It’s tough being an anthology. While other dramas set up their premise and characters and then lazily dole out a little more of the same in every episode, anthologies must constantly seek our approval anew. If critics and viewers think the latest shiny thing is a dud, they toss it into the void and deem all the expert hard work that went into it to be a waste. Even the hits are only celebrated briefly before everyone moves on to the next fresh story, ready to give it a thumbs up or down.
In season seven of his collection of digital-age fables, Black Mirror writer Charlie Brooker finally cracks and, for the first time, produces a sequel to an old episode. This year’s feature-length finale, USS Callister: Into Infinity, is a straight continuation of season four’s fan favourite. But it’s the least interesting instalment from the new batch, because it can’t replicate the thrill, the hope, of starting without knowing whether this latest adventure will be a success. The other five offerings take that risk, and almost all get their reward.
Leading the line is Common People, starring Chris O’Dowd and Rashida Jones as a blue-collar couple who have more love than money. When she is diagnosed with a brain tumour, the lifesaving solution is technology that replaces her mind with servers in the cloud – but it’s on a monthly subscription, which is expensive, and the company that runs it keeps altering the terms. The episode has one of the show’s common flaws, which is a tendency to bludgeon the audience with satire that makes one big point, then works methodically through a long ledger of further logical consequences. It also once again showcases Brooker’s maniacal desire to push beyond what other writers might see as unworkably bleak. But as Common People spirals downwards with grim inevitability, like the film Requiem for a Dream for people who are too online, beneath all the dark gags about signal coverage and annoying advertisements is a study of modern precariousness that shows real compassion for its victims.
This is where what was once a hard-edged, occasionally malfunctioning cyborg of a show has slowly evolved: Black Mirror 7.0 has a lot of soft tissue around the metal. Tender sentiment flows through the ingenious Hotel Reverie, which stars Issa Rae as a movie actor cast in a new type of remake that inserts her avatar into an AI simulation of the world created by a classic black-and-white romance. A story with notes of The Truman Show and Steven Moffat-era Doctor Who explores how, for all Hollywood’s cynical hammering of lucrative formulae and writers’ knowledge of which scripting tricks work, fictional people on screen can mean so much to the viewer – and to their authors – that magic happens and they become real.
Even more heartfelt is Eulogy, with a perfectly cast Paul Giamatti as a man given the chance to step inside old photographs and unlock memories of a great lost love. The techno-gubbins barely impact on a sweet, sad, simple tale that steps away from Brooker’s growing obsession with characters choosing between online and offline versions of themselves. Here instead is a man looking back on his one and only analogue life, regretting what his younger self didn’t know and couldn’t recognise. The truth about the happiness he could have had is in a box in his attic full of pictures, letters and cassettes. The dust may get in your eye.
But this year’s other standout demonstrates that Black Mirror hasn’t lost its demon streak. Bête Noire has a premise straight out of a midweek terrestrial drama, with Siena Kelly as Maria, the office high-flyer who is right to suspect that new recruit Verity (Rosy McEwen) is a deranged wrong ’un, but can’t prove it in a way that her colleagues can see, so efforts to expose Verity make Maria look like the loose cannon. The cruel chaos smoothly ramps up, gradually revealing the twist before the narrative delivers an ending that will make you not laugh or chuckle, but very specifically cackle.
The only skippable episode is Plaything, set in a near future where cops use DNA mouth swabs to solve crimes, and have an interrogation room built in a pleasing asymmetrical-lozenge shape. Inside sits a predictably excellent Peter Capaldi as a mercurial murder suspect who has spent his adult life playing a potent video game that is somewhere between Lemmings, The Sims and a Tamagotchi. What looks like a great first half is followed by … the end credits. The set-up is all there is, the idea doesn’t go anywhere, our thumbs are down and Plaything is moved swiftly to the bin. Anthologies are a hard gig. But this warmer, more convincingly human Black Mirror is easier than ever to forgive.