Elegantly breaching final frontiers to spooky, spectacular effect

‘Common People’, the first episode, features a loving couple, construction worker Mike (Chris O’Dowd) and teacher Amanda (Rashida Jones). When Amanda faints while teaching, an inoperable brain tumour is discovered, and in steps Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross). She offers a way out — Rivermind, which will remove the tumour and replace it with synthesised tissue connected to their servers. The catch is that the couple will have to pay a monthly subscription fee to access the servers for Amanda to have her pre-tumour quality of life.

While in the beginning all goes well, the introduction of a “plus” and “lux” subscription, and Amanda inadvertently breaking out in ads in the middle of her sentences, lands the couple in a bleakly comic nightmare.

A still from ‘Bête Noire’
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Netflix

Maria (Siena Kelly) is living the good life in ‘Bête Noire’, the second episode. She is the talented creator of flavours of chocolate (miso!) at a chocolate lab and has an easy relationship with her goofy gamer boyfriend, Kae (Michael Workeye). All that changes when a young woman, Verity (Rosy McEwen), walks into the office. Maria realises Verity was her weird computer nerd classmate at school, and also that reality seems to be changing around her, affecting her work and her relationships. Is it gaslighting, string theory, the Mandela Effect, or does Verity, with her super-brain, have the power to change reality? ‘Bête Noire’ taps into our fears of fractured memories and source amnesia.

‘Hotel Reverie’, the third episode, feeds our insatiable desire for nostalgia, with a gorgeous love story. There is a black-and-white romance from the 1940s. When Kimmy (Awkwafina) presents Judith (Harriet Walter), who owns the studio’s entire back catalogue, a revolutionary way to reboot the old classics, it seems like an answer to a prayer. Brandy (Issa Rae), a huge star in the present day, agrees to the project, if it could be gender flipped so that she plays the male lead.

Emma Corrin in ‘Hotel Reverie’
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Netflix

Once she joins the project, Brandy realises it will not be shot in the conventional way; rather, a new technology called ReDream will introduce her consciousness into the film. All she has to do is follow the script and the film would be done in time to vacate the set for the Swedish toilet commercial (har har). Of course things go haywire and the heroine (Emma Corrin) gains agency with every deviation from the script. 

A still from ‘Plaything’
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Netflix

In ‘Plaything’, a wildly eccentric man (Peter Capaldi) steals liquor from a store and when he is arrested for a murder from the ‘90s, tells a hectic tale involving a videogame, LSD, a drug dealer and creepily cute sentient electronic creatures. In the same universe as the interactive 2018 film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the episode has Will Poulter and Asim Chaudhry reprising their roles as game designer Colin Ritman and Tuckersoft owner Mohan Thakur. Thronglets, the game in the episode, has been created in the real world by Netflix’s Night School Studio.

A still from ‘Eulogy’
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Netflix

‘Eulogy’ finds Paul Giamatti as Phillip, being asked to share his memories of Carol, who has recently passed away, for a memorial. Carol was his ex-girlfriend; since the break-up was brutal, Philip has not thought of Carol for decades. A new technology (uh oh) helps one enter photographs to recreate memories — complete ouroboros effect where you take photographs for memory and then enter them only to realise that they do not tell the full picture. 

A still from ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’
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Netflix

The final episode, ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’, is a direct sequel to one of the most popular episodes on the show, and features several returning cast members including Cristin Milioti as Nanette, Jimmi Simpson as smarmy James Walton, Paul G. Raymond as tech guru Kabir Dudani and Jesse Plemons. Though ‘USS Callister’, the first episode of Season 4 of Black Mirror, ended with the bad guys defeated and our intrepid explorers free to explore myriad worlds, this episode finds them scavenging weapons and credits from players while trying to find a safe haven.

The perfect sequel, with all that we loved in the original and a story going boldly where others might not have gone before, ‘Into Infinity’ offers unbridled fun and disquiet. All six gloriously bingeable episodes uphold the mission statement of the anthology. Oh, and my favourite episode? ‘Common People’, with ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’ running a close second.

Black Mirror is presently streaming on Netflix