Charlie Brooker has been contemplating the passing of time, and he’s not happy about it. We’re on set at Shepperton for USS Callister: Into Infinity, the sequel to the 2017 space opera from his terrifying tech anthology Black Mirror. “The cast don’t seem to have aged at all,” he grumbles, “whereas I am a wizened old gentleman.”
There is a more reflective, almost nostalgic tone to this seventh season. The episode Plaything flashes back to Brooker’s early years as a gaming journalist in a Bandersnatch-adjacent slice of computer-induced madness; Eulogy immerses Paul Giamatti in his memories as he literally enters decades-old photos; gaslighting parable Bête Noire forces Siena Kelly’s chocolatier to reckon with youthful misdemeanours; Hotel Reverie stars Emma Corrin as a 1940s matinee idol falling for Issa Rae’s modern film star, who plays her white, male love interest in an AI remake of a vintage romance.
“Quite a lot of the technology is being used to relive things or bring them back into the present,” concedes Brooker. “It wasn’t conscious, but then I have a lot more past than future. There’s probably more social commentary and more emotive or vulnerable episodes. That doesn’t mean we don’t go to disturbing places or deliver those chills, but people come to Black Mirror expecting to be surprised, so you can’t give them exactly what they want. I’d say there’s a little less dystopia. If you want that, there’s a 24-hour panel showing it called your window. You don’t necessarily want to see something saying: things are going to get worse.”
Brooker, fed up with Zoom (him) and Roblox (his sons, now 13 and 11) during the pandemic, opted to sideline tech in favour of other genres for season six, notably the bleak horror of Mazey Day, Demon 79 and Loch Henry. This year brings a return to what Brooker terms “trad” Black Mirror: the science that could yet come to define our lives.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Common People, an allegory of private healthcare and the concept of “enshittification”. Chris O’Dowd agrees to revolutionary, life-saving treatment for his wife (Rashida Jones) but, over time, the excessive price tag leaves them in penury even as the aftercare gets shoddier and Jones becomes a walking pop-up ad. Likewise, USS Callister: Into Infinity. The first episode saw sad-sack coding genius Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons) use his co-workers’ DNA to trap their clones in his multiplayer game Infinity, where he could torment and abuse them at will. Following a revolt led by both real and virtual versions of Cristin Milioti’s programmer Nanette and, more reluctantly, the avatar of toxic CEO Walton (Jimmi Simpson), Daly was killed and the cloned crew ventured into a universe that, we now discover, isn’t the paradise they imagined.
“They’re in a minute-by-minute scrap for survival,” reveals Brooker. “Everyone else there is a player in a game who will idly blow your head off if they see you, whereas the clones can bleed and die.”
While Plemons’s absence is felt on the set of the Callister’s bridge, consolation comes in the shape of Simpson, filthy, hirsute and gamely rocking a loincloth exposing both real buttock and prosthetic scrotum. Back in his trailer, fully clothed and cleaned up, Simpson is delighted by the effect. “It made sense because Walton has been stripped of everything. He’s a buffoon, so throw in some bullocks [sic] and lock that giggle in. I’m here for whatever sight gag they want. I’d be a short-order cook for Charlie if that would make him happy.”
Simpson’s devotion is shared by Milioti, whose plans for a Callister reprise with Brooker were derailed by Covid, strikes and schedule clashes. In the interim, her performance as the fabulously monstrous Sofia Falcone in The Penguin has made her a star. “I filmed this two weeks after wrapping The Penguin, so it felt like being ricocheted into a whole new world,” she says. “Sofia and Nanette – both of her! – certainly felt very different to embody.”
Into Infinity’s aesthetic is now more inspired by the Star Trek of JJ Abrams than the Shatner era of Big Acting and sexual objectification that was the touchstone of the original episode. Everything is a little shinier. An LED wall has replaced green screen for the ship’s windows, enabling the actors to respond to images in real time as they flash up. The teleporters glow, the controls are responsive (dials can be twiddled, joysticks grabbed and levers thrust forward for that hyperwarp effect) and the sliding doors really do go whoosh – at least when Milioti’s around.
