(Note: For the first five seasons, these are posts from a group rewatch. After that, posts on a Discord as the episodes came out. Full spoilers throughout.)
S01E01 "THE NATIONAL ANTHEM"
A strong start, and I like the statement of starting out with one that barely has any sci-fi in it. I think it's all fairly well-pitched for satire. It is fairly unsubtle in getting its points across occasionally though, things get underlined heavily and the public are all working class sketches - less would have been more there, I think.
Mostly I find it interesting for the very 2011 point of view. I don't think Brooker would be making an episode today about the public's lust for humiliation and a semi-sympathetic PM!
S01E02 "FIFTEEN MILLION MERITS"
For me it's a little too on-the-nose, a little too clean, very 'I've read 1984 and Judge Dredd'. Daniel Kaluuya's great, but I almost find this one too comfortable a watch.
S01E03 "THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF YOU"
Still amazing. Quintessential Black Mirror - just a tweak of contemporary tech to show how it's having a massive effect on our lives and taking that to a logical extreme. It's a strong commentary on how having access to years of texts and emails and each other's social media has a massive effect on how we interact with each other and can lead to obsessive behaviour. Scrolling through an ex's Facebook, putting spyware on your kid's phone. Plus little notes thrown in of how employers and government have so much more access to our private lives (if we opt in). Really lean, a great eye for detail, and everyone's great in it but Kebbell is blisteringly good.
S02E01 "BE RIGHT BACK"
I really like it. It feels kind of like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind to me, in that it's not really a commentary on tech so much as a use of a sci-fi conceit to examine the loss of a loved one (via death or break-up). The first time I watched it, I was waiting for the 'evil AI' turn and was pleasantly surprised when it never happened. If the first season had been National Anthem, History Of You and this, it would have been an absolutely incredible opener.
S02E02 "WHITE BEAR"
I like this one but it's not in my favourites. I think generally the ones that are about the people affected by the tech rather than the tech (or situation, whatever) itself are the most effective. Also, this episode lets the wind out of its own sails with those inter-credit clips which just explain stuff we could have figured out ourselves and dilute that final moment.
It's interesting how much focus there was on the media and reality/competition shows in the early parts of this show, I'll be interested to see how long that goes on for. Obviously they're a point of interest at this time for Brooker, a tv writer and critic, who has already written Dead Set (people take refuge in the Big Brother house during a zombie outbreak), but it did feel like a prevalent issue as a viewer too. I can't imagine a current satire would bother focusing on Britain's Got Talent or Love Island (reprehensible as they are).
S02E03 "THE WALDO MOMENT"
I thought the characters were well-observed and portrayed but yeah all very light sketches. The story is well-told but also well-trodden ground (idealist worn down by the system, politician succeeds by telling the truth but slowly sells out). And yeah, that ending is a comically sudden escalation, it's like Brooker just wrote "and then dystopia" at the end. For all that I do still quite enjoy watching it, though, because it's well-crafted enough, it's just that I'm thinking "this could be a really good film if Brooker got Morris or Iannucci in to help him give it some meat". I do think Waldo being annoying is the point - not just in a 'the public are morons' way but also in a 'it didn't take a genuinely witty, clever, insightful person to shake up the system, a Sasha Baron Cohen or whoever, all it needed was this childish angry shouting unfunny cartoon because the politicians are that out of touch and fake and untrustworthy' way.
(One tiny nitpick, which I only make because I'm so surprised that Brooker and however many other telly people would write it and let it through - "speed up the autocue, please". That's not how it works, autocues have a human operator who adjusts the speed to match the speaker on the fly, they don't just set it to 8 and let it run. If the speaker wants the autocue to speed up, they just speak faster. I guess it's in there to tell the viewer 'this is a rehearsal for a live show', and they decided that was more important than it being accurate, but it's the kind of thing I would have imagined Brooker would demand get changed to something better!)
