Black Mirror from its first season it became a cult series that triggered many reflections thanks to its incisive scripts and its profound reflections on the dangers of technology in the 21st century.
The series, in each of its original episodes, always functioned as a kind of Cautionary Tale or I have a moral where some gadget, device, infrastructure or technological element ended up condemning the fate of our protagonists.
The articulation mechanism of each story was pure genius and the honest impression during the first two seasons and the first Black Mirror special is that we were facing a fleeting, brief and perfect series, impeccable in each of its stories.
It was then that Netflix added to the equation, resurrecting production and generating more seasons that stopped being neat and round, to come across a very patchy experience, with brilliant moments and inexplicably terrible ones.
So now the premiere of each new season necessarily raises the question: has Black Mirror come back to its former strength or is it still not worth spending your spare time on?
The sixth season has just been released on the streaming platform, with this comes the question described above and we must say, in all honesty, that the answer is a relative “no”.
But all due to a rare and unexpected circumstance: this should not be called Black Mirror.
Charlie Brooker creates a spin-off series and for some reason says it’s the sixth season of Black Mirror
The sixth season of Black Mirror has just been released on Netflix and we will address it WITHOUT direct SPOILERS about the plot, nothing that has not been seen in the previews. But it is essential to describe the map of the composition of this new installment.
Where we have a total of five episodes, all written by Charlie Brooker, creator of this saga that here presents us with something unexpected. The succession of stories and their titles is this:
- 1.Joan is Awful
- 2.Loch Henry
- 3. Beyond the Sea
- 4.Mazey Day
- 5.Demon 79
Of those episodes listed above, only two episodes, Joan is Awful and Beyond the Sea, have full Black Mirror DNA. There is a third, Loch Henry, which still qualifies as an episode of that universe, because the technology of an old camcorder ends up marking the resolution of all the events in its third act and the epilogue.
But apart from that, the other episodes are out of the order and essence of what a Black Mirror story is supposed to be. Smart devices and technology in general fade into the background or disappear completely to make way for other types of stories.
In the sixth season of Black Mirror we have episodes with openly supernatural elements, others that pay homage to authors like Stephen King or the B-movie horror of the 70s and other things that are disconcerting.
So in the end it’s an entertaining experience, where the supernatural episodes are entertaining and well done, but still feel completely foreign to this show, most of the time.
It’s as if Charlie Brooker had developed a Tales from the Crypt-style spin-off series and the folks at Netflix forced him to rename the whole thing as the sixth season of the already famous series.