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Deep into the second episode of the new “Black Mirror” season, I found myself groaning. The first installment of this batch of episodes had been a methodical journey through one woman’s experience of the medical-technological complex, a lugubriously paced descent into her personal hell. Now, in the second episode, yet another woman seemed to be in mortal peril, and we’d once again been brought there in a slow-drip journey of madness by degrees. I’ve been a fan of “Black Mirror” since its early days, when its unified tone appraised humanity with a shrewd, unblinking wit; its experimentation in recent years seemed, now, to have brought it to a place of miserabilism.
But I needn’t have worried. While that first episode, “Common People,” is indeed a slog, the rest of the season — including and especially the bracingly nasty second episode, “Bête Noire,” which upended my expectations, and then did so again — make the argument that the free-ranging imagination “Black Mirror” has demonstrated in recent years is for the good.
While embargoes constrain me from getting into what each episode is really capital-A “About,” suffice it to say that “Common People” concerns Rashida Jones’ character seeing her life saved after a medical emergency by an intervention that comes to dominate her consciousness, effectively ruining her life. It’s all very sad, but there’s never the turn, the tricky moment when it’s explained to us why we’re watching what we’re watching. And the tech here becomes the story to an undue degree; the insight that Jones’ character is suffering in the circumstance she’s in is both plainly obvious — who wouldn’t be? — and a little trite.
Meanwhile, “Bête Noire,” about the reunion of two high-school classmates (Siena Kelly and Rosy McEwen) — the former social outcast gets hired at the former social butterfly’s workplace — makes the case for itself with a genuinely mean-spirited wit, a gradually revealed willingness to be as embittered and harsh as its characters. It finds its match in “Plaything,” a slightly less successful but still deliciously gnarly installment in which Cameron (Peter Capaldi), a marginal member of society, is brought in for interrogation on a cold case and reveals the role that a computer game played in either driving him mad or helping him to see a special kind of reason.
Capaldi — known for his roles in “The Thick of It” and “Doctor Who” — aside, “Black Mirror” is often at its best when name celebrities are not involved. That generally feels like a coincidence — nothing this season is built around its star’s image the way that was the series-low Miley Cyrus episode (Season 5’s “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” from 2019). But it may also be that, for the style of storytelling show creator Charlie Brooker perfected in the show’s early going, a certain ability to disappear into the story is required. Watching “Hotel Reverie” — about an A-list star (Issa Rae) given the ability to take part in an AI-enabled remake of a classic film — a viewer in a certain cast of mind is struck by the details about the industry the episode doesn’t quite nail, and by the various star personas drawing focus. (Emma Corrin plays the movie’s leading lady, and Awkwafina has a role for which she feels too big as the tech whiz making sure her stars stay on-script. Guess whether or not she’s successful!)
“Hotel Reverie,” for reasons I cannot explain without spoiling it, restages elements of the story of one of “Black Mirror”’s all-timer episodes; it seems more like an impressive exercise in style (which it has by the gallon) than like something the show needed to express. I’d suggest the well for ideas was running dry, but an actual sequel episode, “USS Callister: Into Infinity” dazzled me with how far it was able to push beyond the premise of its seemingly closed-ended predecessor. The first “USS Callister,” from 2017, concerned a group of ensigns on a starship who were, in fact, clones being kept captive in a digital space by a tech genius who insisted they play along with his every whim. Satisfyingly, the sequel finds villainy within an entirely different character, and finds a place for its story to go that doesn’t simply feel like restaging past glories.
That, now, is where “Black Mirror” is at its best. The show’s early seasons tended to excel in a unified tone of chilly, bemused irony, treating the “black mirrors” of smartphone, laptop and tablet as mere reflectors of the frailties within all of us. And for all the late-period series has brought us overwrought displays of emotion, as with “Common People,” or too-clever-by-half genre exercises like “Hotel Reverie,” it can also go places we haven’t yet seen. The rule on celebrities ruining “Black Mirror” isn’t hard-and-fast, as Paul Giamatti delivers one of the series’ best acting performances ever in the episode “Eulogy,” as he attempts, in late middle age, to reconstruct a defining romantic relationship by entering old photos with the help of an AI assistant.
The wonder here isn’t the tech — as with all of the best “Black Mirror” episodes, that’s incidental. It’s the gradual shedding of pretensions and protective lies Giamatti shows us, as he realizes, beat by beat, the role he played in the end of the affair, and the things he didn’t allow himself to see. That’s what “Black Mirror” — the ultimate mixed-bag show at this point in its run, but a show that will always be worth watching for the surprises it can still conjure — worthwhile. It’s not the things we know it can do well, but the moments when the show seems even to be surprising itself.
Season 7 of “Black Mirror” is now streaming on Netflix
