However, by relaxing the boundaries to accommodate the otherworldly, Brooker risks turning Black Mirror into a more generic show, with horrors that obey no rules and reflect nothing back at us but our most conventional fears. (The addition of period settings and supernatural menace might shake up the game just enough to keep viewers tuned in.) Fans can point to the continued quality of the writing, which remains sharply trenchant about human nature, whether it’s under attack from monsters or malware. Season 5 was widely accepted as a low point, and with rival anthologies like the BBC’s Inside No.9 cranking out sharp half-hour episodes year over year, there was impetus for Black Mirror to do something dramatic to halt its own decline. If you’ve grown tired of prior seasons’ high-tech terrors, a switch to the occult might be just the tonic. That’s not to say the new iteration of Black Mirror isn’t fun. Such accelerations seem like obvious grist for Brooker’s mill, but instead he’s opted for demons and werewolves. Now we’re collectively fretting over how it could destroy our careers, our lives, and maybe the world-or, at least, reshape them in its image. Consider that, six months ago, few among us knew anything about ChatGPT. The series has always been an act of speculation, but each dreadful advance is only five years, months, or minutes away the paradigm shift is disturbing because we can see it hurtling toward us. Whether it’s the rating-obsessed sociopolitics of “Nosedive,” the accessible memory that haunts “The Entire History of You,” or the simulated reality at the heart of “San Junipero”: the show’s landmark episodes work by projecting our present into exhilarating, devastating futures. Until now, the purpose of Black Mirror has been to cast a distorted reflection of our contemporary reality. One element in particular threatens to stretch the show’s boundaries to a breaking point: In a fundamental shift for the sci-fi series, season 6 marks the first time that Black Mirror leans into the supernatural. In an interview with Tudum in June, he stressed that “ Black Mirror should always be a show that can’t be easily defined, and can keep reinventing itself.” To that end, he admitted, “We’ve got a few new elements … to stretch the parameters of what a Black Mirror episode even is.” A week after all five episodes dropped, one thing is clear: This season of Black Mirror is not Black Mirror, or at least not as we once knew it. Considering all the showrunner has already pulled from his nightmare playbook, it was reasonable for fans to expect the latest season would skewer our tech-dependent culture in updated, yet recognizable ways. Not since the series began has Brooker had such rich pickings to reinvent as a televisual nightmare. The sixth season of Charlie Brooker’s anthology series has landed on Netflix as dystopia feels increasingly inevitable: war, wildfire, spiraling climate and financial crises, the rise of AI, and, oh yes, a once-in-a-century pandemic. Black Mirror is back just when we need it most.
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