In which I review almost every episode of Black Mirror

Dammit, I really need a break from economics.

WARNING: This blog post contains major spoilers for many episodes of the TV show Black Mirror.

I’ve been blogging pretty nonstop about economics, and my last post got pretty bleak. I feel like I deserve a break. What better way to distract myself from my country slowly morphing into a real-life dystopia than to watch TV shows about fantasy dystopias?

I’ve been a fan of Black Mirror since the show first came out 14 years ago. I love sci-fi, as you all know, and this show is (usually) some of the smartest — a worthy successor to The Twilight Zone, and in some ways even better.

But I don’t just watch the show for the high concepts; it’s also full of incredibly well-told stories. Some of these are terrifying and gripping, some are poignant and sad, some are downright silly, but almost all of them are great. I credit the singular genius of the show’s creator and writer, Charlie Brooker. (He also has a habit of spinning story plots from the lyrics of rock songs, which is very cool.)

So today I thought that just for fun, I’d go through and review and rate a whole bunch of Black Mirror episodes. I initially wanted to do all of the episodes, but there are five I don’t remember well anymore, so I just left those five out of the list. I also left out the innovative choose-your-own-adventure movie Bandersnatch, because I actually haven’t seen it.

Anyway, here are 28 episode reviews, along with ratings on a 10-point scale.

“The National Anthem” (5/10)

The first episode of Black Mirror catapulted the show to instant fame, even though it was less about technology than the others. Cerebral cautionary tales about the excesses of technology take a while to work their way into people’s hearts; the sheer grisly spectacle of the British Prime Minister being made to have sex with a pig on live TV is like a direct blow to the head. This episode’s job was to get everyone talking about Black Mirror, and it succeeded.

Interestingly, the reason this episode failed for me is because it was too British. The plot hinges on the kidnapping of a princess, and we Americans just find it hard to understand that sort of reverence for a royal family; I’m just not sure there’s any equivalent figure in the U.S. whose kidnapping would allow a random terrorist to extort the head of state.¹ (It’s also probably a reference to an actual scandal in the UK.) Most Black Mirror episodes either could happen in America, or feel like they could; this one felt foreign, and so it didn’t resonate as much.

But at the same time, “The National Anthem” gave me a good sense of who was making this TV show: a Gen X British punk. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the “national anthem” the title referred to was “God Save the Queen” — not the actual UK anthem, but the Sex Pistols version. The climax of the episode is supposed to evoke shock and horror, but I also felt an undertone of glee, as the show’s creator thumbed his nose at the British elite.

“Fifteen Million Merits” (10/10)

This is one of my favorite Black Mirror episodes of all, for a number of reasons. First, the dystopia it creates is holistic and immersive. Most Black Mirror episodes have a 20-minutes-into-the-future feeling — they’re basically the modern day with a few new technologies, usually introduced by one particular company or inventor. But “Fifteen Million Merits” presents you with a whole futuristic landscape, where human beings have to pedal on bikes every day to create energy² in order to be able to afford tiny rooms where they’re constantly bombarded with advertisements on every wall. Their only hope of escape is to become a TV personality by winning a reality show. It’s a never-ending living nightmare that all of the characters just sort of accept — which, of course, is how most of us treat most of the dystopian aspects of the real world around us.

I also love “Fifteen Million Merits” because it’s one of the most poignant episodes. The protagonist’s desperate longing for the one woman who pays him a tiny bit of attention is both pathetic and relatable. Instead of rebelling against the insane system that keeps people penned in like cattle, the main character instead focuses on wishing he could have the one beautiful thing in his bleak, forsaken universe.

Also, the ending is perfect and hilariously, darkly ironic — Black Mirror at its best.

“The Entire History of You” (9/10)

This is another of my favorites. The central conceit of Black Mirror is that human nature makes us abuse technology and use it to exploit and hurt each other. Technology thus holds up a mirror to reflect our own darker impulses; hence the name of the show.

Sometimes, the show has to really stretch in order to make this motif fit the plot of an episode. Technologists often complain that Black Mirror is too pessimistic about technology, but the truth is that usually it’s just too pessimistic about human nature. In reality, most people use most technologies for benign and productive purposes.

