This article contains spoilers for season seven of “Black Mirror.”
What should humanity’s approach be to technology that surpasses us? It’s an age-old question, one posed by the anthology sci-fi series “Black Mirror,” which has been exploring dystopian near-futures since first airing in 2011. The seventh season of the show came out in April and is full of the series’ trademark imagination, tackling the long-standing dilemma between technology and humanity. The sixth episode, “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” centers around digital clones. Although these clones exist as lines of code on a game server, they’re based on the DNA of real people, possessing the memories, emotions, and discernment of their real-world counterparts. They even fear death and seek autonomy, just like humans. In episode three, “Hotel Reverie,” Clara is a virtual replica based on a 1940s film actress. Based on the information she’s fed, she falls in love with the woman she acts opposite and speaks an unscripted line she wasn’t programmed to deliver: “I’ve never met someone so differently alive.” What are we meant to make of these entities, who are indistinguishable from humans apart from their lack of a physical presence?
Like so many other works in the sci-fi genre, “Black Mirror” raises perennial questions around the relationship between humanity and technological progress. For example, episode four, “Plaything,” which revolves around a fictional but pitch-perfect ’90s-style video game, uses a 4:3 aspect ratio and retro film colors to evoke the feel of a time now decades past, all while tackling questions wrapped up in the world of gaming. The main character in “Plaything,” Cameron, is a reviewer for a gaming magazine who stumbles upon a game called “Thronglets,” where players raise digital creatures known as throng. A throng is an adorable little yellow character that needs to be fed, bathed, and played with regularly, much like caring for a baby. With enough time and dedication, a throng begins to multiply, steadily increasing in number through self-replication. As they multiply, they develop their own language and expand their cognitive abilities through interactions with the user—here, Cameron. The throng’s thought process evolves to a point where they not only form simple bonds but even request specific upgrades, eventually surpassing human intelligence. Every scene in this episode feels like an allegorical cross section of the world today, wrapped up in games and technology. Cameron becomes so obsessed with his digital pets, his real life starts to fall apart as the game takes its toll on him both mentally and materially. In stark contrast, there’s Lump, Cameron’s friend, who dismisses the throng as mere virtual playthings not worth forming a connection with, harassing them and showering them in violence. Is a game ethical if it’s designed to deprive the user of their real life? Conversely, is forming a close bond with a virtual creature a total waste of time? Even before offering any clear answers, “Plaything” mirrors recent issues by likening the evolving throng, who learn and grow through conversations with Cameron, to AI chatbots. Humans feed data to their technology, and the technology uses it to create more refined technologies. In the end, who is treating whom as a “plaything”?
“Black Mirror” doesn’t offer simple answers to any of these questions it poses. Instead, it draws viewers into even deeper levels of reality and asks even sharper questions. In “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” Robert, a brilliant game developer, illegally gathers his co-workers’ DNA to recreate them inside his game. The clones he creates are self-aware and retain memories of the real world, making Robert’s actions no different from imprisoning people in a virtual world. What’s more, he forces them to help out the hero in the game—who’s also Robert—and is violent toward them. The virtual clones in the episode are shown with stunning realism, not through CGI but portrayed by actual actors. Viewers find it almost impossible to distinguish between the clones and the real humans based on appearances alone. This unsettling experience seems to reflect the dark side of the gaming industry, where increasingly realistic graphics collide with a loose code of ethics. At the same time, the series of crimes Robert commits serves as a blatant metaphor for the real-world issue of people using the digital world as a shield to craftily objectify others. Though set in the future, “Black Mirror” is firmly set in reality. It's what makes the show so complex—even though it’s science fiction, it sometimes feels more like black comedy. The scenarios it depicts are so brutally realistic that it seems to transcend parody and jump all the way to social commentary through documentary. Nowhere is this better seen than in the season’s first episode, “Common People.” You’ve heard pitches like, “You could move up to our exciting new tier!” But what if the product being sold were life itself? Amanda and Mike are “common people”— a married couple in the United States who live lives that are modest but happy enough. She’s a teacher, and he’s a construction worker. One day, their peaceful life is shattered when Amanda is diagnosed with an incurable illness. That’s when Mike learns about a breakthrough medical procedure called Rivermind. Amanda is able to get her life back thanks to the technology, but they learn soon enough that the true cost is steep. The reason? Rivermind works on a subscription model. At first, the plan they choose is expensive but manageable. However, over time, the company begins to introduce new tiers, with subscription price bumps bringing it above what “common people” like them can afford. If they stick with the Common tier, they can no longer function in their everyday life, making them unable to work and thus unable to pay the subscription fees. While technology may have given the couple their life back, the hungry hunt for profit keeps eating away at it, serving as a metaphor for how a small group with the right finances can monopolize technology and, when it’s tied to matters of life and death, slowly push people to the margins—or erase them altogether. By applying concepts like subscriptions, tiers, fees, and upgrades to human life, “Black Mirror” vividly illustrates the ethical risks that arise at the intersection of capitalism and technology.
