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At this point in the lifespan of Netflix anthology series Black Mirror, everything feels connected. That’s never more true than with Season 7: Not only does the show’s return feature the first direct sequel to a past installment — the 2017 Emmy-winning “USS Callister” — there are even more obvious connections between Season 7 and the past, making it almost feel like a full season of sequels.
It goes beyond cute in-jokes like “Common People”‘s school teacher talking about the artificial bees from Season 3’s “Hated in the Nation” and “Hotel Reverie”‘s movie star living on Junipero Drive. “Bête Noire” invokes the paranoia of “White Bear” and “Shut Up and Dance,” while “Playthings” brings back key characters featured in the interactive narrative experience Bandersnatch, not to mention the video game company Tuckersoft. And “Eulogy” feels like a mash-up of Season 1’s “The Entire History of You” and Season 2’s “Be Right Back.”
Familiar doesn’t always mean bad, though for a show where creativity feels like a key part of the appeal, it is a concern. Especially because when Black Mirror starts to feel too predictable, it can drag down even the most promising storyline. “Common People,” the season’s opening episode, feels like quintessential Black Mirror, but in all the worst ways. Chris O’Dowd and Rashida Jones (who previously co-wrote the Season 3 episode “Nosedive”) star as Mike and Amanda, whose nice lower-middle-class lives get upended after Amanda nearly dies, saved only by a miraculous new brain injury treatment called Rivermind.
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The good news is that the Rivermind surgery is free! The bad news is that it’s a subscription model plan. Imagine every complaint you’ve ever had about your Netflix bill increasing in price while the service only grows worse in quality, except it’s about your actual brain. Before too long, Amanda is being offered the chance to upgrade to Rivermind Plus. For only an extra $500 a month!
The prevalence of subscription-based services feels like a natural fit for Black Mirror to satirize, especially given how these services manipulate customers into paying for increasingly higher-tier options than they perhaps can afford. While the metaphor here isn’t particularly subtle, the issue is the thoroughly nasty way in which the show explores it: “Common People” is essentially an episode in which two nice people get royally screwed over by forces outside of their control, in ways that don’t really say much about the world aside from the fact that it sucks.
When a Black Mirror isn’t working, it ends up in danger of slipping into self-parody at times, and “Common People” is the most blatant version of that, so over-the-top in its execution that it’d work better as a parody show-within-a-show being watched by characters on The Boys or Only Murders in the Building. It’s not the longest episode of the season, but lord does it feel longer.
Black Mirror: Common People (Netflix)
Fortunately, after “Common People,” the quality of the season definitely improves. As per usual, the season features two episodes starring British actors: “Bête Noire” features a young cast and an innovative take on the Mandela Effect vis-a-vie quantum mechanics, while “Playthings” puts Peter Capaldi in a long grey wig as he explains to the cops how a 1994 video game took over his life, with terrifying ramifications.
Meanwhile, “Hotel Reverie” features Issa Rae as a modern-day actor who’s offered the chance to star in a remake of an old Hollywood film, via an immersive digital simulation where her co-stars are the original 1940s cast, fully realized enough for the long-dead recreation of actress Dorothy Chambers (Emma Corrin) to engage with her like they’re both real…
Directed by Haolu Wang and also starring Awkwafina and Harriet Walter, “Hotel Reverie” is the second-longest episode of the season at 77 minutes, in ways that feel at least a little overly padded. Yet there’s a lot to enjoy, especially when it comes to Rae and Corrin’s performances and the attention to detail when it comes to recreating the nuances of old Hollywood filmmaking. (I do wish they’d experimented more with aspect ratios, but I admittedly have a personal fondness for that sort of thing.)