S02E04 "WHITE CHRISTMAS"
I really like this one, it's full of cool ideas and all the twists are signposted fairly (how I didn't originally get the snowglobe thing within the opening ten seconds of the episode I don't know!). The first section is the only one that has much social commentary to it, really - a deft jab at PUAs, incel culture and the like. The middle bit might be a warning about how we'll treat sapient AI if it ever happens and the latter about the criminal justice system, I guess? But then, the show doesn't necessarily always have to be saying something, it can just be effective tech noir. I love the neatness of the ending, how they're both punished by being isolated in a snowstorm in two very different ways. Probably my main criticism of it is that the cruelty shown to the 'cookies' is very close to the punishment of White Bear.
S03E01 "NOSEDIVE"
Incredible. Howard, Eve and Jones are great, and it's full of amazing character actors (I recognised Daisy Haggard at the time but not Susannah Fielding, Sope Dirisu or Michaela Coel). It's a brilliant look at another aspect of social media, the upvote whores. All those people who give so much of a shit about forum post numbers and Discord name colours and blue ticks, who carefully curate the online presentation of their life to look oh so perfect and adorable. And it gets time for the weirdness of rating Uber drivers, and for inspirational tv programming (via the letting agent holograms and adaptive billboards), exacerbation of body image issues and enforced gender roles. It looks and sounds great, and it reaches a perfect crescendo.
Apparently, Planes Trains & Automobiles was one of their influences - it definitely has that 'person who has it all together goes on a dogged cross-country trip as things get worse and worse' structure. Like Clockwise and stuff as well. It's a really smart choice, actually, to hang it all on a solid well-tested frame like that.
I was a bit worried when Black Mirror became a Netflix thing and all these American creative elements were introduced, but then I saw this and was relieved, excited and blown out of the water.
S03E02 "PLAYTEST"
Another awesome episode. I love how it builds really gradually and then snaps and just keeps going and going and going. I actually was expecting there to be another couple of flips before the end because I'd remembered it as being so relentless towards the end. I remember being very happy at the time because I'd thought during the episode "wow, this guy is great, it's a really Kurt Russell-y powerhouse performance" and then saw his name in the credits and confirmed it with a google. Dan Trachtenberg directing too, after Joe Wright last week - pulling in some big names.
S0303 "SHUT UP AND DANCE"
I really like this one. It's kind of a White Bear except with internet vigilantes like Anonymous - how people cheer if they dox and swat the 'right' people, how much of it is a game for them rather than any kind of coherent ethical motivation.
Funny how this stuff dates so quickly though - this felt so current at the time but groups like Anon seem to have just disappeared now, for some reason.
S03E04 "SAN JUNIPERO"
I know this one's very popular, but I'm not really that into it. It spends a full half hour just doing a standard girl-meets-girl, then it gets interesting in the second half but then just does a Waldo Moment style mid-credits sudden resolution. 'And then, happily ever after!' I like the shots of the storage facility that add a little bite to it, but overall it just compounds the feeling that there wasn't really much to the story. What is there is all really well done, though.
S03E05 "MEN AGAINST FIRE"
This one has an incredibly obvious twist that it takes ages to get to, and then hammers home its metaphor in the bluntest way possible. Cool idea, zero subtlety.
S03E06 "HATED IN THE NATION"
This is a fairly embarrassing entry in the series. It's trite and contrived, it barely has anything to say about technology or social media, and it doesn't justify the feature-length runtime. It feels like a cheesy weekly cop drama whose writers just happened to read about Twitter hate mobs that week or whatever.
S04E01 "USS CALLISTER"
I really enjoy this episode. Yes it's another 'digital clone in a virtual world' episode after White Christmas and San Junipero (plus some overlap with Playtest I guess), yes it doesn't have much to say, and yes that happy ending is reeeeally convenient, but it's really entertaining and well-made, loads of great performances, it looks and sounds great, and I love how for the climactic chase it actually turns into a space action movie with them all working as a team in their roles, and then the happy ending of being given an infinite MMO to play in getting undercut by the reminder that most online gamers are dicks is really funny.
S04E02 "ARKANGEL"
Arkangel is a little weak. Lots of story strands disappear (like the grandfather and the biker), I never got to know a version of the daughter for long enough to care about her, and the ending feels a bit tepid. The tech themes are interesting - parents putting trackers on their kids' phones and laptops, and parental content locks - but I think the latter muddies the water a bit, because what's a parent supposed to do, not put a content lock on YouTube or whatever for their eight year old? The problem only exists with this fictional version of the tech. There's maybe a discussion to be had about how kids used to have access to more adult stuff via libraries and what have you and are actually getting more sheltered now that their primary intake can be throttled so heavily, but I'm not really convinced and I don't think this episode really tackles that anyway.
S04E03 "CROCODILE"
Better than I remembered it. A nasty little thriller with a tech twist. Feels a bit like a spin-off of The Entire History Of You but with slightly different tech rules. I guess what I probably didn't like about it the first time round was that it feels very clinical, everything is there to keep the plot beats going and nothing else - all the characters are basically non-existent. I suspect you can see Brooker trying to fix that in the 'she eats peppermint sweets!' quirk.
S04E04 "HANG THE DJ"
I think I enjoyed this more the second time, knowing the twist and just being able to enjoy the story. Especially since it's another fucking digital clone one so the disappointment isn't quite so sharp. The romcom stuff is really good fun (that "ahhh" halfway through the cunnilingus is hilarious) but it really drags in the second half when it's just slowly moving towards the reveal. I do like the idea that this dating app is basically simulating a Black Mirror episode a 1000 times for something so frivolous, but the build-up is too long and too sincere. I think this would have worked a lot better as a half hour Inside No 9 episode taking the piss out of romcom 'race to the airport' tropes (or even a Richard Curtis movie if he had a good writer to balance out his huge flaws).
Also, had a 'ohh that person was in it, I didn't know them back then' moment with Joe Cole as I've now seen him in Gangs Of London (also Green Room apparently). Guy's got a lot of range!
Weirdly, the POC lead in this was in BBC drama "Murdered By My Boyfriend" and the POC lead in the last one was in BBC drama "Murdered By My Father". Well, maybe tellingly rather than weirdly...
S04E05 "METALHEAD"
Very good. It looks amazing, it's so taut, just no weak spots at all. I love that like all good movie monsters the dogs have got rules, stuff you can use to escape them, gives it a bit of a Tremors feel as well (but those also don't get clumsily explained, you just work out what's happening). The end twist is arguably a little unnecessary and blunt, but also I do think it works, it sticks the knife in a little more - the survivors still have enough humanity left that they're willing to risk their lives just to make a dying kid's last few hours a little more bearable.
S04E06 "BLACK MUSEUM"
Okay, I was wrong when I remembered this as 'maybe a good one'. It's another portmanteau episode like White Christmas, but not half as good. The first story is a cool idea that's rushed through and mostly told through voiceover, and the second two stories are 'digital clones get tortured' again! The framing story has promise but it has to rush through a bunch of exposition at the end just to set up and then execute the twist. Plus having only the one guy present in all three stories really limits them.
S05E01 "STRIKING VIPERS"
I think I liked this one a little more than the first time I watched it, as I could see what they were setting up at the start of the episode with the male bonding behaviour etc. I really like the themes of this and how it deals with them, about social constructs of gender roles and sexuality and how technology can break them down or get assimilated into them. It reminded me of the People Make Games video about VR Chat and how a lot of guys just enjoy being women on there in a non-creepy healthy way. Stuff like how male friends can be incredibly aware of each others' bodies and that be seen as non-sexual and therefore impervious to homophobia in certain specific contexts, or how Karl's younger-generation girlfriend seamlessly switches from sex to phone browsing or integrates the two, was really well observed and layered in. But after Danny and Karl have cyber-boinked a couple of times, the episode runs out of things to say and kinda flips to a romdram which also doesn't have any meat to it. I think with a runtime shorter by 10 mins or so this could have been a top episode.
