Warning: Contains Spoilers!

Since Black Mirror started on Channel 4 in 2011, there has always been a lot of lazy journalism that describes the series as a modern Twilight Zone; because it’s an anthology series with sci-fi leanings and that’s their sole, sloppy frame of reference. In the past, I’ve found this very annoying because they’re two very different concepts; The Twilight Zone deals with fantasy and allegory, whereas Black Mirror was always very much a show about the potential dangers of technology. The title Black Mirror even refers to the inactive computer screen. Even though the most recent revival of The Twilight Zone seemed to be trying very hard to emulate Black Mirror, the two remained markedly separate entities, even when Charlie Brooker’s series moved to Netflix in 2016. Or, at least, that’s how it was until the Sixth Season of Black Mirror arrived…

The first episode in the new series, Joan is Awful, is a story about a mid-grade executive at streaming network Streamberry (clearly based on Netflix itself) who finds that her life is being played out as a streamed drama series on the channel she works for. I’d be lying if I said there was anything original in this; The Twilight Zone did the ‘character finding out that that their life is a TV show / movie’ at least three times: in the original series with A World of Difference (1960), in the first revival with Special Service (1989) and in Rod Serling’s Lost Classics with The Theater (1994). The fact that Joan is Awful uses the modern idioms of streaming and AI animation is not enough to set it apart, in my opinion and this is a level of creativity that feels well below what I’ve come to expect from Black Mirror. Also, somewhat jarringly, it’s a comedy.

The main selling point of the episode seems to be that the ‘story-within-a-story’ version of Joan is played by Salma Hayek, who subsequently appears as an angry, exaggerated version of herself. As a comedy, it’s quite entertaining, though it does at one point steer itself towards an uncharacteristic gross-out moment, when a much simpler, more obvious option is open to the character, but wilfully ignored (she could just do nothing, the show becomes very boring, people stop watching and the show is cancelled – end of problem). In my opinion, Black Mirror does not excel at comedy (which is ironic, since Charlie Brooker started out as a satirist) and the episodes that are intended to be funny have become progressively goofier since the series moved to Netflix. Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek are superb as the two iterations of Joan / themselves, but there’s a real sense of them casting big names because they can, but kinda wasting their talents on a daft and unoriginal comedy.

The second episode Loch Henry is much stronger, but also has its problems. This is the story of an ambitious young documentary film-maker (Samuel Blenkin) who returns to the remote Scottish village where he was born with his fish-out-of-water American girlfriend (Myha’la Herrold) and ends up having to explain to her about the series of brutal murders that still haunt the village after 20+ years. She thinks that the story would make a much more impactful documentary than the egg-snatching story that they had originally intended to film, but their investigations bring to light secrets that were probably best hidden. Drunken former pub landlord John Hannah knows the dangers and is the only voice of reason in the village. It’s a dark and brooding story, although there’s no real technological danger to mark it out as Black Mirror – unless you count the very 1980s technology of the VHS video camera that plays an important part in the story.

Generally speaking, these British-set episodes have always marked the stronger elements of Black Mirror (perhaps because it’s where the show originated), but Loch Henry has a major problem; it’s a rather Alfred Hitchcock Presents style story that revolves around a central ‘twist’ and that twist is unfortunately rather easily guessed by anyone who has ever seen a crime drama in the last 30 years. I called it out about half way through and all that remained was for me to slowly watch my suspicions being confirmed. Of course, it could have been intended that way, to foster the feeling of dread as your worst fears are confirmed, but I suspect not. I think Loch Henry rather underestimates how complex it is to portray this kind of ‘sting in the tail’ mystery without giving away too many clues early on. A pity, because this is otherwise a great episode.

Beyond the Sea is the episode that sticks closest to the established premise of Black Mirror, being that it explicitly revolves around the dangers of technology. Two astronauts (Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett) are on a deep space mission for six years, but they are able to remotely connect to bio-mechanical avatars who are living out their lives on Earth. When the family of astronaut David is brutally murdered by a Manson Family style cult and his avatar destroyed, he sinks into depression and isolation on the claustrophobic ship. Reluctantly, astronaut Cliff allows him to use his avatar for therapeutic reasons, but David (in Cliff’s body) starts to have feelings for Cliff’s wife. Once again, you could consider this to be predictable, but it’s more horribly inevitable. This was always where this story was going to go, but it’s how it is resolved that is the crux of the story.

And how it is resolved is probably more extreme than you would foresee. This being Black Mirror, I should probably have expected something hard-hitting, but this is a much darker, pessimistic view of human behaviour than I was anticipating. Beyond the Sea is a really good episode and I could see it fitting comfortably into any of the previous seasons, although at around 75 minutes, it’s possibly a bit indulgently long and could have done with some judicious trimming to make it a tighter final product. Streaming TV seems to be moving away from the laissez faire approach to episode length that was the norm in its early days, but Black Mirror episodes still vary in length alarmingly from 40 minutes to almost twice that duration. I think a more disciplined approach would trim some of the fat from episodes like Beyond the Sea and make for a more consistent show.

