Black Mirror (Season Six)

 Black Mirror is a British science fiction anthology series, now in its sixth season.  Shows vary in subject and, indeed, quality.  Generally, all of Black Mirror's offerings are impressively produced and well-acted.  The quality of writing is excellent although the surprise generated by some of the shows in the first couple seasons now has largely evaporated..  This is because the show's characteristic have now become generic in themselves -- we might describe other TV shows featuring technology deployed in morbid ways and with dystopian themes as "like Black Mirror."  In this regard, I think that the most pointed critique that can be raised against season six (consisting of five independent episodes) is that these Black Mirror shows fall squarely within the conventions and themes established by earlier seasons -- that is, season 6 of Black Mirror is notable for seeming a bit derivative of earlier Black Mirror episodes. There is something about the uncompromising nature of the writing (for instance, the famous first episode in Season One featured a politician blackmailed into have sex with a pig on prime time national TV) that makes me, at least, a little queasy -- the shows, even, when conventional have an uncomfortable edge.

"Joan is Awful", the first program in Season 6, is similar to other earlier episodes.  It's a demonstration of technology and mass media culture run amuck.  Joan is a self-assured, and, somewhat, self-centered manager at some sort of anonymous-looking Silicon Valley tech company.  She has a handsome boyfriend whom she finds dull (even the food he cooks lacks spice) and a helpful therapist.  The work place is full of catty/snarky co-workers.  The program follows her morning routine in which she brushes her teeth, has coffee with her boyfriend, fires someone, and plots an affair with an old flame.  At home, she turns on TV, accessing a streaming service that is, overtly, modeled on NETFLIX (the venue where Black Mirror is featured).  She picks a reality TV show for her evening viewing, a program called "Joan is Awful" and, to her horror, finds out that the program is about her -- in fact, it chronicles in complete detail the events in her life that we have just seen, although her part is played by Selma Hayek.  Of course, this show, highly popular on the streaming service, wreaks havoc with her life.  She knows that events in her life can be designed to humiliate Selma Hayek, whose likeness has been licensed to the program which is some kind of CGI production created by AI to depict Joan's life in real time -- the machine that makes the show is called a Quamputer (that is, quantum computer or as Selma Hayek calls it a "Quam puta.).  Hayek and Joan team up after the heroine of the show has  behaved in a spectacularly disgusting way and forced her debasement on TV to the chagrin of Selma Hayek playing Selma Hayek..  The show, then, proceeds to a meta-meta conclusion that isn't really satisfying, but seems to be clever so long as you don't think too much about the ending or the premise of the episode (and the premise of the titular reality show "Joan is Awful.")

"Loch Henry" is an episode about a callow Scottish lad and his girlfriend who make a visit to his hometown in a spectacular and empty part of Scotland.  Tourists avoid the town because of  a notorious serial killer who tortured his victims to death in the village.  The young man's father was a local cop who was wounded by the serial killer when he was finally discovered and who later died.  The two young people decide to make a documentary about the murders (a bit like the Moors murders -- although some critics think the show satirizes true crime pictures like Dahmer on Netflix; this show always bites the hand that feeds it.)  You can't say too much about "Loch Henry" without revealing its central plot twist -- a development that I saw coming after about ten minutes of the fifty minute episode.  The program is pretty scary and ingenious, but it's not as clever as it thinks it is.  This show is quite elegant and, even, reticient despite its horrific subject matter and, in my view, is the best of the five shows in this series.

The substance abuse problems of Lindsay Lohan, I think, are the inspiration of "Mazey Day", a show about a beautiful young starlet, pursued by vicious paparazzi; the actress gets high on 'shrooms and is involved in a hit and run accident when shooting a movie in the Czech Republic.  She retreats to her producer's house in Hollywood and, then, is, more or less, abducted by the Studio to be treated for her various addictions in a remote LA sanitarium hidden in a place like Topanga Canyon.  The show is nothing more (and nothing less) than a fairly well-engineered monster movie -- a number of the effects are extracted directly from John Landis' American Werewolf in London.  The episode is reasonably scary, but there's nothing special about it.  The program is entertaining without really being memorable. 