But “The Entire History of You” is definitely not a stretch. It shows an incredibly plausible scenario of how technologies that allow us to record our experiences can force us to confront truths that we’d be better off papering over or forgetting.³ As you watch the episode’s protagonist ruin his life, you keep mentally searching for something that you’d do differently in his place — some critical error or misdeed that you would avoid. And there really just is none. The episode ends with a feeling of dread certainty that any normal person would fall into the same trap.

“The Entire History of You” thus functions not just as an emotionally powerful story, but as an effective warning about a real near-future technology — really a perfect execution of the basic Black Mirror formula.

“Be Right Back” (6/10)

This is one of the most popular and acclaimed episodes in all of Black Mirror, with some lists giving it the top spot. I just can’t agree. It was pretty good, but I don’t think it was one of the best.

“Be Right Back” is about AI technology that lets people feel like they’re interacting with their deceased loved ones. The first half of the episode is just about a chatbot that gets trained on a dead guy’s data and is able to mimic his conversational style. This technology actually exists now, though it didn’t when the episode came out. In the show, this chatbot version of the reanimation tech works fine and doesn’t seem to hurt anyone; the real version seems similarly benign.

Things go wrong in the TV version when the reanimation tech abruptly shifts from the digital to the physical — the company sends the woman a creepy android replica of her dead boyfriend. Unlike the chatbot, this android falls into the uncanny valley and ends up producing existential horror.

I guess the message of this episode is that trying to bring your dead loved ones back from the dead is a bad idea. But the chatbot version of this seems not to cause many problems, both in the show and real life. So instead of some deeper message about trying to play God and cheat death and avoid the natural cycle of grief or whatever, the basic moral seems to be “Stick with chatbots and avoid creepy androids.” Those are words to the wise, to be sure.

“White Bear” (4/10)

In this episode, a woman who’s an accomplice to a murder is sentenced to a punishment where for 100 years, she has to live out the same punishment again and again. Every day she lives out a scary scenario where she’s hunted down. Then at the end of the day, they reveal it’s all an act, but they wipe her memory, so tomorrow she can go through the same ordeal all over again.

This is a pretty silly punishment. If you’re wiping the woman’s memory of the punishment every day, why would you do it for 100 years? The pain and fear isn’t cumulative; it gets erased again and again. And in the meantime you’re paying all these human actors to act out these scenarios, which has to be insanely expensive — all just to punish one criminal. Honestly, jail is a lot worse than whatever this is, and cheaper too.

“The Waldo Moment” (3/10)

In this episode, a goofy TV character named Waldo ends up running for office, and somehow this ends up with Waldo taking over the world and becoming the face of some kind of authoritarian regime. How this happens is never exactly shown.

This episode is pretty forgettable, and the real-life clowns winning elections in America are far more dangerous than imaginary clowns winning them in a fantasy UK. But I was kind of reminded of the Taiwanese politician Lai Pin-yu, a cosplayer who campaigned for office while dressed as Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion — and won. She apparently did a good job in the legislature, before eventually losing her seat in another election.

“White Christmas” (10/10)

This was a special between the second and third seasons of the show, and it’s one of the greatest Black Mirror episodes — and one of the greatest works of dystopian sci-fi — ever created. The episode is divided into three interwoven stories. The plot is impressively complex and intricate, with unexpected twists and turns that somehow resolve into an ending that in retrospect feels inevitable. It’s just masterful storytelling.

There are actually two horrifying, dystopian technologies in “White Christmas”. The first allows people to “block” other people in real life, like they would on a social media site. It’s like a digitally enforced restraining order — if someone blocks you, you just see them as a red blob forever. If your loved one does this to you, there’s no way for you to plead your case, or get back in their good graces — since they’ve blocked you, you can never talk to them again, so one mistake can just annihilate a relationship forever.

This feels like a metaphor for the avoidant attachment style that young people goad each other into online — the impulse to permanently chop anyone out of your life as soon as they say or do anything that upsets you.

The second dystopian technology in “White Christmas” is personality upload, which is a staple of Black Mirror. It features the most horrifying upload scenes I’ve ever seen — a real “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” type plot, where a man gets uploaded and tortured for a near-infinite amount of subjective time. This is the most horrifying moment in all of Black Mirror — and one of the most horrifying things I’ve seen on TV.

“Nosedive” (8/10)

This is another case of flawless Black Mirror execution. The technology in question is a social credit system, a bit along the lines of the system China claimed they were rolling out but didn’t.