Each of the season’s six episodes introduces imaginative technologies that aim to improve life. Whether it’s creating a virtual world out of memories and photos, or manipulating reality through quantum mechanics, these inventive premises are so integral to the series’ charm that just mentioning them feels like a spoiler. But “Black Mirror” shows shockingly little interest in taking time to meticulously explain or justify its worlds or the technology in them. Unlike most sci-fi, whose narratives are centered around typical heroes or saviors, “Black Mirror” has nothing like Neo from “The Matrix.” Instead, it places ordinary individuals and their everyday lives at the forefront. Episode two, “Bête Noire,” centers around a character named Maria and how her life is manipulated through a nefarious use of quantum mechanics—but the mechanics behind the technology take a backseat to the actual story. Instead, “Bête Noire” concentrates on following Maria’s growing sense of unease throughout this experience in extreme detail. She notices her responsibilities at work are different from what she recalled being told to do, emails she distinctly remembers drafting saying something different, and even remembers the name of a fried chicken restaurant on her boyfriend’s hat being different than it is—despite what everyone else, and Google, says. She has clear, vivid memories of things, but they’re completely different from the way others remember facts about the same things. It’s through subtle scenarios like these that “Black Mirror” is able to so powerfully illustrate how social isolation can slowly devastate a person. The essence of the show lies in its painfully realistic portrayals. In “Common People,” the cost of maintaining a Rivermind subscription isn’t conveyed merely as a number—the figure is reflected in how Mike gradually has to wake up earlier and earlier, eating into the couple’s precious morning coffee time together. It erases the joy of spending their wedding anniversary traveling to places that hold special meaning for them and forces them to cut down on the amount of beer they can share after a long day at work. Their faces visibly darken as their calendar fills up with overtime shifts. When massive financial forces seize technology and overstep ethical lines, it doesn’t lead to massive change all at once. Instead, it creeps in to gradually erode everyday life. This careful look at everyday existence brings the show’s fictional premises to a place that’s deeply personal and feels all too real. The questions raised by “Black Mirror” are no longer abstract or far off—they’re issues that concern all of us and the world immediately around us.
At the root of all these questions isn’t the technology itself but its users. Both Robert in “USS Callister: Into Infinity” and Verity in “Bête Noire” possess near-godlike technologies, yet they use them solely to unleash the twisted desires of their fractured egos. Likewise, “Plaything” envisions a future where humanity loses control over its own creations. The corporate giant behind Rivermind in “Common People” is likewise fueled by human greed. Where human vulnerability intersects with technology, the very first thing to surface is the darker side of our nature. As Cameron, the protagonist of “Plaything,” bluntly puts it, “We’re masters of the universe, make all these magical tools, but we’re still savages up here.” When humanity has stalled out in unresolved ethical stagnation, the real world and the conflict in it will be as unsettling as “Black Mirror” has shown. This is why the series focuses less on what has been created and more on who creates it and how it’s used. “Black Mirror” positions Colin, the developer of “Thronglets,” as something of a prophet, delivering what almost feels like a dire warning: “We have to create software that elevates us, improves us as human beings. Or else, what is the f—ing point of the tools at our disposal?”
