Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Netflix
In the four-year hiatus Black Mirror has taken in between its fifth and sixth seasons, the world has become a dystopian version of itself. A lot has changed since 2019’s Season 5 release, back when we had no concept of “social distancing,” the color of New York’s sky was a reassuring pale blue instead of hot orange, and Jack Dorsey was still the CEO of Twitter. Now, as Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi anthology returns to Netflix, the series has to compete with the bleak realities our society faces.
Can the return of Black Mirror rise to the occasion? Yes and no. This season satirizes our obsessions with deepfake technology—apt, especially when a new movie like The Flash recreates the likeness of the late Christopher Reeve as Superman—as well as true crime television and DeuxMoi’s hunt for untapped celebrity gossip. The new season also includes a couple of stories that aren’t as much social commentary as they are intriguing science-fiction concepts, a la the episodes “San Junipero” and “Playtest.”
Unfortunately, while this season tries to tap into that original Black Mirror techno flair, none of the five episodes rise to the occasion of the horrors we’ve seen in 2020 and beyond, also failing to live up to the high standard the series has set for itself. Black Mirror isn’t shocking or quite as entertaining as it used to be. The technology has fallen flat—nothing will compare to the brutal rating system devised for “Nosedive” or the futuristic reality competition show created for “Fifteen Million Merits”—and without that, the stories become bland and unoriginal.