‘Black Mirror’ season seven review: Charlie Brooker’s twisted universe at its most absorbing

If Netflix deserves a pat on the back for anything, it’s nurturing Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. Ever since the streamer liberated it from Channel 4 after season two, the episodes for this twisted near-future look at our interactions with technology have gotten increasingly more complex, daring and loopy. With season seven, they deliver six more slick outings that run the gamut from poignant drama to paranoid fantasy.

The more Black Mirror we get, the more the Brooker-verse grows. And so in ‘Plaything’, we’re back at Tuckersoft, last seen in the head-mangling interactive special Bandersnatch. Will Poulter’s game-creating guru Colin Ritman returns, this time introducing Thronglets, which drives one player (Lewis Gribben and, in later scenes, Peter Capaldi) crazy. It’s a beautifully trippy episode, classic Black Mirror you might say, with a lovely retro feel to the game in question, which is Lemmings meets The Sims by way of Tamagotchis.

In the season finale, ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’, we return to the fully-immersive space exploration game Infinity, introduced back in season four. Clocking in at 90 minutes, this feature-length episode is the longest of the six, as Brooker unpacks further adventures set in the Star Trek-inspired open-world created by Jesse Plemons’ genius coder. And, yes, that means more of oily CEO James Walton, brilliantly embodied by Jimmi Simpson, who might just be the most unpleasant boss since Elon Musk. With nods to Wrexham F.C. (Ryan Reynolds will be pleased) and Real Housewives Of Atlanta, it’s a comic delight.

As pleasing as it is to see these episodes further expand the world of Black Mirror (there are more Easter eggs than a supermarket stock-take in April), it’s when Brooker and co. explore new ideas that the series really takes off.

In the opener, ‘Common People’, Chris O’Dowd and Rashida Jones play a married couple forced into a horrifying bind when she undergoes surgery to remove a tumour. Thankfully, holistic new company Rivermind offers a solution: a back-up of her brain in the digital cloud. All very clever, as long as you don’t mind the increasingly annoying restrictions. It’s a very neat satire on contemporary corporate business models that cuts close to the bone.

As painful as that episode can be to watch (and it does get dark), it doesn’t come close to ‘Eulogy’, which sees Paul Giamatti’s lonely soul asked to dredge up memories for the funeral of Carol, a woman he hasn’t seen in years. New tech allows him to enter old photographs to help recall precious moments from long ago. It’s an exceptionally raw process though, given how Carol broke his heart. Bringing plenty of gravitas to the tale, Giamatti, the Oscar nominee from last year’s The Holdovers, proves that he’s one of the best actors around with this superb performance.

Unsurprisingly, Brooker weighs in on the AI debate that has been raging across Tinseltown for the past few years. In ‘Hotel Reverie’, we see ailing movie studio Keyworth Pictures agree to ‘remake’ their eponymous Casablanca-like black-and-white classic using a real-time simulation that allows them to plant a new actor, Brandy Friday (Issa Rae), into the movie as it runs in real time. With some neat Hollywood gender-flipping, she replaces the male star, meaning she’s suddenly romancing Emma Corrin’s character Dorothy. Smart, sassy filmmaking.

Perhaps the best and most bonkers episode is ‘Bête Noire’. Maria (Siena Kelly), a food researcher working for a confectionery company, gets a shock when old schoolmate Verity (Rosy McEwen) wins a job at her company. An outcast back in the playground, Verity now seems to be the most popular kid in town, which starts to do Maria’s nut in. McEwen and Kelly make for worthy adversaries in this tale about absolute power.

A typically eclectic soundtrack features everything from The Stone Roses to Amyl And The Sniffers), perfectly symbolising the variety on offer across these six episodes. Brooker’s sharp-eyed intelligence and eerily prophetic lens on society is also very much in tune. It’s not all about the twists either. These news episodes, especially the cine-literate ‘Hotel Reverie’, merit a second viewing – but that is par for the course in the Brooker-verse. As they say in the final episode, “a tiger cannot change its stripes”.

‘Black Mirror’ season seven is available to watch now on Netflix

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