–In the digital twilight zone that is Black Mirror, an item of as yet unimagined but yet highly imaginable techno wizardry plays a starring role alongside the main protagonists in each highly individual story. Often it involves a little gadget applied to the temple, which in Black Mirror is a kind of portal between mind and universe. And as with the best of clever plot-making, there is always a further twist right at the end, just as there always was in the likes of The Twilight Zone.
For all of that, good, old-fashioned mystery and suspense are what drives the series, but with such a techno-millennial character that they could have invented it. The makers have created a series that is pretty self-defining... almost a genre of its own, just as The Twilight Zone and Hammer House of Horror were … others, inevitably, will emulate it but it’s unlikely anyone will improve upon it. I say “they” but in fact there are many people involved in this series that is as British as it is seemingly American, depending on which episode you’re watching.
Black Mirror has been a slow burner. A fifth series is now in the wings, but in the UK it first appeared as long ago as December 2011 on the UK’s Channel 4, with a second season in 2013. In 2014 (thank you Wikipedia for much of the information to hand here) it appeared on Netflix, which then took the show over, money and common sense having crossed hands. In 2015 Netflix commissioned 12 new shows which became the third and current fourth series. The whole bang shoot is there, so if you happen to have missed it, you can start afresh right now with the original 2011 episode. It is not to be missed by any kind of television aficionado.
This week I watched San Junipero, from the third season, and so much was so familiar, not least Cape Town’s Twelve Apostles. Filmed in the Mother City, mostly out of town and on or near beaches, this is among the most acclaimed of all Black Mirror episodes (along with USS Callister, although it’s the kind of show where everyone will have their own favourite and cry ‘foul!’ if yours isn’t the same choice). In 2017 San Junipero won Emmy awards for Outstanding Television Movie and Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special. The show’s inverted success – the Emmys came six years after its 2011 debut – suggests that Black Mirror’s best times may be yet to come. Netflix, certainly, does not seem in any kind of hurry to can it.
The stories are supremely well plotted and uncommonly unpredictable. Even when you seem to have reached the punchline, as it were, often there is a further twist, and sometimes even another one. This is not a show to turn off before the last credit has rolled. They trick you into believing it’s all over, then the credits are interrupted and you think, shit that’s clever....
Though creator Charlie Brooker admits to having wanted to write and produce a show of the ilk of Hammer House of Horror, The Twilight Zone, Tales From the Crypt and Tales of the Unexpected, in which the fear of the unknown was exploited, Black Mirror is decidedly different in that the focus is not horror per se, but how susceptible the human psyche and condition are to a different kind of unknown – the world of technology and sundry other scientific advances, the brilliant things that can and probably will be invented and created by minds which may not necessarily have your well-being at heart.
Other than these central tenets of the formula, nothing else is familiar from episode to episode. Each setting and story has its own peculiar style and mood.
The very first episode back in 2011 was The National Anthem, which has been described, Wiki tells us, as “a twisted parable for the Twitter age”. This is true of many of the episodes that were to follow. The notion that the age of social media is swamping us and that we really didn’t know what we were getting into. Far more so now, what with Trump and Brexit and all.
Yet the episode was made in 2011, when none of us would have guessed what effect social media would have on our political lives a few years hence. In The National Anthem, the British prime minister – a ringer for Tony Blair – is set a rude challenge. A member of the Royal Family is kidnapped, her ransom: the prime minister must shag a pig, live on television, as millions watch. Will he do it?
Watch the Black Mirror Series 1 trailer:
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You think, immediately, “but that’s excruciating”. And it is, and that is precisely what makes it work. We’re being asked: how far would we go? We watch wars happening in our living rooms. The same Channel 4, a few years before that first Black Mirror episode, had the entire British nation up very late for several nights in a row when they screened a live dissection of a recently dead man by the spooky Dr Gunther von Hagens. I was living in the UK in 2005 and stayed up for four late nights to watch the grisly late-night spectacle. Autopsy as entertainment. It was supremely disturbing yet undeniably compelling. He went on, as we know, to mount Body Worlds, a roaming exhibition of human cadavers which has toured the world.
Watch (or maybe don’t) Gunther von Hagens’ Anatomy for Beginners: