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Black Mirror: breaking down the series' technological nightmares

Technology is embedded in every single aspect of our lives, which gives it a significant opportunity for make every aspect of our lives go horribly wrong. Each episode of Charlie Brooker's anthology series Black Mirror takes a different look at the dangers of technology run amok, but the twist is that it's often the people who are the problem, not the gear. Episode by episode, we're looking at where Brooker's twisted imagination leads us.

  • Adi Robertson

    Jun 7, 2019

    Adi Robertson

    Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too is Black Mirror’s stab at a feel-good teen comedy

    Photo: Netflix

    The fifth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on June 5th, 2019. We’re looking at each of the season’s three episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears.

    Spoiler warning: This essay does not give away the ending of “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” but it does reveal some major plot twists.

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  • Tasha Robinson

    Jun 7, 2019

    Tasha Robinson

    Black Mirror’s Striking Vipers is startlingly grown-up about its adult video game fantasy

    The fifth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on June 5th, 2019. We’re looking at each of the season’s three episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears.

    Spoiler warning: This essay does not give away the ending of “Striking Vipers,” but it does reveal the episode’s first major plot twist since it’s difficult to address any of the episode’s themes otherwise.

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  • Noah Berlatsky

    Mar 26, 2019

    Noah Berlatsky

    Netflix’s Osmosis is like a Black Mirror episode that doesn’t hate technology

    Photo: Netflix

    Virtually every episode of Charlie Brooker’s Netflix anthology series Black Mirror is an Atlantic cover story about how technology is either corrupting the populace or threatening the children. The episode “Nosedive” warns that the drive for social media likes will create a society of enforced saccharine smarm. “Arkangel” worries that advances in surveillance technology will enable mega helicopter parenting, leading repressed kids into meaningless lives of sex, drugs, and other mischief. Even the relatively upbeat “Hang the DJ” imagines a future where dating apps create and torture sentient AIs to test them for compatibility. In Brooker’s world, technology can transform even true love into something decadent and callous.

    The new French Netflix series Osmosis initially looks like a Black Mirror knock-off. In line with “Hang the DJ,” it’s about a new technology that helps people locate their soulmates. The series’ trailer includes heavy, provocative, ominous questions in a Black Mirror-esque vein. “If science could guarantee true love, would you say yes?” But the initial two episodes provided for critical review turn out to be less about the dangers of new technologies, and more about the dangers of familiar old school bugaboos: ambition, insecurity, grief, and love. Osmosis isn’t focused on moral panic headlines, it’s focused on stories.

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  • Jan 8, 2019

    Tasha Robinson and Adi Robertson

    The missing endings we wanted to see in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

    Photo: Stuart Hendry / Netflix

    Warning: spoilers ahead for some of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s final endings.

    Almost as soon as Netflix’s interactive Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch hit the streaming service on December 28th, internet detectives were racing through the story, trying to map the branches and discover all the available endings to the choose-your-own-adventure narrative. And shortly after that, viewers began taking to social media with mostly joking complaints about the resolutions they didn’t get, from a Colin / Stefan romance to a “surgery on a grape” meme ending someone was gaslighted into expecting. Above all, viewers have repeatedly wished for a purely happy ending to the story — something series creator Charlie Brooker has only rarely provided with his other Black Mirror episodes.

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  • Noah Berlatsky

    Jan 3, 2019

    Noah Berlatsky

    The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s horror story about a career in games

    Warning: spoilers ahead for some of the endings of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

    Careers in game design are widely considered dream jobs — one of the ultimate versions of getting paid to do what you love. Black Mirror’s new interactive episode Bandersnatch lets you experience one — and then concludes that a career in the arts is a nightmare dystopia with no escape. The new Netflix project is a painful parable about how creating commercial art leads to misery, despair, and the destruction of everyone and everything you love.

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  • Jesse Damiani

    Jan 2, 2019

    Jesse Damiani

    Black Mirror: Bandersnatch could become Netflix’s secret marketing weapon

    Photo: Netflix

    Light spoilers for Black Mirror’s interactive episode Bandersnatch ahead.