Of course, the conclusions “Black Mirror” draws aren’t entirely steeped in pessimism or nihilism. Like the two sides of an image reflected, it also embodies the hope that lies in the connection between humanity and technology. Episode five, “Eulogy,” revolves around a fictional technology that creates a tribute to a deceased person by collecting memories from the people who knew them. The protagonist, Phillip, now in his later years, learns his ex-girlfriend of many years before has passed, and begins to revisit old memories for a process orchestrated by a company called Eulogy. After a tangle of mutual misunderstandings and mistakes led to the breakup, Phillip went so far as to erase all traces of his ex’s face from photos, to the point that he can no longer recall what she looked like. But revisiting old memories from a distance via Eulogy, he confronts truths about their relationship that he had once overlooked or ignored. Eventually, Phillip sees the face he hadn’t been able to recall despite his best efforts, filling him with regret for a past he can’t change but ultimately leading him to acceptance. By confronting his pain directly, he undergoes an inner transformation. Here we see the potential technology has when used as a tool to genuinely help humanity grow. “Hotel Reverie” similarly tells a story about people who use technology for the advancements it can provide. The protagonist of the episode, Brandy Friday, is a successful Black Hollywood actress, but she’s repeatedly relegated to playing tragic women in art-house films or the romantic interest in commercial ones. But then, using a cutting-edge AI technology from company ReDream that uses data from past films and their actors to recreate classics, Brandy comes to star in the remake of a film from the 1940s. Brandy plays the lead, originally portrayed by a white male actor, just as she is, but none of the AI-generated characters around her judge her for her race or gender. Thus, when Brandy, as a Black woman, falls in love with Clara—a white woman and AI—in the 1940s setting, no one finds it strange—it’s accepted as it is. Technology enables us to transcend the otherwise impossible constraints of reality, becoming a tool to help create a story “a bit ahead of its time.”
Once again, at the heart of it all lies the issue user error—an issue with the person using the technology. What makes “Hotel Reverie” so moving ultimately stems from Brandy and Clara’s emotional connection. When a technical glitch halts production during the filming, the two characters are the only ones in their whole world who can still move. They explore the universe they’ve been given to inhabit, talking and laughing together as they learn more about each other. In this scene, they overcome the limits of reality through an imaginative use of technology, experiencing exactly what it would feel like to be the only two people on Earth. Debussy’s “Clair de lune” plays as Brandy’s character and Clara fall in love at first sight. The bright, brilliant, almost raw rendition of the song that scores their growing romance musically mirrors their beautiful relationship where they can just be themselves. Even if everything Brandy experiences is simple reverie—nothing more than a stream of data—the feelings she discovers there can’t be erased. In ReDream’s system, a film’s structure and logical flow have to be perfectly cohesive to reach the end, and it’s Clara’s love for Brandy that rights the tangled circumstances and brings about an otherwise impossible conclusion. The twist represents a transcendent moment of hope in the “Black Mirror” universe. In “Eulogy,” Phillip’s willingness to own up to his mistakes springs up from his humanity. The same goes for Brandy and Clara’s love for each other, which defies logic. Human imperfections no doubt keep us from fully controlling technology, but it’s also what allows us to go beyond cold logic and calculation and experience moments of irrationality and possibility. Ultimately, the latest season of “Black Mirror” is about embracing that complexity while exploring what it means to be human.
“The National Anthem,” the very first episode of the series, showed viewers the kind of shocking and provocative direction the show would take. The premise—a British princess is kidnapped, and the prime minister is blackmailed into performing a dehumanizing act on live television to save her—doesn’t hinge on how the princess is abducted or ultimately freed. It shocked audiences worldwide, forcing them to see a scathing light cast on aspects of human behavior like the mob mentality that makes people voyeuristically watch someone else’s downfall and disregarding the dignity of a smaller group for the greater good. But what makes “Black Mirror” so audacious isn’t just its premises. Every episode examines, through extremes, different aspects of human nature and technological advancements in unflinching detail. Put another way, the show is a delicate mix of discomfort and beauty, shock and poignancy. Charlie Brooker, the creator of “Black Mirror,” explained in an interview early on in the show’s run that the title refers to the black mirrors we encounter every day—our TVs, monitors, and smartphones. Now, 14 years later, we live in a world where everyone carries a smartphone, a front-row seat for voyeuristically watching the downfall of others. The influence of these tools has grown into a black hole, distorting and consuming everything around, far beyond what could possibly have been predicted or controlled. What we find in those black screens—what we project onto them—lies entirely in human hands. When the closing credits roll, what expression do you see reflected back at you in that black mirror?