First episode was great (funny, properly tech dystopic, meta, topical).
Second was ok. Third was ok with meh ending.
Fourth was weak and fifth is weak-to-ok.
Underwhelming season considering the 4 year wait, to be honest.
On the positive side, last episode featured two songs from Boney M, which is group I never heard of by name but whose songs I heard a lot as a kid and it was a nostalgic blast finding out who they were and re-listening to them after decades.
I listened to a lot of Boney M as a kid. In 1983, on Qatar TV’s English language channel they didn’t have TV commercials, so they filled the time between shows with Abba’s Dancing Queen and Boney M songs. Especially Rasputin.
I thought “Joan is Awful” and “Demon 79” (the first and last episodes) were especially strong this season & all the episodes were IMO better than the foreshortened previous season. The season does take a bit of left turn into horror and away from the usual tech dystopias & that doesn’t always work depending on handling and taste.
“Joan is Awful” was fun for reasons already mentioned.
“Loch Henry” was well-handled straight-up horror & whodunit.
“Beyond the Sea” was super slow to develop, but had probably the best acting.
“Mazey Day” was fine, but predictable and based around a topic that that could only have seemed relevant a few decades ago. I also had a difficult time conjuring up any nostalgia for the 90’s or early naughts tech being depicted. Why would I want a fat & slow plastic laptop instead of this lovely ARM MacBook? Or a nearly-useless flip-phone versus my iPhone 14?
“Demon 79” was really fun for me, mostly due to the great acting & chemistry between the leads plus the ever-present black comedy.
Wow, predictable? I definitely did not see it coming.
Yeah, no clue what to expect until they arrived at the retreat.
I think my order is…
I can probably scramble the middle three and be fine with any order there. One is clearly the best while the other is clearly the worse.
As an aside, I always thought the story of Tacom the game, with some minor tweaks, could make a pretty good Black Mirror episode. Have the crew of the station be stranded and lost in space somewhere after evacing the station. The twist being the main character isn’t there to rescue them after viewing all their video logs, but only to liberate the stations A.I.
great season, very horror less sci fi. my ranking as of now is
Great season, very sharp and succint. More horror than scifi. That Brooker has written almost all of Black Mirrors episodes from season 1-6 is amazing to me. Theres alot of love and creativity in it… nothing is wasted and while some episodes from past seasons dont hit as hard as others, they always keep it interesting and have great tone. Guys a great writer, as well the people who work on the show are very tight imo!
yup of all the episodes this ending came out of left field… its cheap but i love it!
Just started Demon 79, and in the first 5 minutes it’s already the best for the Watership Down soundtrack.
I was pretty taken aback at how much this was the case. I haven’t watched any Black Mirror since, gosh, season two, I think? But after a friend urged me to check out season six, I was very pleasantly surprised by the horror skew. Loch Henry and Mazey Day, I thought, were especially brilliant for how they invoked with two familiar genres (found footage and werewolves, respectively), and in the case of Loch Henry, actually namechecked Blair Witch Project!
Mazey Day was especially good for how well shot it was. Just a superlative hour-long horror movie with a talented director, two smokin’ hot leads (I find Zazie Beetz so gorgeous to the point of being distracting), and a great twist on the familiar subject. I especially loved how the camera flashes were used in that pivotal scene. Rick Baker should be proud.
After Black Mirror, I watched Monica Dolan, who played the mother in Loch Henry, in a British BBC TV thing called Appropriate Adult, where she played pretty much the exact same character in 2011, based on the same story. She’s amazing. She didn’t get much time in Appropriate Adult (it’s an Emily Waston vehicle), but she’s still amazing. She’s pretty much the key to why Loch Henry works.
In fact, I’m wondering what would have happened in the ending had worked out differently. Was she trying to kill Pia? Then what? Or did she think she could talk her way out of it? Did she intend to just confess? I’m not sure we know.
I myself am looking forward to the Demon Doctor Who spinoff, killing people to save the universe rather than what we have now. Hell of a great companion to kick things off.
Only a couple of episodes into the new season, but enjoying it very much.
If I could offer a recommendation for anyone wanting more in the way of inventive British comedy/horror anthology shows: Inside No. 9. Created by half of the League of Gentlemen, there have been 8 seasons so far, and each episode is a brief 30 minutes. There is a huge range of premises and styles, and I think if you enjoy Black Mirror, you’ll get a kick out of it.
Every episode is self-contained, and they don’t tend to repeat guest stars, so consequently nearly every British actor has been in it. (Including Monica Dolan!) I’m not sure how available it is in the US - you might have to get a trial for BritBox and shotgun it in a week? (Or just VPN over to the BBC iPlayer)
To get somewhat back on-topic, I listened to an interview with Charlie Brooker this week, who said he was a huge fan of the show, but felt professional envy because they could get away with things he wouldn’t be able to do with Black Mirror.
Sold! After seeing In the Earth (“That would be ‘in the Earth’, Bob.”), I sampled some Inside No. 9 for the Shearsmith and was appropriately weirded out by the episode I watched and intrigued by the overrall concept. Not sure why I didn’t keep going, but knowing that Monica Dolan is involved, I intend to take it up again with renewed vigor. Man, she really got under my skin in Loch Henry!