    On Friday, December 28th, after months of speculation, Netflix released Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive “choose your own adventure” film. Beginning in the early hours of the morning, fans got to work decoding its narrative branches, analyzing its symbolism, and hunting for its Easter eggs. That type of dedicated decoder fandom isn’t a new phenomenon, nor is the interactive Netflix episode, which the company has been experimenting with since early 2017. But Bandersnatch is Netflix’s first big success with the format, and this win has the potential to be more than just another buzzworthy title. It paves the way for a new revenue stream that could be a lifeline for the streaming giant and a natural extension of its existing infrastructure.

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  • Sean Hollister

    Dec 31, 2018

    Sean Hollister

    Black Mirror Season 5 now coming in 2019, with more optimistic stories

    Photo by Jonathan Prime / Netflix

    Are you enjoying Bandersnatch, the first choose-your-own-adventure interactive episode of the oft-delightfully dystopian Black Mirror? Good, because it may be the only new episode you’ll be seeing for a while. Executive producer and co-creator Annabel Jones has confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that Bandersnatch took such an “enormous” amount of effort that it wound up pushing back Black Mirror’s fifth season.

    Black Mirror Season 5 is now due in 2019, a Netflix spokesperson tells The Verge, without elaborating.

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  • Tasha Robinson

    Dec 29, 2018

    Tasha Robinson

    The Reddit detectives are hard at work decoding Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

    Early in the morning on Friday, December 28th, Netflix slipped its viewers a late Christmas present: a new episode of Charlie Brooker’s technological-dystopia anthology series Black Mirror, in the form of an interactive movie called Bandersnatch. Its arrival didn’t entirely come as a secret — as far back as October, there were rumors it was on the way — but Netflix has been secretive about the storyline and the scope of the project. Just as Netflix seems to be experimenting with high-profile ad campaigns and wide-scale theatrical releases for award-courting movies like Roma, it’s also experimenting with releasing films like Tau or The Cloverfield Project with little to no advance notice, apparently to test what its subscribers will watch without significant buildup or prompting.

    But the abrupt drop was more or less the crack of the starter’s pistol to a legion of detectives and decoders over at Reddit, who’ve seemingly revealed every single way the movie can play out. At Reddit, competing to pull apart entertainment has become a regular industry. Users have banded together to squeeze every possible clue out of mysteries from the real-life murder story behind the podcast Serial to fictional conundrums like Jon Snow’s parentage in Game of Thrones. Entire marketing schemes are being designed with these entertainment detectives in mind — HBO’s Westworld spent its entire second season baiting the faithful with stunningly obscure puzzles featuring binary and hexadecimal code glimpsed in passing.

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  • Dec 28, 2018

    Julia Alexander

    Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is Netflix’s new interactive special that won’t play on everything

    Bandersnatch is Netflix’s new interactive, choose-your-own-adventure-style movie that ties into the Black Mirror universe. However, it won’t play on every Netflix-enabled device.

    Bandersnatch was written using Twine, an open-source platform that allows for interactive fiction and narrative-heavy games, but that requires devices with a level of technological sophistication in order to deliver a proper interactive experience. An email from Netflix confirms that Bandersnatch isn’t supported on Chromecast, Apple TV, and “some legacy devices.” Outdated hardware devices that don’t support Netflix software updates — like the PlayStation Vita or Nintendo Wii U — are also unlikely to support Bandersnatch. And it’s unlikely your smart microwave with Netflix capabilities can play it either.

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  • Dec 28, 2018

    Julia Alexander

    One of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s games is available to play right now

    Bandersnatch
    Netflix

    Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is Netflix’s new choose-your-own-adventure interactive special and, in traditional Black Mirror fashion, is full of fun Easter eggs — including giving people the chance to play one of the games featured in the film.

    Bandersnatch introduces viewers to a fictional game development studio, run by an ambitious leader who wants to turn the company, Tuckersoft, into the “Motown of games.” The goal is to produce a series of hit titles that will reward its developers with fame and fortune. One of those games, Nohzdyve, is available to play right now — but there’s a twist.