“It is an incredible feeling to experience your own brain being tricked,” she says, laughing. “There’s something about a 3D-printed space laser that immediately makes you eight years old again. It’s so difficult to not make the sound, so I did. Constantly.”
Black Mirror has always sprinkled Easter eggs liberally around its many worlds (Into Infinity includes a news ticker update on Michael Callow, Rory Kinnear’s PM whose porcine intercourse launched the show with a bang in 2011), but until now has never repeated itself. Brooker, whose only returning character of note has been the antithesis of evolution, Philomena Cunk, responds to the charge with mock incredulity – “we’ve never repeated ourselves before, so it’s actually a very new thing to do …” – but writing the crew’s further adventures proved irresistible after the first episode’s cliffhanger.
USS Callister is the only Black Mirror so far seen by Brooker’s sons, after he belatedly realised this “relatively benign” instalment was in fact “pouring nightmare fuel into their brains”. It also aired just as news of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse broke, making it one of Brooker’s most prescient episodes in its exposure of incel culture in gaming and beyond.
“We flip the toxicity discussion in this episode,” says Brooker’s fellow executive Jessica Rhoades. “There’s a scene where a character, who sees themselves as a nice person, cannot contemplate another version of themselves. It speaks to nice-guy culture with a real understanding of someone’s isolation, while also asking: why should your loneliness and anger dictate what happens to my body? But that’s a little more in the background this time.”
Simpson, a lapsed gamer, has form in cerebral futurology with Westworld and Apple TV+’s Dark Matter. “I will never tire of doing sci-fi,” he says. “Anything can happen and it’s all relevant. In Callister, Charlie’s looking at what it means to be you: whether we’re defined by how we treat others, their perceptions of us or by something like a soul.”
“What would it mean to have a complete copy of you running around this universe?” adds Brooker. “Are they experiencing real emotion? Do they deserve our empathy? We’ll be dealing with that more and more as AI gets more sophisticated. We already project a lot on to it and there’ll come a point, presumably, where it will qualify as a living thing.”
Milioti sounds a note of caution. “We’ve made so much art warning ourselves about what could happen, and now it’s happening. I understand the benefits of some AI but, because it’s been designed by us, it will be flawed like us. Sometimes that means it comes up with a stupid summary of a movie. At other times, will it want to destroy in the way we want to destroy? I don’t understand why you would want to introduce this into the world when we still have ancient animal brains. It makes me really anxious, the idea of creating content at all costs and profit being more important than people.”
Does Into Infinity place the blame for this age of anxiety at the feet of tech bros? From Musk to Bezos, they certainly seem to share Daly’s petty grievances and Walton’s venal avarice.
“There’s definitely an element of that,” agrees Brooker. “But it’s just big business and the age-old thing of money and power corrupting. The optimistic part of me, which is admittedly undeveloped, would like to think people don’t go into things with malevolent intentions. And it frustrates me when people describe the show as a warning about the use of technology because the technology is neutral. It might be misused, but it might also be something that gets us out of this fucking mess. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, so it’s about dealing with a new set of circumstances. We just can’t lose people from the equation.”
As a family man, Brooker – “the most empathetic father I’ve ever seen,” reckons Rhoades – has some extra skin in the game. “If I play my hand too overtly, my sons will get all secretive about this stuff,” he shrugs. “Luckily, they haven’t got bogged down in the Andrew Tate world of algorithms spewing up shit, but I do worry about them sitting there in front of YouTube and then before you know it …” He grimaces. “I’ve installed all the parental controls you can, but it’s more that I’m struggling to keep up with the weird things they’ll come out with. [Bizarre YouTube animation] Skibidi Toilet is their pop music, their equivalent of ‘Turn that noise down!’ I’d have been into that at their age, I reckon.”
It could be worse. They could be back watching their dad’s handiwork. “When one of my sons was about six, he came back from school and said: ‘Dad, do you do a show called Black Mirror?’ And I went: ‘Yeeeees … What do you think happens in Black Mirror?’ He said: ‘Is it where a man loves a pig?’ And I thought: ‘Oh, Christ …’”
Season seven of Black Mirror is on Netflix on 10 April.