"Black Mirror" Season #7 - Writer: Charlie Brooker

This will be my first post on this blog to cover a television series rather than a film in the sense that films are generally accepted to be a medium for the cinema and not the "small screen" but as is generally accepted now, films are more and more being accessed and enjoyed on ever larger home TV screens thanks to the numerous on-tap streaming services such as, in this case, Netflix, which is hosting the 7th season of writer and creator Charlie Brooker's dystopian sci-fi series "Black Mirror". This post was prompted by a dream I had this morning of an office situation in which I was apparently working through various resentments and unresolved issues with former work colleagues - literally traumatic in a dream sense until I awoke and realised that it must have been a subconscious mental cobbling together resulting from watching 2 episodes of "Black Mirror" back to back and some online interactions from the night before.

I've been using AI for image generation for some time now and the concept of "machine dreaming" to explain how the LLM's or Large Language Models that underpin AI, mimic how the brain works, an off-shoot of research into machine learning that has been on-going since at least the late 1950's, initially in order to drive factory automation.

AI is a clearly a prescient and controversial subject and it's inevitable that a sci-fi series such as "Black Mirror" would have an angle on it, where it takes the form of "Hotel Reverie" in episode #3 - but this aspect isn't especially the slant of this post.

I've never been a great fan of "Black Mirror" and I could never quite put my finger on it until now, as a fan of science fiction, and it occurred to me that the tone of the series is quite cynical and very much slanted towards the thesis that human beings are beyond redemption, fundamentally flawed, and therefore doomed to fail in some way because of their human qualities. This is very much in opposition to earlier 1960's TV series that are often held up as benchmark classics of the genre such as, notably, Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone" and to a lesser extent, "The Outer Limits" where both series, despite their differing approaches, emphasised humanism and human qualities to shine through in the face of advancing technology and the unknowable, represented by outer space and alien beings. Emerging in the post-WWII period both series clearly reflected the concerns of the period during which they were created and Serling's wartime experiences certainly underpin the essentially optimistic humanist world view that runs through "The Twilight Zone". In contrast, "The Outer Limits" tended to bias toward a brooding sense of Cold War paranoia and horror to counterbalance Serling's humanist approach without ever committing to the kind of cynicism evident in "Black Mirror" - America after all was portrayed as a land of hope for the future.

In Japan, Eiji Tsuburaya's "Ultraman" took a leaf from both "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits", where humanity is under threat from alien invaders and advanced technology is a last hope against an endless parade of rubbery monstrosities minus the cynicism about human beings as depicted in "Black Mirror".

Where "Star Trek" envisioned an essentially hopeful future founded on technology, the "Black Mirror" recurring episodic series recounting the adventures of the fictional, set in the virtual world of a video game "USS Callister" borrows the superficial aspects of "Star Trek" but deliberately derails its central theme with plots where the crew of the ship are virtual reality blunderers in the middle of a real-world conspiracy - it could be re-titled as "Fools In Space", as if Brooker is saying "Space?...why would you want to go there at all?...stay at home..".

Of course this element of gloomy cynicism is a sci-fi trope that predates Brooker, most notably in the work of writers like Edgar Allan Poe and H.P Lovecraft - pre-20th Century technology, Lovecraft's creation posits technology as a kind of magic wielded by terrifying multidimensional beings for whom humanity is inconsequential in the mysterious grand scheme of things.

To date "Black Mirror" has never strayed fully into Lovecraftian horror but then I haven't watched every episode of every series, my guess is that Brooker is less interested in this than forwarding his world view based on a cynicism about current events, the accelerated growth of technology and our dependance on it.

It may be that Brooker is simply reflecting the zeitgeist and general anxiety about the future amplified in previously unforeseen ways by the technology we use on a day to day basis - where H.G Well's "The War of The Worlds' emerged to throw a question mark over the feelings of security resulting from colonialism, "Black Mirror" questions the world in a period of colonial decline in Europe where the "New World" certainties evident in "The Twilight Zone" post-war worldview are under threat or are gradually collapsing.

We seem to be living in a period of extremes in sci-fi with no middle ground - "Dr Who" is now personified by Ncuti Gatwa, depicted as a manic and harebrained character jumping from one crisis to the next and currently counterbalanced by his new companion, played by Varada Sethu, as a no-nonsense nurse who barely tolerates his manic energy, in stark contrast to previous companions who have viewed the exploits of the various incarnations of the character with a sense of wide-eyed wonder, which is a refreshing change. Jodie Whittaker's take on "Dr Who" seemed forever caught up in a maelstrom of jeopardy and confusion and Peter Capaldi's seemed happiest sitting in an easy chair wearing carpet slippers and sipping cocoa in the Tardis whereas David Tennant's was filled with overwhelming curiosity, ignoring all the previous actors who have inhabited the role and brought something different to it each time.

So perhaps "Black Mirror" is a very appropriate title for Brooker's rather bleak view of possible futures, but they seem to be futures devoid of hope, also my reason for not particularly enjoying Netflix' "adult animation" series "Love, Death and Robots" now also into a new season - perhaps it's a generational thing, writing as someone born at the start of the Space and Atomic Age and still perhaps rather naively holding on to the optimism as well as the anxiety that came with that period - Brooker certainly holds that these earlier takes on science fiction were naively optimistic and seems determined to counter that for a perhaps more cynical contemporary audience.

And I haven't yet touched on the episodes of "Black Mirror" that I have watched so far of which "Hotel Reverie" is the most appropriate to this blog since it revolves around a fictitious obscure 1930's cinema romance of the "Brief Encounter" variety saved from oblivion via AI, with typically disastrous results when the technology goes awry as it inevitable always does in "Black Mirror" - so far it's the most satisfying of the 3 episodes I've watched and very well-written and performed with an unusually poignant conclusion, even if it riffs on Woody Allen's earlier "The Purple Rose of Cairo".

"Black Mirror" season #7 is a mercifully short one of only 6 episodes so perhaps it's a little unfair to base any review/criticism without watching the rest but at a guess Charlie Brooker won't stray too far from the template established in the previous seasons - that said, I really enjoyed "Hotel Reverie" but this is a spoiler-free post and it should suffice to say that it's recommended.

"Black Mirror" - creator, writer and show-runner : Charlie Brooker

Netflix