S05E02 "SMITHEREENS"
Not much to this one, really. Much like the robot bees one, it feels more like a standard cop drama episode the writer of which read an article about addictive algorithms that week. As usual, strong performances, well-directed etc, and the script was a lot better than the bees one at least.
S05E03 "RACHEL, JACK AND ASHLEY TOO"
Boy, this is a disappointing episode. I don't mind them just going out-and-out action comedy, the show's strength is in its diversity. And I don't completely mind it being another digital clone ep as they do something a bit different with it (though really, Jesus, another one?). But it takes a good 40 minutes to actually get to be the thing it wants to be, and even when it gets there it has no bite, no dark satirical undercurrent. There are nods towards post-mortem digital likeness rights, mistreatment of child stars, celebrity personas, artists' estates milking all their half-baked recording demos for years etc, but it's all just there to set up this mild adventure story. I even liked the stuff about the inhibited Ashley Too actually being a bad presence in Rachel's life because she's full of mindless empowerment mantras and can't actually read subtle social cues or use life experience like a human can, but that got dropped along with the absent father thread. It reminds me of Dead Set, Brooker's 'zombies in the Big Brother house' miniseries - it had a couple of clever satirical elements but mostly it just grinded through the usual zombie apocalypse tropes instead. This really needed Ben Stiller to come in and give it that Cable Guy/Zoolander/Tropic Thunder touch.
(One other thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was those former Ashley fans fleeing the gig at the end, like the show is saying 'yeah, fuck off, how dare you enjoy pop music!' I would have much rather seen them at the back a little taken aback but maybe getting their minds opened to some other kinds of music by what is, let's be honest, a fairly accessible NIN cover.)
"BANDERSNATCH"
I haven't given Bandersnatch another go yet, but I really enjoyed it on release. The one thing I will say to people who haven't played it before is to approach it as a lightly interactive tv episode, a cool idea for a show about tech, not as the next Sam Barlow game. I saw a lot of people in the gaming community at the time treating it like it was the latter and judging it far too harshly as a result.
I had a really good experience with it; at a certain point I was replaying to try to get a bunch of different events and endings and just as I was thinking "I've exhausted this to the point of diminishing returns" I got sent down this new long ending strand which just wrapped the whole thing up perfectly. I don't think I'm going to try to hit that again this time, I'll probably just play for 40 minutes and put it down, but I'm really glad it went that way the first time.
...
Just did a new play through. I'm not going to go back and hunt down all the different routes like I did last time, but I really enjoyed it again. I'd forgotten how much they tie the interactive thing into the story, it's so good when you become part of it and you're basically a demon possessing people by the end of it. Also really smart how they repurposed the White Bear symbol. I also thought it was actually really impressive how it remembered lots of small stuff and previous paths and integrated them into complex edits seamlessly - I'd be really interested to see some behind the scenes stuff of how they did all that.
S06E01 "JOAN IS AWFUL"
Really enjoyed Joan Is Awful! Very funny and yet a horrible 'what would you do' set up as well. I felt a little bit ahead of it for a while in the middle there, but the chemistry of Murphy and Hayek pulled me through and then the Michael Cera twist totally got me. And yeah, it is basically the digital clone thing again, but it did feel different to what they'd done before with it, so I didn't mind too much - it had a bunch of different stuff going on in there as well, like the whole free will thing.
S06E02 "LOCH HENRY"
Wasn't a big fan of Loch Henry. Good performances but very predictable and didn't have anything to say about modern technology. Also a few weird contrivances - their decision to shoot everything on VHS rather than spend a day or two gathering some equipment that would actually be broadcast quality (maybe they were going for a retro vibe to match the old footage, but the stuff about getting tourists in with 4K footage openly contradicted that), getting John Hannah and the son into the hospital via two separate incidents, and then Pia making a bunch of silly slasher victim decisions at the end. It was a bit better than Hated In The Nation or Smithereens but it was another of those 'we're just going to try our hand at a bog standard thriller this week' episodes.
And the exploitative nature of documentaries has been a topic of conversation for, I dunno, a hundred years?
