Black Mirror Season 7 Finally Gets The Show Back To Its Sci-Fi Roots

In the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes says, “There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.” This quote was actually author Arthur Conan Doyle reworking the book of Ecclesiastes from the Bible. So, when Holmes said that back in 1887, the idea that nothing was new was doubly true. But it also didn’t matter. The remix of older ideas into a new context is what made Holmes immortal. He wasn’t created from nothing, he was created from something.

Black Mirror’s seventh season — which has just hit Netflix — is similar. One could easily dismiss it by using institutional knowledge of science fiction or trivia about the franchise to proclaim that there is nothing truly new or groundbreaking about the series anymore. Ever since 2017 or so, new installments of Black Mirror are often regarded by critics with suspicion. If you ask your Google AI if Black Mirror is still relevant, it will tell you — thanks to the arbitrary prioritization of very specific Reddit posts — no, people think it’s not. Essentially, if the internet tells you Black Mirror isn’t Black Mirror enough anymore, that’s the most Black Mirror thing that’s ever happened, and you really should rethink how science fiction works.

Like all sci-fi, Black Mirror’s quality isn’t connected to how well it predicts or shocks the audience about near-future predictions. That’s a juvenile way to appreciate sci-fi in general. (One wonders how people who make this kind of critique manage to read any science fiction novels published before 2015.) When Black Mirror succeeds — like with the classic episodes like “The Entire History of You” or “San Junipero” — it's because the sci-fi tech is thought-provoking, but the analogous, non-literal reading of the story has greater emotional implications.

To put it another way, if you even pretended to know a little bit about science fiction, nothing about the basic setups in most Black Mirrors haven’t already been done before in a different context. The show’s premises aren’t super-original, but the show has never been outright bad, either.

That said, it does feel like Black Mirror Season 7 is something of a comeback. Not because the quality is higher than Season 6 per se, but because every episode this season is 100 percent a science fiction story, rather than Season 6, which clearly had a few installments in which the central conceit was merely a new way to depict a horror trope. Black Mirror Season 7 is perhaps less scary than Season 6, but that’s also why it’s better.

The first episode, “Common People,” is perhaps the most recognizable as a basic Black Mirror episode. Rashida Jones and Chris O’Dowd play a couple named Amanda and Mike. Amanda has brain surgery early in the episode, and a new streaming tech steps in to help keep her alive. The twists and turns here are realistic-ish, but the bigger point the episode is making is something more clever than the actual sci-fi idea. It’s not that we need to imagine this situation literally happening to see the allegorical point. Whether or not this humanist, anti-capitalist point is too on the nose for snobby TV watchers isn’t really creator Charlie Brooker’s problem. It’s a solid episode of the show, and had it been in Season 2 or something, it would be heralded as a classic.

The second episode, “Bête Noire,” is one of two episodes directed by Toby Haynes this season, and it’s likely the one that people will talk about the least. Here, the tech twist is somewhat unconvincing, but the performances from Siena Kelly as Maria and Rosy McEwen as Verity are electric. Is this a story about people fighting at a confectionary/candy company? Is it about bullying? As a sci-fi premise, “Bête Noire” might not really work, but it succeeds as a solid hour of TV.

One of the stand-outs this season is the third episode, the longish “Hotel Reverie,” which stars Issa Rae as an actress who decides to be part of a remake of a classic 1940s black-and-white movie. This one’s a heartwarming and brilliant episode that plays out more like a visual kind of prose poem about AI. Because Rae plays an actor, dealing with another kind of actor-ish avatar, there are a lot of layers. It’s better than anything we got out of Westworld.

The fourth episode, “Plaything,” is the sideways sequel to 2018’s Bandersnatch and stars Peter Capaldi and Lewis Gribben as the old and young versions of a man named Cameron Walker, a guy who reviews video games for a living. We get both the 1994 perspective and the 2034 perspective. The ending here feels sort of unsurprising and very Philip K. Dick-esque. But, then again, so was Bandersnatch, and in many ways, this episode is preferable to that Black Mirror story.

The fifth episode is “Eulogy,” which stars Paul Giamatti as Phillip and Patsy Ferran as a character called The Guide. This episode might secretly be the best of the season because the twist isn’t so much about the tech but rather about how Giamatti’s revelations about his own past unfold. This is a story about confronting long-held assumptions and thinking about whether or not you were the villain of someone else’s story. This one also has a powerful ending, with Giamatti doing perhaps what he always does best: give us a realatable, yet deeply flawed man struggling to find meaning.

The big episode of the season is, of course, the sequel to Season 4’s “USS Callister,” which is called “USS Callister: Into Infinity.” Again, like that season, Black Mirror Season 7 seems more interested in science fiction than Season 6, and in theory, “USS Callister: Into Infinity” is the one that is most drenched in sci-fi influence. Here, the Star Trek references are somewhat obvious and, in truth, not as compelling as in 2017. At this point, the aesthetic and conceit of “USS Callister” feel less interesting than seven years ago, perhaps because we’ve actually had a ton of new Star Trek in the last eight years, not to mention the visually similar series The Orville.

The biggest challenge with “USS Callister: Into Infinity” isn’t whether or not the episode provides a new sci-fi twist (it kind of does) but if it can actually say something new thematically. With this one, I’m not sure the episode really works. We sort of saw the same thing play out seven years ago, and I’m not really convinced we needed to explore these exact same themes again. That said, there are some satisfying dot-connecting revelations about the digital cloning tech, and visually, the episode is delightful. As always, the performances are everything, and Cristin Milioti and Jimmi Simpson are particularly on fire here.

However, there’s the nagging sense that Black Mirror Season 7 doesn’t need “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” nor did it need to be as long as it was. But despite its flaws, the final episode is a perfect microcosm of what makes Black Mirror Season 7 such a solid collection of science fiction storytelling. Black Mirror might be playing the hits right now, but if this were someone’s first season of the show that they’d ever seen, they would be correctly blown away. It may no longer be the hottest sci-fi show on the planet, but maybe that’s been the point all along.

Black Mirror Season 7 streams on Netflix.