In my experience, of the people who have actually watched Black Mirror, there are two types: those who absolutely LOVE it, and those who never got past the pig episode.
To be fair to the second group, “the pig episode” (aka, “The National Anthem”) is the very first episode of the very first season and it packs a serious gut-punch. For my friends with gentler constitutions who are looking to get into the series, I usually advise against watching the first season in order. Truth is, though, “The National Anthem” is one of Black Mirror‘s best/worst installments. It’s one of the best in that it accomplishes so powerfully what Black Mirror as a series sets out to do, namely, to show us how our technologies, both sophisticated and mundane, show us ourselves, both virtuous and venial. (The “black mirror” of the series title refers to the fact that we can see ourselves reflected in our various tech-screens when they are powered down.) “The National Anthem” is also one of the worst episodes, especially for those unaccustomed to or disinclined toward existential gut-punches, because it goes there. “There” being that very dark, very dangerous, and mostly hidden corner of our collective consciousness where we stash away all the things of which we say we are not capable, but secretly know we are.
Netflix just released the fourth season of Black Mirror last month to mixed reviews. (More on that below.) The series is near-future, sci-fi anthology and the brain-child of Charlie Brooker, who described it as “about the way we live now– and the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time if we’re clumsy.” It consists of mostly stand-alone, hour-long short films that are connected thematically, Twilight Zone-style, but which share no common characters, storylines, or even a common world. Black Mirror originally aired on Channel 4 in the UK, and its first two seasons (in 2011 and 2013) were only three episodes each. Netflix picked up the series for seasons 3 and 4 and doubled the episodes per season.
Black Mirror is, in my estimation, one of the top two or three television programs ever made.
It has also proven to be incredibly, sometimes frighteningly, prescient. Only six years out, several of Brooker’s imaginations from the first season have already become reality. And the time-lag between Brooker imagining something and that same thing showing up in your IRL newsfeed keeps getting shorter. In that sense, Black Mirror really does seem to confirm futurist Ray Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns.” (Yes, Virginia, the Singularity is near.) It is primarily this imaginative/predictive aspect of Black Mirror that hooked me in the first place, and it has since made me a bit of an evangelist about the show. I think everyone should watch Black Mirror.
In fact, I teach two episodes (“White Bear” and “Be Right Back”) in my intro-Ethics courses every semester. I think it is absolutely essential that students– and the rest of us, not for nothing– think seriously about our relationships with various technologies, the power those technologies give us, and the influence technology exerts on and around us. Especially when it comes to new, developing, and/or “future” technologies, about which not enough has been written and even less has been thought, Black Mirror provides an excellent tool for supplementing what otherwise might be “mere” imagainations with a world, a context, and real, discernable consequences. To that end, Black Mirror is perfect for a Philosophy class. It gives us thought-experiments to analyze and evaluate, ones that students are not only far more likely to care about, but also ones they are far more likely to encounter in their real lives than those of the Trolley Problem, the beetle in the box, the colorblind neuroscientist, or the original position.
As I mentioned above, this most recent season of Black Mirror (Season 4) has gotten mixed reviews. I think it’s the weakest season yet by a long shot, but it is still 90% better than 90% of what’s on television. After Season 3 was released in 2016, I began writing a series of posts about each of that season’s episodes. I only posted two of them (on “Playtest” here, and on “Nosedive” here) before deciding that I should go back and write about the fist two seasons first, since I kept referencing older episodes in writing about the new episodes. Then, I changed my mind about some of the S3 episodes I had written about but not yet posted. Then, I decided that I didn’t want to post about Black Mirror in chronological order, but I couldn’t decide what, if any, ordering I should use. So, I got stuck.
What I have now decided is that I’m going to start releasing S3 posts I’ve already written and hopefully, over the next month or so, complete the whole 19-episode series of posts in no particular order. So, stay tuned. In advance of doing that, though, below is a little bit of Black Mirror advice for beginners. And also my current “ranking” of episodes. Don’t hold me to this current iteration of the rankings. It has changed many times as the IRL world has changed, and it will no doubt change again.
First, my rankings. This is in order from best to worst, with the season and episode number of each in parentheses. As you will see, there are some ties. Also, I didn’t include the one-off episode “White Christmas” because I think it’s just a re-do of “White Bear.”
1. White Bear (S2E2) and The National Anthem (S1E1)
2. Nosedive (S3E1)
3. Shut Up and Dance (S3E3)
4. Be Right Back (S2E1)
5. The Waldo Moment (S2E3)
6. Playtest (S3E2)
7. USS Callister (S4E1)
8. Man Against Fire (S3E5)
9. The Entire History of You (S1E3)
10. Hated In The Nation (S3E6)
11. San Junipero (S3E4) and Hang the DJ (S4E4)
12. Crocodile (S4E3)
13. Black Museum (S4E6)
14. Arkangel (S4E2)
15. 15 Million Merits (S1E3)
16. Metalhead (S4E5)
(UPDATE: As I have posted about of each episodes, I have gone back and hotlinked them above. Despite my initial reservations, I ended up writing a review of “White Christmas” here, and I would now rank it as tied for 5th place.)
Now, some advice for beginners. If you’re one of the people who never got past the pig episode, or if you’ve not yet dipped your toes in the Black Mirror waters, here are some tips for watching:
1. All episodes are not “the pig episode.” There is a lot of argument about this on the interwebs, but I don’t think all Black Mirror episodes are fatalistic, nor do I think they’re all dystopic, nor do I think they’re all depressing, though I would grant that, in one way or another, they are all deeply unsettling. “The National Anthem” (aka, the pig episode) is perhaps the hardest to watch for most people because it pushes our most uncomfortable Puritan buttons, but those buttons won’t be pushed in every episode. Keep watching. You’ve got more buttons than you know.
2. It’s okay not to binge-watch. It’s going to very hard not to binge if you’re new to Black Mirror, but I think there’s a lot to be said for not doing so. Each episode really should be thought of as a short film, and each episode packs 15 million times more merit than most feature films that you will see in the theater. Take some time and sit with the episodes, sit with your thoughts and your discomfort and all your feels. Don’t feel pressed to draw conclusions or move on to the next episode immediately. This last season was the first one that I did not binge– some of that was because this season just wasn’t as binge-worthy– but I was reminded in doing so how important rumination, in the true Nietzschean sense, is. Chew slowly and completely. Feel the indigestion.
3. Don’t assume there is a lesson to be learned. Charlie Brooker has insisted repeatedly, in interviews, that Black Mirror is not a morality tale. That’s mostly bullsh*t, to be sure, but I think Brooker doesn’t want us to be so confident that the lesson any one of us take from any particular episode is the lesson. Watching Black Mirror, as its title implies, is like looking through a glass, darkly. It’s complicated, it’s nuanced, it’s multivalent and, like all imagainings of the future, it is not a matter of mere deciphering. You say dystopia, I say utopia. Or vice-versa. Depends on what we see when we look in the black mirrors, no?
4. Understand that Black Mirror takes place in a NEAR-future world. There are some episodes in which the technology depicted will seem quite sci-fi-ish, perhaps even impossible, but there are also episodes in which all of the technology depicted already exists in our world right now. The thing to remember, a la Kurzweil, is that technological advances are happening at increasingly exponential speed. As I remind my students all the time: Siri (Apple’s intelligent personal assistant) is only six years old. If I had told you six years ago that you could have a complete, sensible, and meaningful conversation with your phone, you would have laughed. What you will see in Black Mirror is an imagining of the future, but not the way-off future. In the words of Charlie Brooker, it’s a future that’s only 10 minutes away if we’re clumsy.
5. Black Mirror is not exclusively, or even primarily, about technology. If you’re only concerned with the more-or-less believability of the technology depicted in Black Mirror episodes, you might be missing the point. The series isn’t a Jobs-style iPhone launch. It is deeply, deeply humanist. And I don’t mean “humanist” in a prescriptive sense. Black Mirror certainly does not presume the uniqueness of human beings, or our metaphysical distinctness from the things we make, even less so our inherent value. If we’re meant to wonder what is technologically possible, what technology can or cannot do, we’re just as much meant to wonder what is humanly possible, and what humans will or will not do.
6. Go ahead and give yourself over to the world that is given to you. One of the most brilliant aspects of Brooker’s series is the care it takes in world-building. Like all science-fiction, you’re going to have to suspend some disbelief while watching Black Mirror. It doesn’t ask you to suspend much, trust me, but you have to be ready to accept the possibility of the eminently (and imminently) possible world that it builds.
Stay tuned for the upcoming Black Mirror posts. Go ahead and check out my posts for “Nosedive” and “Playtest” if you’re eager to get started. And all you hardcore Black Mirror fans should feel free to give me your episode rankings in the comments below!