In “Nosedive” people are able to rate each other on basically anything, and these interpersonal ratings determine whether you’re rich or poor. As you might expect, this society is filled with fake niceness. The protagonist ends up accidentally having her life ruined by this system, when one initial bad rating eventually causes so many problems in her life that she gets more bad ratings.

This is another case where Black Mirror gave us a clear, concrete, and effective warning about the potential harms from a near-future technology. The episode is also pretty funny and fun to watch.

“Shut Up and Dance” (8/10)

This is another one of the most acclaimed episodes of Black Mirror, and it deserves its reputation. It’s the story of a kid who gets recorded masturbating to child porn by hackers, and who is then blackmailed by those hackers into doing a series of increasingly bizarre and horrifying crimes and stunts.

“Shut Up and Dance” is one of the best-made episodes of Black Mirror. The directing is fast-paced and gripping, and the writing is incredibly realistic. You’re on the edge of your seat for the entire episode. It feels like the kind of thing that could really happen, and you find yourself asking why it hasn’t ever happened. (Some people say that the plot is similar to the real case of Brian Wells, but I don’t see many similarities.)

The episode’s one weakness is the twist at the end. For most of the episode you think the protagonist is being blackmailed over watching normal porn, but at the end you find out it was child porn; this makes his cooperation with the blackmailers more understandable, but also makes him somewhat less sympathetic in retrospect. It adds plausibility, but at the expense of emotional impact.

“San Junipero” (11/10)

This was not only the best episode of Black Mirror by far, but also probably the single best hour of television I have ever watched in my life — an accomplishment so unique and profound that I still get shivers when I think about it. Even if every other episode of Black Mirror had been terrible, it would be worth watching the entire series just to get to “San Junipero”.

If you haven’t seen it, please stop reading this review now and go watch it before getting spoilers.

For those who saw it but don’t remember, “San Junipero” starts with a quiet, touching lesbian romance in a 1980s California beach town. Eventually you find out that they’re in a simulation. One of the women, Yorkie — the shy one who had been a virgin before meeting the more experienced and outgoing Kelly — turns out to be a locked-in invalid who’s trying to get doctor-assisted suicide so she can upload herself to the San Junipero simulation forever instead of just visiting occasionally. Kelly, meanwhile, lost her husband and daughter, and is now just enjoying herself in a retirement community while she waits to die. Eventually Yorkie convinces Kelly to upload herself too, and the two live (presumably) happily ever after in the digital afterlife.

The story is incredibly heart-wrenching and perfectly executed (and it’s based on song lyrics, which I always enjoy). But this is also the episode that changed Black Mirror forever, because it shifted the show’s basic thesis about technology. In the end, simulated reality and personality upload allow both Yorkie and Kelly to live an unambiguously better life than they would have been able to live without the technology. In a show about techno-pessimism, “San Junipero” stands out as one of the most techno-optimistic stories ever told.

It’s also an optimistic story about humanity. In its early episodes, Black Mirror usually depicted humans as weak, selfish, sadistic, or otherwise too flawed to be trusted with the power of technology. In “San Junipero”, every character is good and kind, and they also end up being wise and brave. In most of his stories, Charlie Brooker seems to be testing his characters; in “San Junipero”, finally, you get to see someone ace the test.⁴

This is enough to make “San Junipero” the best episode of the entire show, but for me, there was something that made it even more powerful. As I watched the very last scene, where a robot places a capsule containing the protagonists’ consciousness into a rack in a vast glittering server farm, I had a quasi-religious experience. Suddenly I felt the absolute conviction that this will happen. Over time, humans have gained the power to perform more and more of the miracles attributed to God in the Bible; one day, we’ll be able to create Heaven and Hell as well.

The power of this realization, and the terror, and the utter strangeness of it, simply overwhelm me. We are animals who crawled up out of the muck and became gods. We have a responsibility to the Universe too profound to even understand yet. Our future is lonely and bizarre and terrifying and full of infinite promise, and we have no possible choice but to embrace it.

All that hit me in the final few seconds of “San Junipero”.

“Men Against Fire” (5/10)

This is a rare episode of Black Mirror that’s actually too optimistic about human nature. It’s about genocidal soldiers who are tricked by the AR technology in their battle armor into thinking that their victims are disgusting and subhuman. Sadly, in real life, that sort of technological trickery isn’t required — lots of people are plenty willing to commit genocide even when they see their victims clearly.

