“Black Mirror” Season 6: Unpredictable Reflections

Season 6 of “Black Mirror” premieres: unexpected reflections

This Thursday arrives on Netflix the awaited sixth season of “Black Mirror”, which promises surprises. Salma Hayek and Aaron Paul, among the protagonists.

No series explored the dystopian extremes to which the uncertain present can reach as Black Mirror, and that is why its silence during the pandemic was significant: there was no fiction that could compete with that event. It took creator and screenwriter Charlie Brooker four years to launch the brand new sixth season of the strip, which arrives on Netflix this June 15 with the even stranger sensation that time had not passed.

The installment, announced by the platform as the most “unpredictable, unclassifiable and unexpected” so far, is promoted as usual accompanied by a halo of mystery. The information released in dribs and drabs dictates that the five episodes will have a movie format (emulating the previous “National Hate”, “White Christmas” and “Bandersnatch”), and the trailer released a few days ago shows familiar faces such as Aaron Paul, Salma Hayek and Michael Cera. The motto of Black Mirror was always that of less is more: the fifth season released in June 2019 had only three episodes.

Perhaps one should read in that leak a beginning of creative exhaustion; that triad of episodes that had Miley Cyrus as the star was one of the weakest of the series, and already critics and fans had pointed to a loss of quality when Black Mirror moved from the English signal Channel 4 to Netflix in 2015.

The recent hiatus that the fiction went through had partly to do with another important transfer: in January 2020 Brooker and his partner Annabel Jones left the production company House of Tomorrow that nucleated them when the Endemol Shine Group to which it belonged was acquired by the French multinational Banijay Group.

The duo responsible for Black Mirror then founded their own production company Broke and Bones, which Netflix quickly took over with an estimated investment of 100 million dollars. The rights to the series anyway remained with Banijay, with whom Netflix had to enter into a decisive agreement. With all these corporate delays, the filming of the sixth season could only start in mid-2022.

Brooker however acknowledged in an interview with Radio Times in 2020 that world conditions at the time prevented new episodes of Black Mirror from being broadcast. The screenwriter literally admitted in the midst of the pandemic that there was no longer a “stomach” willing to process grim stories about the flawed bond between humanity and technology.

In that exchange Brooker gave vague hints of his plans for the series, stating that he had returned to more comedic writing of the sort that Black Mirror boasted in its British beginnings. Who knows, maybe what the strip is missing to regain its masterful touch are some gruesome laughs.

In a now-current note to Netflix’s Tudum blog, Brooker said, “I always felt that Black Mirror should include stories that are entirely different from each other, and continue to surprise people – and myself – otherwise what’s the point? It has to be fiction that can’t be easily defined and that keeps reinventing itself all the time,” he said.

He added: “Partly as a challenge and partly to keep things fresh for me and for the viewer, I began to conceive this season by deliberately putting in suspense the most basic assumptions about what to expect from the series. Consequently, certain familiar Black Mirror themes are joined by new elements among which sneak in some that I vowed never to include, with the goal of pushing the envelope of what a ‘Black Mirror episode’ is supposed to be. Either way the stories bear the Black Mirror stamp through and through, albeit with some crazy twists and never-before-seen variety.”

Exciting Episode Previews: Joan’s Discovery, Astronauts in Alternate 1969, Investigative Documentaries, Troubled Stars, and Demonic Acts

Aside from what the trailer anticipates, it’s already feasible to know the synopses of the five “films” to be seen starting Thursday. In “Joan is Awful” the Joan of the title played by Annie Murphy discovers that there is a series in which she is the protagonist, and that her role is played by none other than Salma Hayek. The hint that Brooker is allowing himself to joke about his own creation is evident in the episode’s fictional Streamberry TV signal logo, similar to Netflix’s.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play myself,” Hayek told Tudum. I had to mess with the concepts and the clichés that people have of me and I had to be kind of blasé about myself. It’s like I created an alter ego to do these grotesque, disgusting things that I would never do in reality, and in that sense I had total freedom to play him.”

Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad, Westworld) is an astronaut on a space mission far from his Earth family in “Beyond the Sea”. The journey, which takes place in an alternate 1969, is shared with David Ross (Josh Hartnett). Paul marks a unique case in Black Mirror, as this is his second appearance after providing his voice for “USS Callister.”

“I begged Charlie not to write me off the list and to consider me for other episodes. When this new script landed on my desk I instantly read it and said yes without thinking,” noted the actor.

The ensemble is completed with “Loch Henry”, about a young documentary couple composed by Samuel Blenkin and Myha’la Herrold who investigate some events that took place in a placid Scottish town; “Mazey Day,” in which a troubled showbiz star (Clara Rugaard) is stalked by a paparazi (Zazie Beetz) after being involved in an accident; and “Demon 79″, in which passive sales assistant Nida (Anjana Vasan) is persuaded by an eccentric guy (Paapa Essiedu) to perform terrible acts during the year 1979.

TO WATCH.

Black Mirror season 6 will be available on Netflix starting June 15.

“I can’t wait for people to really get into these episodes, which hopefully they’ll enjoy – especially those parts they shouldn’t enjoy,” Brooker concluded.