Right after Netflix renewed Love, Death + Robots for a season three, Variety reported that Charlie Brooker is working on the sixth season of Black Mirror. While not much has been revealed about the upcoming season, casting is reportedly underway. Fans are already pumped to see what the show has in store, and here’s why they need to binge on all five seasons ahead of the release of the sixth season.
This British sci-fi anthology series is terrific and scary. It presents a dystopian future modelled on the contemporary world, unveiling and analysing modern society’s problems and ugly realities, often juxtaposing it against steampunk or cyberpunk settings.
Black Mirror is a brilliant deconstruction of the effect of technology on our lives, and it adds substantially to the discourse surrounding this. It mirrors a future which does not seem to be very far away, where professional, social and interpersonal relationships are often adversely affected by technology’s rapid advancement. Provocative, interactive and often mind-boggling, the series boasts superb visuals, incredible performances and storytelling, and the latter is often a blend between realism and absurdism.
From people being repulsed by the scary portrayal of the near future to people writing full-length theses papers, Black Mirror has received all the hype it deserves. Brooker reported how he spent his quarantine writing scripts that are no longer as scary and dark; instead, they are supposedly funny. Given the current events in the world, including a deadly pandemic, natural calamities and geopolitical tension leading to wars and humanitarian crises, it seems like Brooker might derive inspiration from them to make satirical commentaries via the episodes.
While we trust Brooker’s creativity and ingenious, it is essential to acknowledge that the comic scripts will probably not be as brutal and horrifying as his previous episodes. Previously, on Best of Netflix, we ranked all the episodes of the show in the order of greatness. Harrowing and dark, every episode bore the promise of a twisted ending that was enough to instil the fear of modernity and the advancement of technology.
Take, for instance, the third episode in the first season, ‘The Entire History of You’. Given how we are all addicted to various forms of social media, this dark and grim episode provides a heavy reality check, as does ‘Nosedive’. While ‘The Entire History of You’ deconstructs the tech-driven future via an ominous and claustrophobic lens, it also includes emotions and infidelity in the mix to lead to a distorted reality and a bloody ending.
In episodes like ‘San Junipero’ and ‘Striking Vipers’, the show introduces homosexual relationships, while other episodes like ‘Be Right Back’ show how technology can never replace human emotions despite providing sexual gratification. The show upholds the dichotomy of the world while constantly emphasising how humanity is on a moral and spiritual decline; the fall of humanity does not seem to be very far away in a world where AI, technology and robots rule.
Black Mirror has something for us all. From class warfare to gender and racial politics, interpersonal conflicts to political issues and other alienating events, the series has a very hard-hitting impact on its viewers and stays with them for days. While the fifth season was not as good as the first two, it still had something substantial to contribute to the conversation. Brooker’s ideology is rooted in the idea that technology is important but not indispensable; unless we realise that, we are utterly screwed!