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  • Tasha Robinson

    Dec 8, 2018

    Tasha Robinson

    The Black Mirror card game isn’t soul-crushing enough to reflect the show

    Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

    As the entertainment year winds down, Black Mirror fans are watching Netflix suspiciously, hoping for announcements about the fifth season of the technological-terrors show. Back in October, a Bloomberg report claimed that new episodes would arrive in 2018, including an interactive choose-your-own-adventure episode. (Reached for response to the unsourced report, Netflix immediately sent back a cheeky choose-your-own-press-statement email.) And a few days ago, a hastily deleted tweet appeared to leak a release date of December 28th for at least one new Black Mirror episode. But there’s been no official word about what season 5 might look like.

    Interactive fans now have a new way to vicariously experience Black Mirror, though: Asmodee Games has just released Nosedive, an officially licensed board / card / app game inspired by a season 3 Black Mirror episode. The game, designed for three to six players, invites players first to tempt each other with potentially valuable or terrible lifestyle experiences — anything from being elected president to living in the family basement — and then to rate the experiences they get from other people, which helps generate a “social score” for each player.

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  • Tasha Robinson

    Oct 1, 2018

    Tasha Robinson

    Netflix will reportedly release an interactive Black Mirror episode in 2018

    Black Mirror Nosedive

    In its fourth season, Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series Black Mirror stirred up some debate over its new dedication to relatively positive endings. The earliest seasons, on Britain’s Channel 4, showcased possible technology-driven futures that ranged between relentlessly grim and merely melancholy. But subsequent seasons, produced and released by Netflix, have been skewing in an increasingly positive direction. Episodes like “San Junipero” and “USS Callister,” which come with traditional upbeat endings, earned strongly positive reactions from some fans, but for others, they were a sign of the show losing its edge.

    But what if Black Mirror were interactive and every fan could just pick their own favorite ending? A report in Bloomberg this morning says a “choose your own adventure” episode of the show is in the works for season 5, and that it’ll debut before the end of 2018. Netflix hasn’t yet revealed the planned release date for season 5, but it’s been widely theorized that like the previous Netflix seasons, it would be a fourth-quarter release. (Season 3 debuted on Netflix on October 21st, 2016. Season 4 came out on December 29th, 2017.)

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  • Lizzie Plaugic

    Feb 14, 2018

    Lizzie Plaugic

    Black Mirror’s new website will reveal your relationship’s expiration date

    Netflix

    It’s Valentine’s Day, and the future-phobic TV series Black Mirror has a present for you. It’s a new website inspired by the season 4 episode “Hang the DJ,” in which a dating device known as Coach determines the length of a couple’s relationship. The website, coach.dating, asks you to “put your trust in the system,” which presumably also means putting a damper on any romantic thoughts that might cross your mind today.

    To use Coach, you share a link with your partner. Then you’ll both be prompted to click Coach’s interface, at which time the device will reveal exactly how many more years, days, or minutes you have left in your current relationship. In theory, if you both click at the exact same time, you’ll have found your “ultimate match,” but in practice, it feels a lot more random. At The Verge, our results ranged from 26 minutes to 17 years, even when we took extra care to sync our clicks. Also, Verge Culture Editor Laura Hudson emailed her partner link to herself, and found out her relationship with herself will end 10 years from now. We’ll miss her in 2028.

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  • Devon Maloney

    Jan 31, 2018

    Devon Maloney

    To stay relevant, Black Mirror has to change how dystopian fiction works

    Image: Netflix

    Dystopian science fiction has spent more than a century in the popular imagination, but the more popular it gets, the more it confronts a major existential dilemma: making people fear a dark future is no longer a useful tool in preventing it. Dystopian futures have never been more piercingly relevant. We live in an era when many of the genre’s most far-reaching prophecies have come true, from radical inequality and authoritarian doublespeak to irreversible climate change and unsettling breakthroughs in AI. Dystopian fiction is inherently political, but it also gained steam because it was good entertainment, an escapist adventure into the frightening hypothetical consequences of human frailty. But when the real world is so thoroughly exhausting, it’s hard to get any kicks from such a deeply cynical format: a genre that predicts steadily worse conditions on the horizon.

    This watershed moment is particularly evident in the evolution of Black Mirror. Since its 2011 debut, Charlie Brooker’s techno-horror series has been heralded for its unsettling ability to both predict and inform our technological future in unusually bleak ways. But as the show has grown over time, its familiar pattern of “What if phones, but too much?” narratives are becoming predictable. Black Mirror needs to evolve. Over the past two seasons, Brooker has shown a willingness and even a tendency to change and grow, but if he wants the show to stay relevant, he will need to abandon his worst impulses and go even further in complicating his original, brutally dismal premise. Eventually, that may mean reshaping how dystopian fiction functions.

