BLACK MIRROR: SEASON 4
It’s been a year since we last peered into Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror
– a year so stuffed with awful real-world headlines that Season 4 can’t possibly compete with the news anymore. Thankfully, it doesn’t try. Swapping pig-shagging prime ministers and cartoon presidents for the smarter, sharper sci-fi fables that only occasionally peppered the earlier shows, Brooker’s latest anthology is his strongest yet. It offers up six Hollywood-grade mini-movies that go deeper and darker than anything else he’s done before.
Moving to Netflix has obviously helped. Season 3 gave a taste of what a bigger budget might look like, but the proven formula now pulls in a whole different class of tentpole talent. Not many TV shows get Jodie Foster and John Hillcoat directing, Sigur Rós doing the music, or Maxine Peake running away from a CGI terminator dog for an hour. And fewer still have the balls to upscale without feeling the constant need to shock and awe.
Foster’s ‘Arkangel’ is a strong opener, and a remarkably subdued one. A cautionary tale about overparenting and digital privacy, it stings with slow-burning realism. Next up, Jesse Plemons takes the lead in ‘USS Callister’, mixing Her, Galaxy Quest and Wreck-It Ralph in the most ambitious, sprawling and downright enjoyable episode yet.
David Slade’s ‘Metalhead’ shifts the tone again, following Peake in one stripped-back, black-and-white chase scene that lasts for 40 minutes but feels like five. ‘Hang The DJ’ takes the Tinder phenom to its logical endpoint, and then does something rather clever and very sweet with it. Hillcoat’s gorgeous Nordic noir ‘Crocodile’, meanwhile, drags Andrea Riseborough through what looks like a bleak episode of
The Bridge from the future.
Brooker muses on everything from virtual clones and copied consciousness to pleasure addictions and the meaning of digital life and death. But he always asks his big philosophical questions with a wry smile, a bite of black comedy, or a Roald Dahl twist. The result? Weighty, without getting heavy.
Only the final chapter, Colm McCarthy’s ‘Black Museum’, lets the side down (relatively speaking). It’s a hokey three-part riff on mad medical science that feels more Tales From The Crypt than Twilight Zone, and more old Black Mirror than new. But taken together, Season 4 is a big step forward for the sci-fi series, and a hell of a way to spend a few dark, sleepless winter nights. Paul Bradshaw