Black Mirror's most ambitious episodes are "Demon 79" and "Beyond the Sea".  Both are about 80 minutes long, that is, the length of a short feature film, and share a baffling characteristic -- these episodes are set in an alternative past making extensive allusions to the period that they depict.  "Demon 79," as the title asserts, takes place in a grimy London in the year 1979 -- the episodes "meta" features include stylistic details devised to make the show seem like an exploitation/horror film from that era, although the plot is "woke" to some extent, and ironic in a way that would not be feasible with this material if it were really a product made 44 years ago.  "Beyond the Sea", a space opera with overtones of Tarkovsky's Solaris, is inexplicably set in the late sixties; a Manson-style cult commits a massacre that drives the action and the characters are reading Roots, I think, by Alex Haley and Jacqueline Susan's The Valley of the Dolls.  It's not clear to me why this device of the alternative past is used in these two episodes.  The past, however, has these advantages which are exploited by "Demon 79" and "Beyond the Sea" -- the pop music is better; there are no cell-phones to provide warnings to people; racism and prejudice was more overt and, therefore, can be invoked as a plot device; and families were more traditional, again providing the script with a basis to satirize conventions in child-rearing and gender roles that don't exist today:  women aren't "stay-at-home" moms anymore (by and large) and it's no longer acceptable to "whale on" your kid as a form of discipline.  Both shows are pretty implausible -- there are huge plot holes, particularly in "Beyond the Sea," and "Demon 79" evokes arcane rules in demonology that the script seems to make up as it goes.  The sweet spot for Black Mirror episodes seems to me to be about 50 to 60 minutes -- beyond that point, the shows start to stumble over their own pretensions to cleverness.  

In "Demon 79", a much-oppressed shop girl of Indian ethnicity, leads a lonely life.  People openly discriminate against her in the department store where she works in the shoe department.  Her co-workers don't like the smell of her curried Biryani and make her eat in the basement of the store, discrimination that has momentous circumstances -- in that place, she finds an oddly inscribed domino and summons a demon.  Initially, the monster is like the creature in Night of the Demon, vaguely reptilian with lots of spines and spikes.  But the monster needs the young woman's cooperation, so the demon transforms himself into a funk dancer with the pop group "Boney M" -- a figure for whom the heroine has some (suppressed) sexual desire.  The demon  tells the girl that,  in order to save the world from a nuclear apocalypse, she must make three sacrifices -- that is, murder three people.  (The plot is vaguely similar to Tarkovsky's austere The Sacrifice).  Of course, the girl is not a murderer and committing these crimes seems impossible to her.  But nasty victims keep surfacing:  there's a man who's raping his young daughter, another smarmy fellow, a pussy-hound who murdered his wife, and, at last, a vicious right-wing politician, modeled, it seems, on Tony Blair who is courting the racist National Front vote.  A kindly copper  with a girl sidekick is in hot pursuit of the heroine as she slaughters her victims with the help of the demon dressed in an outlandish white fur garment and wearing enormous platform shoes.  (This episode is the most distinctly British of this series and, probably, has many allusions to the politics and popular music of the late seventies that I couldn't discern.)  As is typically the case with Black Mirror, the show ups the "ante" with brutal and gory killings and has a tendency to humanize its villains just before they meet their awful demises.  The episode has a sweet ending, although the world is consumed by nuclear fire.  

"Beyond the Sea" involves two astronauts on a six year mission.  One of the astronauts is an artistic soulful fellow who sketches scenes on earth from memory, has good taste in French pop music, and paints beautifully in oil colors.  The other astronaut is a tough military type who bullies his wife and son; a guy, whom we learn, who "doesn't read much."  The astronauts' actual flesh-and-blood bodies are on the space ship where they spend most of their time in a sort of induced coma in weirdly shaped bucket-beds.  While the men are in their comas, they project their mind or soul or sentient being, I suppose you might say, back to earth where they inhabit robotic replicas of themselves. It appears that the astronauts only meet once a week to exercise in the low G gravity of the space ship to keep their muscles in tone.  The rest of the time, they are on earth inhabiting their simulacra.  A wild-eyed hippie with a cult of adoring women (obviously modeled on Charley Manson) attacks the family of the artistic and soulful astronaut, tortures the replica by hacking off his arm, and, then, slaughters his wife and two children before his eyes.  (This is nasty stuff and completely without any plausible motivation -- it's obviously just a gruesome motivating factor for the plot.)  The soulful astronaut's replica is completely destroyed and, so, now the poor man can't escape the confines of the space-ship to return to earth -- he has no one to return to.  The other astronaut's wife suggests to her rigid and domineering husband that he let his partner in space come down to earth for an hour each week using his replica.  The idea is that the grieving man can smell fresh air and walk in nature for an hour and that this will help him recover from the horrible trauma that he has experienced.  So the mourning astronaut transfers his sentience into the body of his partner and, of course, interacts with his wife and son.  What could go wrong?  The outcome, of course, is predictable and this leads to a exceptionally grim denouement which, I'm sorry to say, doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  

As I write, Black Mirror (6) is the most popular show on Netflix.  It's diverting and each episode contains something that is remarkable and disturbing.  But, I think, some of the luster has come off the show.