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  • Jan 15, 2018

    Noel Murray

    Amazon’s Electric Dreams is more optimistic about the future than Black Mirror

    Photo by Christopher Raphael / Amazon Video

    These days, it’s almost impossible to talk about any kind of science-fiction TV anthology without comparing it to Charlie Brooker’s future-fears series Black Mirror. It’s the question most SF fans and telephiles will immediately ask. The new Amazon Prime Video anthology Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams does have some comparison points to Brooker’s series, and it’s unlikely that either Amazon or its UK television partner, Channel 4, mind having their fledgling series mentioned alongside Netflix’s well-established, buzzy technological creepshow. But Electric Dreams is decidedly brighter than Black Mirror. Co-creators Ronald D. Moore and Michael Dinner are every bit as pessimistic as Brooker about how technology is going to transform the culture in the centuries ahead, but they have a lot more faith in the people who will still be around.

    The 10 episodes of Electric Dreams’ first season (each roughly 50 minutes long) are driven more by grounded characters than far-out premises. Those who know Moore’s work shouldn’t be surprised. In his Battlestar Galactica remake and his Outlander adaptation, Moore has often just let wild fantasy be the backdrop for stories about the deepest yearnings and aspirations of human beings (or robots who look and act like human beings). And he falls into the usual pattern of science fiction, where most stories about the future are really about the present. In stories set a thousand years from now — or even 10 — the creators are usually extrapolating from current trends, and reflecting their own visions of where humanity’s headed. The stories in Electric Dreams are a snapshot of today, filtered through our collective hopes and fears.

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  • Laura Hudson

    Jan 10, 2018

    Laura Hudson

    Black Mirror’s Crocodile lacks a meaningful perspective on surveillance or privacy

    Black Mirror
    Black Mirror

    The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on December 29th, 2017. In this series, six writers look at each of the fourth season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears.

    The other essays in this series address “USS Callister,” “Black Museum,” “Hang The DJ,” “Metalhead,” and “Arkangel.”

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  • Tasha Robinson

    Jan 8, 2018

    Tasha Robinson

    Black Mirror’s Arkangel misses out on so many story opportunities

    Netflix

    The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on December 29th, 2017. In this series, six writers will look at each of the fourth season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears.

    Other essays in this series address “USS Callister, “Black Museum,” “Hang The DJ,” “Crocodile,” andMetalhead.”

    Read Article >
  • Bryan Bishop

    Jan 5, 2018

    Bryan Bishop

    Black Mirror’s Metalhead suggests technological disruption is unavoidable (and terminal)

    Photo by Jonathan Prime / Netflix

    The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on December 29th, 2017. In this series, six writers will look at each of the fourth season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears. 

    The other essays in this series address “USS Callister,” “Black Museum,” “Hang The DJ,” “Arkangel,” and “Crocodile.”

    Read Article >
  • Lizzie Plaugic

    Jan 5, 2018

    Lizzie Plaugic

    The dating-app future of Black Mirror’s Hang The DJ doesn’t seem that implausible

    Jonathan Prime / Netflix

    The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on December 29th, 2017. In this series, six writers will look at each of the fourth season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears. 

    The other essays in this series address “USS Callister,” “Black Museum,” “Metalhead,” “Arkangel,” and “Crocodile.”

    Read Article >
  • Samantha Nelson

    Jan 4, 2018

    Samantha Nelson

    In season 11, The X-Files is slowly moving closer to Black Mirror

    FOX

    Technology-based horror is nothing new for The X-Files, which had FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully confront their first murderous AI back in the 1993 episode “Ghost in the Machine.” But technological threats have always had the same status as other monster-of-the week problems on the show, which used to give futuristic fears the same weight as the series’ multiple episodes about killer fungus.

