Note: This post, while about the third season, contains second-season spoilers.
When the episode begins, we see Victoria (Lenora Crichlow) awaken, sore and discombobulated, on a wooden chair. She seems unsure how she got there, why her wrists are bandaged, or what the image on the screen in front of her is. We, the viewers, are just as confused.
Throughout the grueling 40 minutes of “White Bear," the first episode of *Black Mirror’*s second season, Victoria runs through the strange world looking for help. Most people walk by numbly, filming everything on their phones, seemingly in a daze. Others are even more terrifying, hunting her in disturbing animal masks. Victoria is trapped; she runs aimlessly, trying to find her bearings. Just when it seems as if she’s finally beaten the maze, though, the episode's crushing reveal shows she’ll never truly exit her labyrinth.
When Black Mirror first hit Netflix in December 2014, most of the buzz centered around the technology: Charlie Brooker’s anthology was a warning of where our screen addiction would lead us. But that fear only accounts for a part of the terror. The fundamental horror of the first two seasons of Black Mirror comes from watching a character looking for a way out—only to realize that no matter which way they turn, they rarely escape. “I only realized this after the fact, but in the first two seasons and the Christmas one, every single character in all of those stories is trapped from the very first frame and then never gets out,” Brooker says.
The third season, which launches today, is different—in a way that liberates Black Mirror to try a whole new set of narrative twists and tricks.
Even devoid of a literal hunt, trap imagery pervades the first two seasons. “National Anthem” opens with a phone call about a kidnapped princess and an indecent request, which the prime minister tries desperately to avoid. Instead, he’s stuck doing the unthinkable, filmed for the world to see. “Fifteen Million Merits” starts in Bing’s (Daniel Kaluuya) sterile room, surrounded by screens, a reality show offering his only way out. He ends the episode still stuck, only in a slightly larger room of screens.
The show's genius lies largely in its lack of dramatic irony. Brooker builds a new world in each episode, giving us the rules as we go along; that uncertainty makes our immersion all the more uncomfortable. We're in the room with Bing, on the phone with the prime minister, running for our lives with Victoria. Horror movies give us the comfortable distance to scream: “Don’t go in there!” Black Mirror is more difficult to watch because the characters make seemingly rational choices, struggling to escape, only to fail at the end.
And a year like 2016—bleak even for a Black Mirror episode—feeds perfectly into Brooker's mission with the show. "As a total pessimist, I'm kind of relieved that the year's been so horrible," he says, laughing. "Because I'm usually expecting the worst, and I'm just having all my fears and prejudices confirmed."
Brooker—a former TV host and habitual satirist—says that the new season will be more digestible, “because people could potentially watch them back to back.” Though each episode still centers around tech and exists in a crafted world—some near-future, some sci-fi, and some worst-case-scenarios in present day—the presentation is more tonally varied. “This time around, we've got a romance, we've got a police procedural, we've got a horror romp, we've got a thriller, we've got a social satire, a military story,” Brooker says.
“Shut Up and Dance,” about 19-year-old Kenny (Alex Lawther) who gets caught in a hacker’s plot, feels perfectly at home in the first two seasons. We see the trap set, and struggle along with the terrified teenager, unsure how we’d escape ourselves. But while watching Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) fall in love in “San Junipero,” the tonal differences become clear. The episode is sprawling, imaginative, and beautiful, but the trapped-animal tension is gone. In “Nosedive,” Lacie’s (Bryce Dallas Howard) obsessive social striving has the grim desperation of earlier episodes, but there’s plenty of distance between us and her—throughout we’re screaming “Don’t go in there!” at the screen.
Without the trap structure in each episode this season, Brooker and co-executive producer Annabel Jones’s stories will have to lean on something else: their dark senses of humor. Asked what describes a Black Mirror episode now that the show has a whole new range of tones this season, Jones answers without drawing a breath: “Fucked up.”
