The third season of Black Mirror, the first in its move from Britain’s Channel 4 to Netflix, does everything it is supposed to do. It takes the basic idea of grabbing everything that forms your modern life and pushes it into a dark, twisted world of slow simmering terror and anxiety. It’s what predecessors The Twilight Zone and Science Fiction Theatre did but for things like cell phones, social media, and the like.
One episode will simply fill you with dread, another makes fun of our fragile dependence of technology, and a particular beautiful story even convinces you that there’s hope within these ones and zeroes of our beeping and blooping today. It even goes so far as to drag one of our most prolific genre tropes into a debilitating what-if, and continues into the same for an episode that amounts to a scathing commentary on the networked world of anonymity.
That’s not to say it’s perfect. Nothing reaches the shockingly poignant and pointed heights—leveled and consistent at tearing apart your assumptions and preconceptions—of the first season. And parts of the first half of this season dip briefly into selling morals rather than making whatever values are on display work for the story at hand. It’d be bit hard to explain holistically, so let’s break it down by episode.
- Episode 1 — Nosedive
- Episode 2 — Playtest
- Episode 3 — Shut Up and Dance
- Episode 4 — San Junipero
- Episode 5 — Men Against Fire
- Episode 6 — Hated in the Nation
Final Score: 9 out of 10
[…] Black Mirror can be, each season is often an uneven trek between bland and immense. The third season, for instance, suffered a rehash of what was up until then the worst episode of the series, but it […]