Some big names in the teaser.
Yes, can hardly wait!
Man, I STILL haven’t girded my loins enough to finish watching what’s already been made. This is a great, great anthology show but I have to prepare, steel and brace, order anti-depressants, get tickets to Disney The Happiest Place in the World and hide all nooses before I can watch an episode.
I thought season 5 was mostly terrible. Bandersnatch was meh. If it gets back to the 50% absolutely amazing and 50% mediocre of seasons 1-4, I’ll be pleased.
As a modern successor to the original Sterling Twilight Zone I like Black Mirror but at this point reality is kind of overtaking many of the plotlines of earlier series. I mean, the British haven’t yet had a Prime Minister fucking a pig on television but I feel like they came pretty close with Boris, and we’re about another MCU phase away from actual murderbots and soldiers wired to see everyone as an enemy combatant. I’m not sure what they’re even going to do that won’t risk being overtaken by current events between production and release.
Stranger
This is correct. I hope the new episodes are much better.
One of my favorite early episodes is when a woman signs up for a service to email her, then call her, etc in the voice of her dead husband. That’s possible, both text and speech, today. Now, LLMs aren’t quite as good as the show, and they might need more training data, but the basic technology is just there. That’s pretty cool; I liked that episode more because how plausible it was (less so when the robot gets there).
That was David Cameron:
That was more ‘creepy bro’ activity, but still uncomfortably close to Charlie Brooker’s imagination. Honestly, I’m not sure I want to know what he’s thinking about for this next series because it seems all too likely to come to pass.
Stranger
What I liked about the infamous pig episode is that, unlike basically all of the other episodes, it actually didn’t utilize any fictional technology. It was able to explore a seemingly outlandish scenario without making up anything that didn’t already exist. I guess Shut Up And Dance is another one like that. That’s two episodes out of 22, and they were among the most emotionally impactful. I think that proves they don’t need to rehash the “human consciousness trapped in some kind of device” thing over and over again. There’s potential. I agree with others that the last few seasons sucked. The last truly powerful episode, to me, was Black Museum. I thought most of the rest of Season 4, and all of Season 5, sucked.
This is why the show runner stopped making them. He said real life was way worse than anything he could think of.
I like to imagine that someone came to him in mid-2016 with a story pitch about a game show host being elected president and he said, “Nah, that’s too far even for this show,” and then…
Stranger
I certainly hope they stop giving tech-bros ideas about how to make the future suck more.
“So, this billionaire, see, he buys a struggling social media platform on a dare, and then…”
Stranger
I would rate Series 5 the same as Series 2: one good (but not mind-blowing) episode, one okay episode, and one episode I didn’t care for.
The number of Black Mirror episodes I would rate as “absolutely amazing” is well short of 50%, in my experience.
Charlie Brooker seemed to have run out of ideas somewhat. The earlier episodes that were originally broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK were definitely more varied. Since Netflix bought it he has relied on the old trope of artificial intelligence/consciousness far too much. Although I must admit I did enjoy the episode that was a homage to Star Trek. As for Black Museum episode, the best segment of that, about the doctor who got off on other people’s pain, was based on a story written by Penn of Penn and Teller fame, believe it or not!
I would 100% agree. I love Charlie Brooker and honestly prefer him as a panel show guest or cultural analyst, but the first couple seasons of Black Mirror were great. I think there are only so many stories about the bleakness of the modern world you can tell.
I’ll definitely watch the new season, though. He might have one or two good ones.
How many episodes is this new season?
As an unpatriotic Brit, I usually much prefer American films and TV. But in the case of Black Mirror, the transition from grubby British misery sci-fi to slick American misery sci-fi hasn’t really worked for me. It’s probably still worth a watch though.
I can’t find it anywhere but given the amount of star power i saw in that trailer I’d guess six.
Can someone name the star power from the clip. While I do recognize some faces, I’m not up to speed on the newer stars names. I’ll propably slap my forehead when I hear them.