The next story, Mazey Day, starts off with a very Black Mirror conceit, the dangers of intrusive tabloid news media, then quickly becomes a horror story. A jaded paparazzo Bo (Zazie Beetz) is tempted back to the fold by the lure of £30,000 for a single picture of reclusive film star Mazey Day, who hasn’t been seen since being involved in a hit-and-run incident while filming abroad. Eventually she tracks her down to a large walled building which she assumes to be some kind of a detox clinic, but this is no ordinary detox clinic because, upon breaking in to the building, she finds Mazey naked and chained to a bed. If this was anything other than Black Mirror, I thought to myself while watching, this would be because she had become a werewolf. The basic premise was not dissimilar to an unfinished amateur film that I started many years ago called The Beast Unbound, but Black Mirror would never do anything so obvious… would they?

Spoilers – they did. It felt like a very familiar trope for such an inventive series as Black Mirror and it probably didn’t help that I’d only recently re-watched The Howling, which covers similar ground. I even felt like I’d seen the hit-and-run scenario before, though I can’t remember where and I spent the entire rest of the episode waiting for a second twist that would make it something more ground-breaking, but it never happened. Perhaps I had been spoiled by the Machiavellian complexity of the recent Inside No.9 episode Hold on Tight! / 3×3, but there was even a part of me expecting it to be some devilishly clever ruse to trick the audience, rather than an all-too-familiar Hammer House of Horror trope. But no, she’s a werewolf and that’s that. It’s a shame, because it’s a well-made and generally entertaining episode, but it feels like a space-filler and I really expected something much smarter from Charlie Brooker.

The lad makes good though, with the final story Demon 79, almost certainly the best episode of the season and the one that is to be remembered in years to come. In an authentic-looking 1979, a young Indian woman (Anjana Vasan) struggles to survive day-to-day in a world that is uncaring, prejudiced and lonely. When she finds an ancient tile bearing a runic symbol in the basement of the department store where she works, it conjures up a trainee demon called Gaap (Paapa Essiedu) who takes on the appearance of Bobby Farrell from 70s pop group Boney M and tells her that she must commit three ritual murders in the next three days or else the world will come to an end. She’s naturally reluctant to do this, but she gets drawn into it in an impressively believable way, targeting a man who murdered his wife and another who is a child molester.

When she sets her sights on a local politician that Gaap forsees to become a right-wing dictator who will destroy millions of lives, the demon tries to dissuade her because his ‘boss’ rather approves of the guy… but she pushes on regardless. It’s a great story that could easily have been released as a stand-alone movie; nothing to do with Black Mirror, of course, having no technophobic remit whatsoever, but if you’re still clinging to that by this point in the series, you haven’t really been paying attention. The late 70s setting is flawless and never submits to the obvious clichés that so many shows in that setting unfortunately do. I’ve been in department stores exactly like that as a youngster and the look of the counter and displays are spot on for the period, with the design never going too deep into the nicotine-stained ‘brown’ look that is so often wrongly evoked.

Now, here’s a thing: Demon 79 is credited on its gorgeous 70s-style opening title sequence as a ‘Red Mirror’ production and assuming that this refers to a more horror-oriented series, at least two other scripts in the series could also have fallen into that category. I’ve read elsewhere that Charlie Brooker has expressed an opinion that Black Mirror has run its course and one can’t help but wonder if he actually wanted to do a spin-off series more based on horror stories, but was pressured into churning out more Black Mirror by Netflix. I have to admit that a series called Red Mirror that featured Loch Henry, Mazey Day, Demon 79 and a couple more horror episodes would have made a more satisfying prospect than Season 6 of Black Mirror. As it stands, Season 6 has the same disjointed feeling as when the BBC’s late-60s sci-fi anthology series Out of the Unknown capriciously switched to tales of ghosts and the unexplained for its final season.

Look, I don’t want to say that Season 6 of Black Mirror is bad. It’s not; it’s well made and always entertaining to watch, but it lacks the cohesion of its earlier seasons (particularly the Channel 4 ones) and it feels like a series busting to break free of its concept. There are also at least two of the scripts that needed someone to cast a critical eye over them and say, “no, this needs something more.” I’m no high-powered Netflix executive, but if I were and that werewolf story had landed on my desk, it wouldn’t have gone any further. It sounds churlish to say so, but I hope this is the last series of Black Mirror; it no longer feels fresh and I get the impression that Charlie Brooker would be much happier writing something new. So, who knows? Maybe in another couple of years we’ll get a dedicated full series of Red Mirror, with all of the stories to the quality of Demon 79. Now that is the series I want to see!

‘Black Mirror Season 6’ is currently streaming on Netflix.