In a world where we've grown reliant on technology, Black Mirror shows just how vulnerable we might be. The Netflix sci-fi series explores our relationship with tech, and what could happen if things go off the rails.
Its latest season is out today with six episodes, including a sequel to season four's "USS Callister," which follows an executive who clones AI versions of his colleagues for a video game. There's romance, heartbreak, workplace drama and reclusive computer hackers to watch out for.
On top of that — real-life advertisements of fictional products from the series — like the Nubbin device shown in several episodes, and Thronglets, a video game featured in another, launched today as part of the marketing campaign promoting the show's return.
Black Mirror creator and co-showrunner Charlie Brooker joined NPR Morning Edition host A Martínez to discuss how he came up with ideas for the new season, and what he hopes viewers take away from it.
Below is an extended version of our interview with Brooker, edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Martínez: So, Charlie, compared to the other six seasons of Black Mirror, are there any new themes in season seven that you're addressing that you have never, ever addressed before?
Brooker: Oh, yes. Very much so. Well, without wanting to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't seen it, there's an episode about — I don't know if I'm allowed to say the word — about the degradation of tech services over time. There's this particular word that describes that, that the writer Cory Doctorow coined.
We've got an episode where Rashida Jones plays a regular woman who, there's a medical emergency and her husband signs her up to a service that can kind of cloud stream part of her brain. But the problem is, it comes with a subscription tier and she starts spouting adverts. So that's a sort of very Black Mirror idea that maybe doesn't go in quite the direction people will expect it to.
And then beyond that, we've got episodes about AI and sort of remastering old movies. We've got a story where Paul Giamatti is literally stepping inside old photographs using a high tech sort of means. So there's a lot of weird and wonderful stuff going on.
Martínez: Can I tell you, Charlie, as much as I looked forward to talking to you about Black Mirror because it's one of my favorite TV series, I was also dreading talking to you because you have to be probably one of the toughest interviews because, well, we can't really talk about too much because it's going to give away stuff. But then if we don't talk too much, we don't have an interview.
Brooker: I know, it's weird, isn't it? Luckily, though, the entire world is turning into a Black Mirror episode. So there is that.
We've got some episodes that are kind of a bit of a gut punch, which is a very Black Mirror thing to do. We've got others that are more sort of, I guess you'd say, emotive and reflective and hopefully have got a bit of original Black Mirror DNA in them. But you can see the things that I was channeling across the season, we can certainly talk about the things that were obsessing me.
Martínez: So what were the things that were obsessing you?
Brooker: Well, we've got an episode which is about — sounds so dry to say — the degradation [of] tech services, but also a sense, I think, that everyone has, that everyone and everything is being sort of squeezed somewhat and that everything is getting more desperate and everything's getting more of a hard kind of struggle that's channelled in there.
There's an episode where we're dealing, on the surface, with gaslighting, but coming at it from a slightly sort of tech perspective. Gaslighting, obviously, is a term that everyone is now familiar with. But I think we're all sort of being a bit gaslit constantly at the moment and [there] seem to be competing versions of reality.
And we've got stories that are kind of about: I was thinking, I'd watched the Peter Jackson documentary about the Beatles, Get Back, where he and his team were using really high-tech means to sort of bring the past back to life, making it almost more vivid than it was at the time. And there's a couple of stories this season which are almost about using technology to sort of almost literally re-enter versions of the past, which felt like a new sort of rich theme for the show to mine.
Martínez: That's the episode with Paul Giamatti. To be actually able to enter a photograph. I mean, is that something that you've heard is a few years away, 10 years away or 20 years away? Is that something you've heard about?
Brooker: I would imagine that's probably five minutes away in some form. I mean, maybe not to the degree of sophistication that we show it unfolding in the actual episode itself. You can see the speed with which these things evolve. I think we've all seen videos where somebody feeds a Van Gogh self-portrait to an AI and presses a button, and then you've got an animated video of him rapping or whatever.
So the notion that you could sort of walk inside some kind of virtual reality recreation of an old photograph, I suspect, is really very much not far away.
Martínez: In that episode that you mentioned with Rashida Jones, where she is basically part of this tiered system of operating, in some ways, I think we all live in tiers, right? In every single thing that we subscribe to, there's always something better or something worse. You either have an ad-free experience or you don't. And that ad-free experience is supposed to be better than the one that has the ads.
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