Grade: B
When Channel 4’s mysterious new series “Black Mirror” aired in the United Kingdom five years ago, it quickly rose to cult status among viewers all over the world.
Hailed as a modern day “The Twilight Zone,” the first two seasons of the show had only three episodes each, followed by an extra long Christmas special — as is often the fashion for British miniseries.
The anthology series focuses on the dangers of technology in a modern or futuristic world, often portraying these threats in unsettling or downright horrific ways. It’s not uncommon, for example, for fans of “Black Mirror” to recommend the show with the caveat, “Watch it, but don’t start with the first episode.”
“National Anthem,” the show’s insane pilot, follows the kidnapping of a British princess and the disturbing hostage demands that follow: in order to secure the princess’s safe return, the British prime minister has to have sex with a pig on live television.
Yes, you read that right.
“Black Mirror” is insane and unnerving by design, so when the show was announced as switching to Netflix for its third season, fans were skeptical. An Americanized, sanitized “Black Mirror” isn’t what anyone wants — if we can get through Rory Kinnear having televised sex with a pig, we can get through anything.
Season three premiered with six shiny new episodes, filled with a new cadre of British and American star power. Unfortunately, about half of the episodes were just as Americanized as we feared, leaving only three that lived up to the show’s previous standards.
Don’t get me wrong — season three is still great. Even the three episodes that didn’t impress me were still solid hours of television, even arguably better than the vast majority of what is on TV now.
But by cleaning up the show and making it more accessible to a broader, more American audience, it’s lost some of what makes it great. If I’m not messed up emotionally and mentally for at least a good 20 minutes after I watch an episode, is it really “Black Mirror?”
Because this is an anthology series, viewers can skip around with ease. Therefore, I’m going to break down each of the six episodes, ranked worst to best.
First up: “Men Against Fire.” Soldiers are equipped with something called a “MASS implant” and trained in a futuristic landscape to hunt down creatures called “roaches.” After a successful kill, they’re rewarded with sexual favors in their dreams.
As twists go, I — and I’m assuming many other viewers — spotted this one coming a mile off. Seeing a twist coming isn’t always enough to doom an episode, but in this case, the story has little else to redeem it. Michael Kelly from “House of Cards” is impressive in his supporting role, but the rest of the performances leave something to be desired.
“Playtest” stars the absurdly likable Wyatt Russell as a world-traveling thrill-seeker who finds himself low on cash. He signs up to test a new line of virtual reality video games and quickly finds himself in over his head.
This episode is certainly less predictable, but after a while, the twists on top of twists get tiresome. It relies almost entirely on Russell’s charisma, which works in the episode’s favor, but the annoyingly layered realities are just too much in the end.
“Nosedive” is an example of an episode that is a fantastic hour of television on its own, but isn’t quite right for “Black Mirror.” Mike Schur and Rashida Jones teamed up to write the script, and Bryce Dallas Howard stars as the eager-to-please lead.
In a world where your popularity and social media ranking mean everything — literally, everything — Howard’s character is desperate to get her numbers up by attending a high-class wedding. Everything goes wrong, of course, and Howard ends up seeing the upsides to being unpopular.
Moral of the story: people care too much about what the world thinks of them online, blah, blah, blah. Howard is great, and the episode is entertaining, but far too predictable and just downright slow at times.
Now it starts to get good.
“Shut Up and Dance” was the only episode of the season to leave me well and truly shaken, and the more I think about it, the better it was. It follows a teenage boy who, after some “private time,” finds out that he was being filmed through his webcam.
He teams up with Jerome Flynn (fan-favorite Bronn from “Game of Thrones”) to follow the mysterious instructions texted to them and keep their secrets from being broadcast to the world.
The majority of the episode is nothing special, but it accomplishes what no other episode this season did: the final twist left me unnerved, shocked and questioning everything I had just watched.
The final episode of the season, “Hated in the Nation,” is practically a feature film — a 90-minute crime procedural set in futuristic London. It’s still a bit too conventional by previous “Black Mirror” standards, but Kelly Macdonald and Faye Marsay (the Waif from “Game of Thrones,” almost entirely unrecognizable) take the episode from OK to great.
For the sake of spoilers, I’ll stay away from plot specifics, but let’s just say that I’d happily watch an entire series of these two solving scary cyber crimes and being badass female detectives.
Finally, “San Junipero.” Mackenzie Davis and Gugu Mbatha-Raw demonstrate why they’re some of the best young Hollywood has to offer at the moment in a bittersweet episode that is “Black Mirror” at its best.
The twist is nearly impossible to fully predict, but even if you see it coming, the episode works on so many levels that it doesn’t matter. The less you know going in, the better — just prepare for ‘80s nostalgia, an impending crush on Mbatha-Raw and a fantastic soundtrack.
This season may not have quite lived up to my expectations, but “San Junipero” proves that “Black Mirror” has still got it. You’ll never hear Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” the same way again.
