‘Black Mirror’ turns from the future to rewrite the past

That was a long time ago. It was hard to imagine how the tools the franchise had mastered could address this depleted, post-pandemic moment. Brooker himself acknowledged this: “I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart,” he told the Radio Times back in 2020. The sheer aesthetic and philosophical range of dystopias “Black Mirror” conjured was impressive and overwhelming, but it doesn’t feel like we stand in need of compensatory negativity right now; rather than celebrate the potential benefits of disruption, most of us are sadly surveying the few institutions that remain intact. And although the series eventually pivoted to provide a little happiness and relief (as with the much-loved episode “San Junipero” in its third season), the overall tone was bleak and reasonably convincing.

The new season (critics got all five episodes) is responsive to the moment, but it pivots in ways that challenge some core features of the series as we’ve known it.

It’s lighter, for one thing, and more than a little tongue-in-cheek. That “Black Mirror” once warned of technology’s evils via a relatively new streaming service called Netflix is the kind of irony the show is extremely pleased to call to our attention.

In fact, in the first two episodes, the monster is Netflix.

In “Joan Is Awful,” written by Brooker and directed by Ally Pankiw, a woman named Joan (Annie Murphy) plays a dissatisfied executive who returns from firing a valuable employee and grousing about the coffee to hang out with the fiancé for whom she feels she’s settled (Avi Nash). Browsing for something to watch on “Streamberry” — a streaming service with Netflix’s exact font — they see that the featured show, starring Salma Hayek with hair eerily like Joan’s, is called “Joan Is Awful.”

The Streamberry show turns out to be the exact story of Joan’s day, right down to her complaints about her boyfriend (played on TV by Himesh Patel) and her flirtation with an ex (Rob Delaney in the original, Ben Barnes in the show-within-a-show). At this point, on the Streamberry show, Salma Hayek (as Joan) stumbles onto a TV show based on her life. It, too, is called “Joan Is Awful,” and Hayek’s Joan is played by Cate Blanchett. And so on, and so forth. The episode racks up an impressive celebrity roster, and the Big Bad turns out not to be the quantum computer producing all this via CGI, but the CEO of Streamberry. The service takes some hits. As Hayek puts it: “They have taken 100 years of cinema and diminished it to an app!”

It’s a fun premise that could have used a slightly less hand-wavy resolution (make sure to watch past the credits). But the point is, it’s funny.

In the second episode, “Loch Henry,” “Black Mirror” takes an even more pointed dig at the streaming service broadcasting it. Myha’la Herrold and Samuel Blenkin play Pia and Davis, a couple of would-be filmmakers on their way to shoot a documentary about an “egg collector,” which sounds, despite their pretentious explanation of the stakes, amazingly dull. They stop in at Davis’s picturesque but abandoned hometown in Scotland, and when Pia hears why it’s deserted (a serial killer), she insists that they make a documentary about that instead. Their efforts to sell the idea to Streamberry — which is so glutted with true crime programming that an executive demands they find some new or “personal” angle — diminish them both, and by the end it’s hard to regard anyone who gets behind a camera with anything but contempt. (The episode, bleak though it is, includes at least one fun little Easter egg: at an awards show, it turns out one of the nominated documentaries is “Euthanasia: Inside Project Junipero.”)

You might have noticed that “Loch Henry” features no new technological innovations. Its gadgetry is limited to cameras, Polaroids, VHS tapes. The same is true for “Mazey Day,” set in 2006 Los Angeles, in which Zazie Beetz plays an ethically conflicted paparazzo coming out of retirement to hunt down a starlet in crisis, and for “Demon 79,” in which Nida (Anjana Vasan), a sales clerk in 1979 England, is informed by a demon (Paapa Essiedu) that she must do unspeakable things to stave off the end of the world.

The demon is perhaps the biggest surprise of the new season, and it’s far from the only supernatural element. The turn to comedy and magic is so massive a pivot that I sometimes found myself wishing the series had stuck with hilariously subversive permutations of its “Netflix Is Awful” theme throughout all five episodes. “Black Mirror” is either radically expanding its definition of “technology” to include stuff like satanic talismans or it’s straying from the theoretical rigor sci-fi requires to delve into horror — or black comedy, and sometimes both. “I got a bit bored of writing [episodes where it] pulls out to reveal that they’re all inside a computer, so one of the things I wanted to do was really shake up what the show is,” Brooker told GQ this month.

Mission accomplished. Of the new season’s five episodes, only one — “Beyond the Sea” — feels like classic “Black Mirror.” That one’s a period piece, too, however! Set in a version of 1969 with tech that allows people to “transfer” their consciousness into perfect android replicas, it follows two astronauts (Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett) on a mission in space. They approximate normal family life back home while in transit by cognitively inhabiting Earthbound mechanical replicas of themselves whenever they’re not needed on board. Things devolve when one astronaut’s wife and children are murdered (and his replica destroyed) by a Manson-type cult that regards the androids as unnatural and unholy.

It’s interesting that Brooker appears to have felt a bit like I did about “Black Mirror” — nostalgic about the pessimism it could once afford, and more ready to imagine alternative pasts than alternative futures. “It does feel like the dystopia is lapping onto the shores of the present moment,” he told GQ. “Lots of people say it’s like we’re living in a ‘Black Mirror’ episode, so there’s certainly a sense of looking in the rearview.”

Black Mirror (five episodes) returns June 15 on Netflix.