfire that was the last two seasons of Westworld.)
Hartnett, too was excellent at portraying David both as a charismatic family man and a frightening, unhinged, tragic figure. Sad how he hasn't really gotten many major lead roles since the 2000s, he's very much still got it. He'll be in Oppenheimer this year too so hopefully a career resurgence is on the way.
Now to where the episode suffered: even for its extended length, it tried wrangling too many conceptual/character threads, most of which were great directions to take the story but required texture and patient buildup that the episode's structure and runtime didn't really afford. The worst of these was the rushed subplot between David and Cliff's wife, which is anyways a super boring and predictable route to take such an inventive premise, and was rendered in way too broad strokes to be properly compelling. (Kate Mara was great in her part, but her character basically had no life of her own and was just a plot device, which made this story feel even more hacky and disappointing. It was also frustrating seeing it after remembering how much better Enemy handled this premise.)
What made the affair angle interesting again was David's sinister reaction to being told no, but that leads me to the next flaw: the awkward and poorly structured way in which the episode revealed the two leads' dark sides. Both characters' antagonistic turns felt jarring rather than earned: with Cliff, we got some very slight indication in early scenes between him and his wife that he had, let's say, "old-fashioned" views about marriage and fatherhood, but we didn't get to spend nearly enough time with him on Earth (nor with Kate Mara's character) to understand her dissatisfaction with her marriage. It was simply told to us via exposition from David, which made the reveal of David as a possessive husband and abusive father feel clumsy.
Similarly with David, we didn't get any signs of his pushy, entitled behavior earlier in the episode, so his behavior with Kate Mara felt out of left field and again, rushed in its buildup. The implication is he's become addicted to living Cliff's life, which makes perfect sense given the tragedy he suffered, but it was again too broad and exposition-driven to feel organic. The episode needed extended time to really lay the groundwork for this theme about Cliff not appreciating what he has (let alone David himself discovering this.)
The ending also rang a bit false to me. I saw it pointed out how David offering Cliff a seat represents the adage "misery needs company", but given what we saw of Cliff in the episode, we have no reason to believe he wouldn't immediately try to kill David in a rage - which leaves the "ambiguous" ending feeling a bit hollow. (Yes, killing him would be suicide since both men are needed to complete the space mission, but now Cliff himself has nothing left to lose, so what does it matter?) There were also some dumb decisions made in the script to get us there, namely the Cliff suddenly trusting David enough to give him his things and go out into space, as if David wasn't obviously gonna try and steal his body while he was gone.
I also wasn't a fan of much of the dialogue in this episode, which often felt incredibly stilted and first-drafty. It fascinates me how it was written by the same guy who gave us scripts as sharp as “White Christmas” and “Hang the DJ”. The physical confrontation between Cliff and David was perhaps the worst offender here. On the other hand, the scene where Cliff's wife tells him about her loneliness was surprisingly well-done, even if the way they examined that theme was quite half-baked.
Didn't like the whole Manson Family thing at the beginning with Rory Culkin’s cult. Felt again like a plot device just to kick off the main premise of the episode, as well as a fairly sloppy way of delivering exposition about the nature of the mechanical bodies. It could've been handled a whole lot better, but again, the episode's length made it feel premature and half-assed.
I've been piling on the criticisms here, but all this said I still really liked this episode. It was by far the most ambitious and original episode the show has come up with in a long time (finally a sci-fi episode without a cookie/simulation premise!) and the acting and visuals were simply terrific from start to finish. It did squander a lot of its potential in its execution, which felt rushed even with the added runtime (it really, really would've worked better as a full movie), but I still felt quite enthralled the entire time given how much promise and weight the story had.
Thank you for reading!