Oh, Pod from GoT was bloody brilliant though.
S06E03 "BEYOND THE SEA"
Didn't think much of it. An interesting set-up very quickly devolved into a very predictable and incredibly slow thriller. Anything it's saying about people valuing their digital lives over their physical ones is undercut by that plus the spaceship meta-setting. This is one of those episodes where you have to find out what Brooker was addressing via interviews etc after the fact because none of it is actually in the writing.
Also, I know that this is a digital avatar rather than digital clone episode and there are slightly fewer of those, but fucking hell another one. I saw an interview snippet from Brooker about this season and he said that when he started writing he looked back at the previous episodes and realised how many were about digital versions of people. What happened, Brooker?! 66% of the new episodes are that again!
S06E04 "MAZEY DAY"
Very much enjoyed the last 7 minutes, then it just ended.
S06E05 "DEMON 79"
Well, I didn't think much of that one. Fairly predictable and not massively funny or scary or gross. Weird selection of episodes this season.
S07E01 "COMMON PEOPLE"
I had a lot of reservations about this as I watched - is it a bit predictable, is it taking too long to get going, is the 'medication as live service' idea actually a shitty thing that already happens (I think I've read about stuff like pacemakers getting messed about by bad updates or something, but maybe that was just some other speculative fiction!), is it a bit tacky to complain about stream subscription services as if they were life or death, is the cyber-augment stuff off-target? But by the end of it, I appreciated it for its theme of predatory practices, looking at shitty stuff like Prime Video making you watch ads even though you're already paying for the service, or those awful 'pay poor people to do nasty stuff sites' that people like PewDiePie use, or drug dealers (getting you hooked on brief moments of euphoria) and drawing a line to national healthcare (UK/US specifically, I guess) and private pharmaceutical companies. So, while I think it probably could have been 5-10 mins shorter and it's fairly 'standard' Black Mirror, it's a solid entry.
S07E02 "BETE NOIRE"
Enjoyed this one, though it was a little predictable and it only really got to the fun stuff in the last 20 minutes or so. Still a cool idea, well acted and written.
S07E03 - "HOTEL REVERIE"
Thought this was pretty terrible, clunky nonsense. I almost gave up on it halfway through. I don't mind suspending disbelief for 'advanced computer is magic', but just the basic real world logic of it all was so broken I was constantly bumping against it. Plus characters constantly telling each other stuff they know and the show telling me stuff I know, infuriating. It's too long, it's yet another digital avatar story (please for the love of god if there's a season 8 make a rule that not a single episode can involve this), it's another of their 'let's make a Hollywood thriller, or love story or teen caper' attempts which always fall flat. I wish I could appreciate the show trying different things more, but it never really works. There's a seed of a good idea here, trying to get a known story back on track, maybe they should have taken an old episode of the show and done it with that, like The Entire History Of You or something, so they don't have to constantly tell the audience what the non-existent original version was and they can play with expectations, give it a cheesy Hollywood happy ending, that kind of thing. BTTF 2, basically. I'm already enjoying an idea I came up with off the top of my head more than the episode they made!
S07E04 - "PLAYTHING".
Arguably a bit self-indulgent (sequel to an existing episode, overt references to stuff in Brooker's life like PC Zone and CEX) and limited (it's essentially a 'what if?' story that takes its entire duration to unfurl that 'what if?' without actually answering) but it's all done really well, it's exciting and entertaining. And I'm a big Bandersnatch fan so I enjoyed the indulgence. Also, scanned the QR code in the credits, got sent to a version of the Thronglets game and got stuck playing it for almost two hours!
Skiplist: "The National Anthem", "The Entire History of You", "Be Right Back", "White Christmas", "Nosedive", "Playtest", "Shut Up And Dance", "USS Callister", "Metalhead", "Bandersnatch", "Joan Is Awful"
[I was tempted to put White Bear in there, but it's not on the same level as these. Similar deal with Plaything. Joan Is Awful is a new addition some time after the fact, could get removed again on rewatches.]