    That’s changed since The X-Files returned for its 10th season in 2015. In that season’s premiere episode, Mulder (David Duchovny) learned that the alien invasion he feared for decades isn’t happening, and may never have actually been planned. The revelation helped cut ties with the series’ original nine-year run, and the extremely convoluted mythology it developed from 1993 to 2002. But it also moved the show closer to the focus of one of its most popular successors, Netflix’s horror anthology Black Mirror. The X-Files’ primary conflict is no longer with mysterious extraterrestrials, but with humans who are using cell phones and space travel to their own terrible ends.

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  • Adi Robertson

    Jan 3, 2018

    Adi Robertson

    Ricky Gervais collaborator Karl Pilkington predicted two Black Mirror stories — but that isn’t as weird as it sounds

    Karl Pilkington, star of An Idiot Abroad and collaborator on The Ricky Gervais Show, is also almost eerily in tune with the TV series Black Mirror. A YouTube video maker dug up Ricky Gervais Show clips where Pilkington closely outlines much of Black Mirror’s season 4 finale, “Black Museum” — years before the episode aired. It’s an uncanny coincidence, but also a good reminder that stories are more than just clever ideas.

    “Black Museum” is a three-part mini-anthology, and Pilkington nails the central premise of two arcs. The animated clips above aired on HBO’s The Ricky Gervais Show in 2011 and 2012, but the audio was recorded even earlier. (Obviously, there are light Black Mirror spoilers ahead.)

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  • Adi Robertson

    Jan 3, 2018

    Adi Robertson

    Black Mirror’s Black Museum episode is packed with Easter eggs

    Black Museum, Black Mirror

    Black Mirror’s fourth season episode “Black Museum” is set in a tourable collection of technological artifacts with horrible backstories. As shady proprietor Rolo Haynes puts it, “if it did something bad — chances are it’s in here.” And for longtime series viewers, some of those backstories should seem very familiar. Besides the three items that play specific roles in the mini-anthology stories of “Black Museum,” there are props from episodes spanning the series’s entire run.

    Black Mirror stories frequently reference each other. This season’s “Arkangel” shows a scene from last season’s “Men Against Fire,” and the song “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)” can be heard in multiple episodes. But the Black Museum is the largest single indicator that Black Mirror constitutes a coherent timeline of high-tech disasters, like the world’s most misanthropic cinematic universe. (Or at least that the show’s set designers like in-jokes.) The episode adds yet another layer of tragedy to an already-dark series: this world has apparently watched ridiculously sinister inventions backfire again and again, to the point that there’s an entire museum based around the phenomenon. And still, tech innovators in Black Mirror never stop producing horrors and disasters.

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  • Adi Robertson

    Jan 3, 2018

    Adi Robertson

    In Black Museum, Black Mirror finally finds a single person to blame for technology

    Jonathan Prime / Netflix

    The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on December 29th, 2017. In this series, six writers will look at each of the fourth season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears.

    The other essays in this series address “USS Callister,” “Hang The DJ,” “Metalhead,” “Arkangel,” and “Crocodile.”

    Read Article >
  • Nick Statt

    Jan 2, 2018

    Nick Statt

    In Black Mirror’s USS Callister, the true villains are real-world tech moguls

    Jonathan Prime / Netflix

    The fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on December 29th, 2017. In this series, six writers will look at each of the fourth season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears.

    The other essays in this series address “Black Museum,” “Hang The DJ,” “Metalhead,” “Arkangel,” and “Crocodile.”

    Read Article >
  • Season 4 of Black Mirror now has a release date and seven trailers

    Netflix announced today that season 4 of Black Mirror will premiere on the service on December 29th, 2017, and it’s been slowly drip-feeding fans teasers for season 4 in anticipation. Charlie Brooker’s Twilight Zone-esque anthology series, which originated on Britain’s Channel 4, offers different tales of modern horror, told through the lens of technologies or societies gone wrong.

    As of season 3, Netflix had taken over production, and has exclusive streaming access. Very little information has been released about each episode, though we now have all six episode teasers and a series trailer to dig through. Once again, all the new episodes revolve around some nightmare scenario. As Brooker himself put it at a preview event in October, that dynamic has ensured his fans are constantly feeding him story seeds: “I’m immediately alerted to any horrible development in the world. People email me and tweet me about it, saying ‘This is very Black Mirror!’ Oh, thank you so much!” 

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