My Thoughts on Black Mirror (Season 5)

Black Mirror is one of the most consistently interesting series out there at the minute, and when it's at it's best, it's really, really special. After all there aren't many shows that can go from a tense tale about the prime minister being blackmailed to a tender, honest love story set in 1987, to a crazy Christmas episode split in three without breaking a sweat. I love this show, because it always has something to say, and always says it in an interesting, sometimes explosive way. When the fifth season was announced, I was immediately hyped, and when the trailers were released, I didn't really watch them, because I wanted to go in blind and have Charlie Brooker wreck me like only he can. And, having seen all three of them now, I think that the season is, overall, pretty good. Obviously, as ever, some chapters are stronger than others, but on the whole, the show has stayed pretty damn strong.

Season 5 starts with Striking Vipers, and this episode is freaking bonkers, man. Black Mirror has had episodes about video games and VR before, but there's something about this one that's just so interesting. Like so much of this is stuff that we've seen before, in Playtest, and San Junipero and even The Entire History of You to an extent, but something about how it's been put together is just so interesting. Without giving too much away, the episode follows two old friends reconnecting over the VR version of a video game they used to play all the time. When they get in there, the results are.... unexpected. What I love about this episode is that it's not afraid to explore these two guys, to show them at their most vulnerable and in doing so, pick away at some really interesting ideas, like sexuality. The show has always had something to say about relationships, and the way this episode approaches that idea is really quite interesting. Okay yeah, it suffers a little from previous episodes exploring similar things, but I've never quite seen something like this through the lense of video games. Even if it's maybe a tad longer than it needs to be, it explores its ideas in a medium that allows them to ask these questions, and the fact that it's unafraid to give some of the answers is one of its greatest strengths. It's not one of the show's more shocking episodes, or even one of its more creative episodes, but the way it dives so deep into the psyches of these guys is something that I find really interesting. It asks some really thought provoking questions, and never feels like it's passing judgement when it starts to answer them. I'm not a huge fan of its ending, which feels oddly quite neat, but I suppose Black Mirror has always been more of a conversation starter than a comprehensive study, and that's definitely true here. I'm a huge fan of fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter, and the way this episode homages them is affectionate, and ultimately pretty interesting. Overall, Striking Vipers feels like a remix of ideas that the series has touched on before, but they really work when they're put together, even if there are some issues here that stop it from being one of the show's best episodes. Also cast Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in more things please

Smithereens is the second episode, and is one of those Black Mirror episodes that isn't science fiction as much as it is a parable about the modern world. Like The National Anthem and Shut Up and Dance, it takes existing technology and uses it to tell a really, really effective story of the world we live in. This is the season's best episode by some distance, one that really benefits from its long runtime, which I realise was an issue for a lot of people, but I don't know, I kind of think it works. It starts almost cryptically simple, with a troubled driver working for a ride share app snapping and kidnapping an employee of a multi billion dollar social media company. One thing I think that the runtime does is it allows us to really see every relevant detail here. There's a lot of stuff early on that comes back in a big way (there's a reason he's looking for the right moment to talk at the group therapy sessions), and the episodes ability to deliver these really powerful payoffs is maybe it's greatest strength. Andrew Scott is absolutely phenomenal here, beginning quietly, before gradually working his way up to one of the most stunning moments in the series, where he explains his motives in heartbreaking detail. The episode is tense, really drawing the whole situation out, always stopping just short of making it feel like it's dragging. It's very much about how normal, everyday people relate to big, monolithic companies, or rather, how they don't. Smithereens understands that it's easy to feel invisible to these corporations, and uses that to explore the fraught emotional states of its characters, giving us not just the perspective of Scott's damaged driver, but also a grieving mother seeking answers about her daughter's death. Okay, so maybe I would have liked a bit more about her, because she's largely forgotten about in the episode's mid section, but that's really my only issue here. It's an episode of gradual payoffs that really resonate, maintaining and intensifying that great tension, before letting it explode into achingly emotional social commentary with an ending that's both devastating and satisfying. This is top tier Black Mirror, a real primal scream of an episode that resonates because it's made of real feeling ingredients. Yeah, I really dug this one

Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too definitely feels like the weak link. This is the episode that will forever be known as "The Miley Cyrus One", partially because her being in this show is kind of surreal, but also because the plot is so thin and clichéd that her presence is really the only memorable thing. Basically, an incredibly famous pop singer releases small android replicas of herself. A shy girl buys one, and when the singer is put in a coma by her aunt/manager, it's up to the girl, her sister, and the robot to save the day. This feels like a weird hodge-podge of better Black Mirror episodes, one that also kind of misses the point of any of them. It's also weirdly comedic, not unusual for this show, but given the lack of any real bite or commentary, the humour makes this one feel weirdly out of place in the larger scheme of the whole show. It's a strange experience, one that kind of lacks a lot of what makes this show good. Some of the jokes do land, and I guess the absurdity of the whole thing is kind of fun, so it's not a bad episode, but it does feel particularly weak given the lofty heights that this show has proven itself capable of reaching. Ideas of AI and public image have been done so much better in other episodes, so definitely watch those instead. That said, in the moment, this episode is kind of fun

It's hard to talk about any season of Black Mirror as a whole because of how varied the episodes can be, in content and quality, but overall, season 5 is pretty strong. Those first two episodes are definitely the highlights, Striking Vipers being thrillingly crazy and fairly thought provoking, and Smithereens being an unbearably tense slow burn that explodes into a fantastic comment on large companies and small people. True, Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too is the season's weakest, but even that isn't bad, just bizarrely out of place. Overall, it isn't the show's strongest season, but there definitely is fun to be had with this latest crop of Mirror-y goodness