“Hated in the Nation” (8/10)

This is probably the most underrated episode of Black Mirror. It’s about a terrorist who offers Twitter users the (fake) chance to kill someone with their tweets, and who then kills every would-be murderer with a swarm of robotic bees.

The terrorist is supposed to be the bad guy, and of course it’s pretty horrifying to see robotic bees crawling in people’s ears and eating their brains. But the episode also makes a good point about how awful social media is. In the age of Twitter and similar apps, our public discussion has become ruled by the absolute worst people in our society, and it’s hard to deny that this has degraded our democracy.

It’s the kind of actual, real-life technological dystopia that almost makes you think a swarm of robot death-bees would be preferable.

“USS Callister” (7/10)

In this episode, a narcissistic game programmer uploads some innocent people into a Star Trek-like online simulation, so he can dominate and torture them. The digital clones fight back by getting their real-world selves to kill the evil engineer’s real-world self, and then escape into an open-world RPG.

This was a good episode, and the bad guy was really bad, but it was also a little cheesy. I did notice that the ending, while bizarre, was actually fairly happy — the regular folks escape into a video game universe instead of being tortured for eternity. This sort of weird, bittersweet ending turned out to be typical of many of Black Mirror’s newer episodes, and I think it’s often a good fit.

“Hang the DJ” (7/10)

This is a cute episode about personality upload and online dating. The protagonists fall in love in an online dating simulation, only to discover at the end that they’re uploaded digital clones whose job is to test out the romantic compatibility of the real-life people they were cloned from.

I liked the bittersweet ending; like “USS Callister”, it showed how Black Mirror was changing from a downbeat show about the flawed nature of humanity into a show about the fundamental weirdness of technology. This evolution was probably kicked off by the success of “San Junipero”, and it’s a natural and good direction for the show to go in. But I have to say, I was a little disappointed that the digital clones were just wiped. It would have been more fun, and more bizarre, had they gotten to live out their own romance in the digital realm.

“Metalhead” (10/10)

This is the most terrifying episode of Black Mirror, by far. It’s set in a world in which dog-like autonomous robots have killed off most humans and large animals. The story is very simple — it’s just a band of humans desperately trying to survive another day, as they’re hunted by the “dogs”.

This episode is terrifying not just because of the bleak future and harrowing plot, but because the tech is so realistic. Militaries around the world are testing robot combat dogs that look an awful lot like the ones in “Metalhead”. And with AI advancing by leaps and bounds, it’s likely that at some point these robot death-dogs will be autonomous. It’s pretty scary to think about all the ways that could go badly.

“Black Museum” (4/10)

This is another dystopian tale about personality upload, set in a museum where a psychopath uploads and tortures people. The style of this episode is very cartoonish and over-the-top, and it ends up being a little cheesy and unconvincing compared to masterpieces like “White Christmas”.

“Striking Vipers” (7/10)

This was a really interesting and fairly poignant episode about two guys who have sex in a video game but who aren’t interested in each other in real life. It’s a neat exploration of how sexuality will change from things like virtual worlds and AI.

“Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” (8/10)

This is another upbeat story, about an AI doll modeled after a pop star. The doll helps the pop star to escape the control of her evil aunt, and eventually to begin a much more fulfilled, independent life as a rock star. The fun twist at the end is that the whole story turns out to be a silly fantasy-history of a beloved 1990s rock song. Oddly, a lot of people told me they didn’t like this episode, but I thought it was clever, funny, and charmingly irreverent.

“Joan is Awful” (9/10)

This is another underrated episode, about a woman who finds that her life is being turned into a TV show in real time. The plot centers around her trying to get out of the TV show, using increasingly dramatic and hilarious methods. At the very end, more layers of technological wackiness are revealed, and the whole thing gets even zanier. The ending is of the “bittersweet/weird” type that has become the hallmark of the later seasons of Black Mirror. Anyway, I love this one — it made me laugh more than any other episode of the show, by far.

“Loch Henry” (7/10)

In its 6th season, Black Mirror tried branching out in new directions. One of these was mystery; “Loch Henry” isn’t sci-fi at all, but simply a murder mystery set in a small Scottish town. It’s very well-executed, but feels a bit out of place in the show.

“Beyond the Sea” (5/10)

This is a slow, depressing episode about astronauts who send their consciousness back to Earth to occupy remote bodies. It’s set in an alternate 1960s, but this ends up not adding much to the episode. The plot is workmanlike and fine, but nothing here blew me away.

