A belated review of Black Mirror season 4

Becoming popular was the worst thing that ever happened to Black Mirror.  Not necessarily for the quality of the show, but for the internet itself.  Back when it wasn't easily accessible in America, it was more of a cult hit for those who did manage to track it down, so it felt like a small little secret to be a part of and enjoy.  But ever since it was made available on Netflix, with the promise of new episodes produced by the streaming service, it became a part of the zeitgeist, the thing that everyone talked about.  And whenever something becomes an addition to the cultural conversation, the floodgates open up for torrents of backlash.  Those who've been hearing others raving about it are ready to prove that it's not as good as everyone says, and even those who once loved it seem to be in a race to prove that they're smarter than the show.  Nowadays you can't see one pro-Black Mirror tweet without seeing 10 others that are just "what if iPhone but too much" memes and other reductive sniping.

What those not very clever jabs seem to miss is that Black Mirror succeeds because of the human element of its stories, not the technological factor.  The episodes usually have an interesting, new bit of tech them, but they use them as a launchpad for emotionally gripping tales about human beings wrestling with that technology.  It's not just a cynical show about technology being bad, it's often about how technology just reveals the worst parts of humanity that has always been there.

Even if it didn't have the quality to back it up, Black Mirror deserves credit for its high degree of difficulty alone.  It's not easy to create a completely new world, with its own rules and technology that dictate it, then tell a fleshed out story within that world in the span of an hour.  Charlie Brooker is a genius on the level of Rod Serling in the way he's able to constantly pull this off.  (Serling still has him beat of prolificacy though.)

So that disconnect, the one between the aims of the show and the snarky derision it's met with, had me a little burnt out on engaging with the Black Mirror.  I put off watching the show's latest season, which dropped on December 29 last year, not because I was no longer into it, but because the surrounding discourse made me feel like I wasn't as into it anymore.  Now that the hot takes have cleared, I've been able to watch season, and if there is anybody who still cares to hear about it, here are my thoughts on each of the latest episodes.

USS Callister

This is the closest I've seen to a consensus favorite of the season.  I can totally understand why -- it's got the double easy hook of riffing on Star Trek and also being a story about mostly marginalized people overcoming an angry white male gamer.  But aside from that easy pandering, it's also just a rock solid entertaining episode.  Black Mirror can lean on its grimness at times, but "USS Callister" works so well because it has a terrific balance of tones.  It's horrifying, funny, exciting, and it even has a happy ending.  But what's most fascinating about the episode is the moral and psychological implications it subtly examines.  Technically, these aren't the "real" versions of the people that Jesse Plemons' character is torturing.  In that way, it mirrors the detachment one can feel when enacting violence in video games.  It was smart of Brooker to start off with a crowd-pleaser like this.

Grade: A-

Arkangel

One of the biggest reasons why Black Mirror is so interesting is that it seems like everyone has a different idea of what the best version of the show is.  It leads to the wildly divergent opinions that we get on each episode every season.  For every person like myself who found "Shut Up and Dance" to be abysmal nastiness with nothing to say, there are people who thought it was terrific and tense.  All of this is a long way of saying that I, too, have a favorite mode of Black Mirror.  The show is at its best when it pares its story down to simple interpersonal drama, usually between two people.  "The Entire History of You," "San Junipero," and to a certain extent "Be Right Back" are all examples of that, and they're all in my top five favorite episodes of the show.  So it goes without saying that I thought "Arkangel" was a phenomenal episode of television.  I've seen some quibbles about the logic of the Arkangel technology, but none of that matters, because it served its purpose as a vessel through which the episode could examine the emotions between a fearful mother (played by the always excellent Rosemarie DeWitt) and her daughter.  It's an engaging story almost perfectly told, and that's all I want from the show.

Grade: A

Crocodile

Okay, I don't know what Charlie Brooker's obsession is with Nordic crime dramas, but I am not okay with it.  At least with last season's "Hated in the Nation," he married that gloomy procedural style with some delightful X-Files wackiness (ROBOT BEES!), but "Crocodile" has nothing to leaven its dreariness.  It starts with an inciting incident that feels completely divorced from believable human behavior, continues without giving the audience any reason to be interested in its characters, and worst of all, it features some truly underwhelming tech.  This is just a dull, drab affair that never has any sense of drama or tension.  The only thing that saves it from being a complete failure is that Andrea Riseborough is really giving it her all with her performance and Kiran Sonia Sawar's Scottish accent is very lovely.

Grade: D

Hang the DJ

I was enjoying the story of this one from the very beginning, but there were nagging questions about the world that made me feel like Brooker hadn't fully thought things out.  Do none of these people have friends or lives outside of the dates they go on?  What were they doing before they started this dating program?  Did they opt in or are you automatically put into the system at a certain point?  It turns out that I should never doubt the show in that regard, because the episode had consider all of that weirdness, and answers those questions with a reveal that isn't entirely surprising, but still completely satisfying.  "Hang the DJ" is an episode that really comes together with that ending.  Before that, it rides on Joe Cole and Georgina Campbell's crackling chemistry and the way concept of this dating system takes our algorithm-based, swipe-heavy dating culture to its logical extreme.  But the reveal that this was all not just a simulation, but a simulation that decides two people's actual compatibility, is what took it to the next level.  It certainly doesn't hurt to end your episode on "Panic" by The Smiths.

Grade: A

Metalhead

Even though Black Mirror has been around for six years and four seasons at this point, the show hasn't even had as many episodes as there were in the first season of The Twilight Zone.  So it still has a chance to expand on what an episode of Black Mirror can be, and that's really exciting.  That's a part of why "San Junipero" was such a hit -- not only was it a moving story, but it felt so unlike anything we had seen from the show at that point.  "Metalhead" functions in the same sort of way.  Never have we had an episode that's this daring in its sparseness and lean storytelling.  It's a survival story, simple but unrelenting, and it crafts some great sequences of stomach-churning suspense.  Though it throws the viewer into the deep end with little context, the episode has efficient details that clue you in to how things work.  (That scene with our protagonist stuck in the tree, trying to figure out the killer robot dog's sleep cycle, is a particularly ingenious sequence.)  The episode also features some of the best photography of the show yet, thanks to some glorious black and white work from David Slade and his DP.

Grade: A-

Black Museum

Remember how in 1941, Steven Spielberg's fourth feature film, he paid homage to Jaws (his own work) as if it was already a canonized classic?  It was actually pretty awesome and ballsy when he did it, but it feels like it's a little too soon for Black Mirror to be doing a rehash of old ideas.  With its triptych structure of mini-stories tied together by a framing narrative, "Black Museum" pretty obviously mirrors "White Christmas," but the mini-stories themselves also recall previous episodes.  The middle story felt alot like the middle story of "White Christmas," while the last one felt like a mixture of "USS Callister" and "White Bear."  The best story ended up being the one that was the most original -- the doctor who becomes addicted to pain was lots of fun to watch.  And even despite my story complaints, I like the campfire tale vibe of the museum owner telling these stories to Letitia Wright's character.

Grade: B

Overall this was a great season, one that was better and more memorable than the (still quite underrated) third season.  I would have almost been willing to make a case for this being the show's best season if "Black Museum" was a little bit stronger, even with the dreck that is "Crocodile" bringing things down.  Let's hope Netflix orders more episodes of this show.  Hearing people talk about it may be infuriating, but Black Mirror remains an absolute pleasure to watch.

Season 4 episode ranking

1. Arkangel

2. Hang the DJ

3. Metalhead

4. USS Callister

5. Black Museum

6. Crocodile