Black Mirror Season 4
Netflix, Friday 29 December
What the hell is Black Mirror anyway? It’s often described as a sci-fi anthology techno-paranoia series, but some episodes don’t feel like science fiction at all, while others embrace the positive side of technology, and the very first story, famously, was about a Prime Minister being bribed to have intimate relations with a pig. So, it’s very difficult to pin down what it really is. Take the fourth season – all six episodes of which arrives this Friday on Netflix. One story, Metalhead, features Maxine Peake being pursued by something horrible across a barren Scottish landscape in black and white. USS Callister is Star Trek with a massive twist (and Michaela Coel from Chewing Gum in brilliant form). Arkangel, directed by Jodie Foster, is about a mother fitting her kiddie with a tracking device and taking it way too far. Crocodile is a kind of Scandi-noir thriller about a lady trying to keep a horrendous incident from her past a secret. Hang The DJ is a clever and surprisingly funny spin on online dating. And as if all that’s not bold and ambitious enough, we get Black Mirror’s most jaw-droppingly daring episode yet: Black Museum incorporates four separate tales into its spooky framing device – an anthology of stories within an episode, which is itself part of an anthology of stories. Which may seem more confusing than trying to work out what the hell Black Mirror really is. In the end, though, it really doesn’t matter, because even when one of the individual episodes may seem a tad drawn out (USS Callister), or when the twist feels a bit of a stretch (Hang The DJ), the pleasure of settling down to watch a drama series in which you genuinely never know what to expect is as great as anything else out there right now.