Jun 5, 2019 10:45 AM

Black Mirror Isn't Surprising Anymore. We're Screwed

The show's fifth season boasts some great performances and a standout episode, but the real world just keeps outpacing its imagined dystopia.

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When you first lay eyes on Billy Bauer, it's more than 40 minutes into "Smithereens," the first episode of Black Mirror's new season. Bauer, the young CEO of a social media platform, has a crisis on his hands. A rideshare driver has taken one of his employees hostage and is demanding to talk to him. Getting hold of Bauer has been a bit of a tall order, however, seeing as he's on a 10-day silent retreat in the mountains. When the camera finally lands on him, with unkempt hair and a shaggy kinda-beard, seated in full lotus position, the neon sign flashes even more brightly: HEY, GUYS. GUYS! IT'S JACK DORSEY.

As far as satire goes, it's decent. A little on the nose, maybe, given the Twitter CEO's (in)famous 10-day vipassana retreat in Myanmar, but still nice. There's just one thing: Dorsey first mentioned his retreat in December 2018, by which point at least part of "Smithereens" had been filmed. In other words, show creator Charlie Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones in all likelihood plucked Bauer's vision quest not from the headlines but from their own brains—only to have reality outpace what would otherwise be a pitch-perfect lampoon of tech-founder sanctimony. Such is the burden of Black Mirror. More than seven years after it first debuted, the sci-fi anthology can still make you laugh (sometimes), unnerve you (many more times), and even disappoint you (more on that in a bit). It just may no longer surprise you.

The show's fifth season, which releases today, includes only three episodes, presumably in deference to the outsize demands of last year's interactive episode, "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch." "Smithereens," which features Andrew Scott as the hostage-taking driver in question and Topher Grace as Bauer, hinges on a familiar gripe with social media—so familiar, in fact, that the episode never quite latches onto the essence of the show it belongs to. Black Mirror's best episodes feature either a speculative vision of the future, a funhouse-mirror distortion of our worst digital selves, or both. "Smithereens," with its present-day setting and its predictable twist, might as well be a well-acted episode of CSI: Cyber. (Scott, who recently showed up in Fleabag's second season, turns in a moving, jittery performance.)

"Striking Vipers," the second episode, at least tries to bend the mind in a new direction—unless you're already tired of boy-meets-girl, boy-marries-girl, boy-plays-virtual-reality-fighting-game-with-old-friend-and-ends-up ... (well, let me not spoil it here) stories. Black Mirror has dealt with VR more than a few times, but never has it grappled so frankly with the unprecedented ways virtual embodiment can upend the human experience. When you're able to inhabit a different body, what do that body's actions mean for the IRL you? Is what happens in VR real enough to constitute infidelity? Can it shift your sexuality or even your gender identity? What starts out feeling cartoonish ends up legitimately affecting, anchored by solid turns from the episode's core trio (Anthony Mackie, Nicole Beharie, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II).

[#video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ssr40U3-do0

As has become increasingly the case over the show's run, the new season is studded with references to other Black Mirror episodes. Brooker and Jones like hiding their connected-universe Easter eggs in news crawls, and a momentary shot in "Smithereens" delivers a basket's worth. (Look for nods to in-world staples like game developer Saito and sci-fi series Sea of Tranquility, along with classically Black Mirror trending topics #StJunipersStrike and #snoutrage.) Similarly, the VR of "Striking Vipers" comes by way of TCKR, the technology company that drives much of the show's Pandora's box gadgetry, from its chronological beginning in the 1980s (Bandersnatch, when it was just starting out as Tuckersoft) to its decades-hence future ("San Junipero").

So. Here's the part where you say, "Hey, there are three episodes and you've only mentioned two." Here's the part where you say, "Doesn't Miley Cyrus show up in this season?" Here's the part where you say, "I'm starting to get the idea you might not have much good to say about 'Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too.'" And you'd be right on all three counts. The final episode is … well, it's bad. The tale of a young teen (Angourie Rice) who receives an Alexa-like cutesy-robot version of her favorite pop star, Ashley (Cyrus), is nominally a warning about music-industry exploitation and artistic empowerment, but it never gets out of hackneyed territory. Most seasons of Black Mirror have if not an outright clunker at least one episode that falls short. From its flat villains to its facile allegory to its peek-through-your-fingers closing musical number, "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" isn't just that episode for season 5—it's that episode for the whole damn show. (It also features what has to be the most contorted, ill-explained, ooooh-spooky! technology in Black Mirror history.)

But perhaps most disappointingly, it's simply not shocking. Of the three, only "Striking Vipers" delivers what viewers have come to expect of Brooker and Jones after 18 episodes and two specials. Some of that is inescapable, right? Black Mirror has one of the highest degrees of difficulty on television. A speculative dark-satire anthology is hard enough, let alone making each episode a bracing extrapolation of one of the many ways people have mortgaged their humanity for convenience and narcissism. A stumble was inevitable. But it's hard to shake the feeling that in season 5, the trouble isn't artistic choices—it's that, wherever we're headed in this current platform-enabled real-world tailspin, we're clearly going to get there before Black Mirror does.