Black Mirror, s7 (2025)

It’s possible that Black Mirror creator, chief writer, and showrunner Charlie Brooker’s well is running dry, but I thought s7 was an improvement and even something of a return to form over s6, which leaned way too hard for me into easy horror. The show still feels a little tired, but priorities are back in order. The familiar sardonic view of corporate absolute control was sharp as ever in the first episode, “Common People.” It involves a miracle pharmaceutical that upgrades brain function against tumors and disease. The problem is that it’s expensive and only getting more so as tiered “membership” levels come available. To defray costs, lower-tier users serve as advertising media, involuntarily dropping product pitches into everyday random conversation, with predictably loony (and intense) results. Other episodes, creaking slightly as they may, take on the multidimensional lifestyle in a competitive work environment, immersive AI in a unique type of film restoration, and the usual world-ending levels of computer hackery. Perhaps the most interesting development here—perhaps a sign of where Brooker’s imagination is drifting—is a kind of sequel to the USS Callister storyline from s4. I say sequel, but the relation between them is more like the first was a pilot for a TV show and now this redux is the first episode of the first season. It’s a parody of Star Trek, a good one that rivals even Galaxy Quest, focused more on the original series (“TOS”) than The Next Generation or anything that followed. Jesse Plemons plays the Captain Kirk character—he is as interested as James T. Kirk in getting laid but a far more unbalanced and cruel person. In real life he is Robert Daly, a software developer and creator of a successful immersive space opera computer game. A DNA replicator enables him to bring coworkers into his private version of the game. At least a couple of familiar points are here. One is the little electronic nubbin you affix to your temple which enables so much technology in Black Mirror. The other is the idea that “digital cloning” brings an essential element of consciousness into the software and/or device or game. Digital clones are not just some kind of empty replicant but bear essential sentience and self-awareness in their own right. Both USS Callister scripts shade their characters to appear different from different angles. Daly at first appears to be a harmless dweeb, but when he keeps calling himself “a nice guy” in conversations with women we start to get the picture he’s more of a petulant incel. As the captain of a spaceship, he is a monster. But I suspect Brooker is having so much fun with his Star Trek universe that I wonder if he wouldn’t like to dedicate a whole season to boldly going around in it.