“Demon 79” (3/10)

In its sixth season, Black Mirror started to experiment with new themes, genres, formats, etc. In the season’s final episode, it sarcastically rebranded itself as “Red Mirror” and told a fantasy story about demons killing people and the world getting destroyed. The story is OK as far as it goes, but it didn’t have much of Black Mirror in it; I don’t think that fans really come to this show just to see awful things happen to characters. If the showrunners had kept taking Black Mirror in this direction, I would have given up on it. Fortunately, it didn’t, and the seventh season represented a spectacular return to form.

“Common People” (9/10)

The first episode of Black Mirror’s most recent season is a near-perfect return to the series’ roots. It’s a dark, sad tale of a loving, devoted working-class couple who are slowly ground down and destroyed by the callousness of a software-as-a-service business model.

The wife has a brain tumor, and can only survive by buying a subscription from a company that operates her brain remotely. Although she needs the service just to stay alive and do her job, the company keeps adding things like geographic restrictions and ads that come out of her mouth, and charging the hapless couple ever more money per month in order to avoid these things. The husband works himself to the bone at his blue-collar job, and eventually resorts to humiliating himself on a livestreaming service for tips. At the end it’s just too much and the sweet couple kills themselves.

“Common People” is classic Black Mirror — the story of a powerful new technology corrupted and misused by flawed, greedy humans. The tenderness and innocence and earnest devotion of the couple makes their fate at the hands of callous capitalism all the more bitter.

However, the timing of this episode blunted the impact a little bit. It was released right after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, and just as Trump was defying a Supreme Court order to bring back a wrongfully arrested man from a foreign torture-dungeon. Watching a dystopia about a biotech company extracting fees from working-class people was still powerful, but perhaps not as powerful as it would have been if far worse things hadn’t been unfolding in the real world at the time.

“Bete Noire” (7/10)

This was a very fun and well-acted episode, although the technology was a little silly.

“Hotel Reverie” (7/10)

The last 20 or 25 minutes of the extra-long “Hotel Reverie” are a beautiful love story between an actress and an AI patterned after a long-dead actress from a previous era. The romance is extremely touching, but the plot that the episode uses to get the protagonists into that situation is pretty laughably unrealistic, and makes it a bit hard to suspend disbelief at times. It also drags on for a little too long. But the payoff of the doomed, bittersweet romance in the last part of the episode is worth it.

“Plaything” (5/10)

Finally, Black Mirror did an episode about AI becoming sentient and taking over the world. They even referenced Roko’s Basilisk. But most of the episode is in flashback/voiceover, which I thought was a bit of a clunky way to tell the story.

“Eulogy” (10/10)

Classic Black Mirror is about flawed humans misusing technology. But “Eulogy” is very different — it’s about technology helping a flawed human, giving him a chance for closure and peace of mind that he never otherwise would have had. The plot is about an old man trying to remember his deceased ex-girlfriend, using an AI assistant and a technology that lets him walk around inside old photographs. Slowly, he realizes that the bitterness and anger against his ex that he’s held onto for most of his life was actually misplaced, and gains a much more positive understanding of his past. The episode was hauntingly beautiful, slow, poignant, and ultimately bittersweet without being weird at all. I hope this episode gets remembered as the triumph it is.

“USS Callister: Into Infinity” (8/10)

This episode is a direct sequel to “USS Callister” from the fourth season. The plot picks right up where it left off, with our digitally cloned heroes zooming around inside an open-world video game. More hijinks ensue, as one of their real-world versions tries to rescue them. The sequel is even funnier and zanier than the original.

Anyway, “USS Callister: Into Infinity” caps a seventh season that really revived Black Mirror after a disappointing set of experiments a couple of years before. Although a little bit of this was a return to the series’ roots (with “Common People”), most of this season’s episodes represented a shift toward a more balanced — dare I say, more realistic — view of how technology changes the world. I hope the show has many more seasons.

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1. Note that in the UK, the Prime Minister is only the head of government, not the head of state. In the U.S., these roles are not separated.

2. This is, of course, an insanely inefficient way of creating energy; this was also a plot hole in The Matrix.

3. Incidentally, this is the same idea as the (also excellent) Ted Chiang story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.

4. In a way, Brooker is acting a bit like Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation — testing humanity to see if they’re responsible enough to ascend to the next level of technology.