In this season of ‘Black Mirror’, episodes sometimes end well

Serial leader Charlie Brooker does in the seventh season of Black Mirror Something he has never done before: he makes a sequel to an earlier story that seemed completed. Black Mirror Is namely an anthology series: every episode is a completed, standing story. In the extra long final episode of this new, seventh season, we therefore board the USS Callister for a second adventure on board. The crew consists of employees who are locked up in a computer game by their resentful boss. They have already eliminated that boss in season four, but because they are still illegally trapped in the game, they have to find a way to keep themselves alive.

This popular homage Rigid trait (and Galaxy Quest) is so nice that Brooker could get a spin-off. The creator said in Netflix club magazine Tudum: « Normally I let everyone die in the end, but here I let a few live there. Apparently I grow as a person. » The episode ‘USS Callister-Into Infinity’ remains an oddball in the series with his humor and space promotion. But is a worthy ending to this seventh season – the happiest so far.

Dark side of technology

Charlie Brooker was looking for the previous two seasons. The starting point of the highly rated Black Mirror was to make Dystopian SCI-Fi stories about the very near future, whereby viewers were presented with the dark side of technological progress. The episodes are often a satire on social media, video games and virtual reality. Brooker seemed a bit through his ideas the fifth and sixth season. Now he resigns himself to making variations on earlier ideas, or stories that are released from the starting concept. And the stories can now also be less dark. Three of the six new stories end well – all highlights in the series.

The first, ‘common people’, is still vintage black mirror. A construction worker threatens to lose his wife in brain cancer, but thanks to a new transplant method, she gets on top of it again. Only, the couple must take a very expensive subscription on a kind of streaming service that feeds the synthetic brain part.

Virtual memory aid

Soft melancholic is the tone of ‘Hotel Rêverie’ and ‘Elogy’. In the first, a famous actress gets stuck in the remake of a classic romantic film à la Casablancaafter which she goes off script and gives love priority. In ‘Elogy’, technology is no longer even a threat, but a blessing. After the death of a childhood love, a lonely man tries to dig up his memories of her using a virtual memory aid service. The battle is not between people and machine, as usual in Black Mirrorbut is an internal fight of an older man who comes to terms with his past.

The two lesser episodes are ‘Bête Noire’ (new employee turns out to be the weird schoolgirl from the past) and ‘plaything’ (oddally tells the police how he created a people in a computer game). They mainly suffer from a bad, pompous end. Does not bother: every episode is a completed, standing story. You can therefore skip the lesser with impunity.

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