Scott Woods Reviews — Black Mirror, Season 3
Black Mirror Season 3 — A weak effort from a very strong show
by Scott Woods
Netflix commissioned new episodes of the technology-gone-awry meets science fiction anthology series Black Mirror and released them this past weekend. The eerie silence you’ve been hearing since is every science fiction fan with an internet connection snuggling into their Twilight Zone pajamas to binge watch it. Just kidding: at a mere six episodes (which is how you know we imported it from the British) all of us sci-fi geeks burned through them by Saturday morning. The remaining silence was the spiraling ennui of stunned Ohio State fans.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it was a great season. I would venture to say that of the thirteen episodes of Black Mirror that exist, this season’s six pack might only have one that’s better than the worst episode of any previous season (“San Junipero”). That said, you should still check it out because it is better television than most of the shows scheduled on any given day. It’s just not a great season of Black Mirror.
People keep referring to it as a science fiction show – which it is – but parts of it scream horror, so if that’s your bag you’ll find a lot to like here. It is not only frequently graphic, but occasionally spooky: actual monsters of one stripe or another appear this season. And yet, the pervasive distress permeating almost every minute of these shows is largely due to the inevitable dread waiting at the end of every journey.
There are no happy endings in the worlds of Black Mirror, ever. Contrary to rumor, it’s not dystopian. The show is just bleak. Even the episode in this season that ends on a high note still had a body count (I’ll let you discover that one for yourself).
This season touches on social media a couple of times. Once in “Nosedive” (starring a highly effective Bryce Dallas Howard in pseudo-Stepford Wives mode) regarding our incessant need to be liked by strangers over our phones, and “Hated in the Nation”, wherein a government initiative to save honeybees is turned on its head by Twitter trolls into a process of execution by popular demand.
When it doesn’t dwell on the technology exclusively, the episodes move along fairly well. When it does, they plod. Looking at you, “Playtest”. Really, looking at all of you: with an average running time of 55 minutes per episode – and a closer that’s as long as a movie – all of these shows are just a little longer than they need to be, still hammering home their moral points well after we’ve received them.
Black Mirror is most effective when it uses technology as a tool to get to a deeper, usually darker aspect of human nature. It’s constantly tapping into the notion that, given freedom and enough anonymity, people are basically garbage. And because this is so persistent an outcome of every season of Mirror, it makes episodes like “Men Against Fire” stand out a little. “Men…” is a soldier’s story that suggests that even when people are committed to violence, we don’t really want to destroy one another, and that we might even have to be cajoled to do so. I don’t know how true that sentiment is across a sampling of actual soldiers, but it’s a philosophical bright spot in the otherwise terrifying treatise on human nature that is Black Mirror.
Sometimes it throws you a bone. A small bone, but an edible one nonetheless.
Takeaway:
If you’ve never seen Black Mirror, start from the beginning. You don’t have to watch any of it in any particular order. You could literally watch all thirteen episodes backwards and lose nothing. But the first two seasons are very good, and combined equal the running time of this new one. Even if this season doesn’t grab you, one of the other ones is sure to. And considering how seemingly integrated our lives have become with the technology around us, we could stand to do a little of the kind of self-reflection Black Mirror imposes.
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