(Full confession: while watching Loch Henry, I thought she was Tracey Ullman! Don’t tell anyone, because hoo boy, do I feel dumb.)
Heh - my lips are sealed, if only because I thought the exact same thing when I first saw her! I haven’t seen her in much else, but a great performance and someone I’ll be looking out for in future.
I thought Mazey Day was the weakest episode, honestly. It felt like it could have told the same story in about 5 minutes, and it wasn’t a particularly interesting one - the whole you think the person is being caged against their will but it’s actually to protect everyone else thing has been done many times before, so all this really added was the celebrity/paparazzi spin, which wasn’t a lot nor particularly insightful. Like I say, a 5 or 10 minute short, keeping the quite effective final shot, would have been fine. It didn’t really work stretched out to a full episode.
I loved the paparazzi stuff for a few reasons: 1) it was a smokescreen for the genre (we don’t know Mazey Day is about werewolves when it starts), 2) it gave the werewolf kill fodder so Mazey Day could have a high and graphic body count before it was over, 3) it gave a plausible reason for the characters not hauling ass away from the werewolf (all the stuff about the pictures’ value escalating over the course of the episode made the two asshole paparazzis’ cameras a focus of the action during the finale), and 4) it made the transformation scene all the more lurid with the flashes going off while everyone crowds around the bed. As I mentioned, I loved that transformation scene, because it was more than just an homage to Rick Baker’s make-up effects from American Werewolf in London; it was very much its own scene for the dynamics of the characters present, seeing something horrific and being afraid, but also constitutionally incapable of not snapping pictures, and unwilling to just run away.
The paparazzi angle also connected Zazie Beetz’ character to the action, and it gave her character an intriguing arc: how much did her empathy with the paparazzi’s “prey” help her understand what the werewolf had done? How much did it play into her decision at the end of the story to take pictures or not take pictures? In fact, what even was her decision at the end of the story? The external shot of the diner ends before we know whether she “shot” the werewolf or not, so we’re left not with a werewolf story, but with a story about how far a woman’s empathy will take her, and we don’t even know the final answer.
And surely you don’t need me to explain how the predatory behavior of the paparazzis was intended as a parallel to a literal predator? :) Maybe that parallel didn’t work for you, but it’s not arbitrary. It’s very much a baked-in feature of the story.
Finally, show me another werewolf movie with shots as stylish as the wolf running past the diner window while the people inside argue, or its distorted image in the glass of water as it enters the main room in the diner. If you look up director Uta Briesewitz, you’ll see she’s mostly been a cinematographer, and it showed. I’d definitely say she showed us things we haven’t seen before. In fact, as someone who thinks most werewolf movies are so dumb I used to say there are only three non-dumb werewolf movies, I’m officially changing my tune. So, in no particular order, here is my revised list of the only non-dumb werewolf movies I can think of:
But I completely understand if it didn’t work for you. It sounded like you were looking for insightfulness, so I can understand your disappointment. All I was looking for was a good horror story, and I felt Mazey Day schooled most feature-length horror movies by telling a filler-free, exciting, unpredictable, and stylishly shot werewolf yarn with a compelling (not to mention smokin’ hot!) lead character to take you through it.
I suspect we’re going to get into Blade Runner territory here, but while I agree it’s technically ambiguous, I absolutely think we’re supposed to take away that she took the picture.
Yeah, that’s fair. I certainly agree it was well shot, and I like the horror turn BM has taken this season, mainly because I was worried it was played out in its old niche given how weak the previous season was. But I’m absolutely looking for insight from it, or at least savage satire. For me, schooling most horror films is a pretty low bar. Perfectly happy to agree this is better than most werewolf movies.
Loch Henry tricked me into watching Appropriate Adult, a clumsily titled BBC miniseries from ten years ago in which Monica Dolan plays the exact same character. It’s not very good, as its mostly just a bog standard BBC crime show with Emily Watson and Dominic West Englishly acting at each other. Furthermore, Monica Dolan is only in a couple of scenes, but she’s tremendous in both of them, especially one where she profanely dresses down Emily Watson. Man, I’d love to see that lady on stage. I bet she takes over a room like nobody’s business!
Incidentally, if you’re looking for more horror stories with Zazie Beetz, Atlanta is amazing.
Shots fired!
Absolutely. I don’t think the look on Beetz’ face says anything otherwise! But for whatever reason, Booker and Briesewitz decided to leave it ambiguous. I think mainly because showing that flash would have been too direct, too clumsily “on the nose”. Which to me is another sign that the director of Mazey Day knew what she was doing.
I wouldn’t push this point very far, because I agree with your overall point, but I do feel there’s a touch of satire – perhaps barely even a whiff – at the predatory element of celebrity. It’s really just the thinnest of foreshadowing before we even know we’re watching a werewolf movie, and its left fallow for us to pick up if we want, but I do feel it’s there.