Yahoo News Black Mirror season 4 review: Not a single duff episode
Much is made of the influence of The Twilight Zone and Tales of the Unexpected on Charlie Brooker's tech-horror anthology series, but its heftiest debt may well be to The Comic Strip Presents. Like Peter Richardson's deliciously deviant and darkly funny film series (which also jetted off from Channel 4 to a starrier network), Black Mirror is nimble enough to jump from genre to genre from episode to episode, to the point where it can sometimes barely feel like the same show.
While that would have been unimaginable during its Channel 4 years, Black Mirror now luxuriating on Netflix is able to think bigger than ever and these six episodes show off the series at its most visually and narratively confident.
This season, more than any other, plays like a series of handsomely budgeted feature films and there are more flavours, more textures here than ever before. Hell, there are even some happy endings this time round. Rather than wanting to just depress and disturb us, Black Mirror has shaken off some its adolescent cynicism to give us a glimmer of hope, a notion that sometimes, just sometimes, the best of humanity will win out over the worst of technology.
The biggest difference between the Netflix-funded Season 3 and those Channel 4-birthed seasons was that this new Black Mirror is now a truly transatlantic affair. Two of the last six were American set, another two were American fronted and only the remaining two were wholly British.
That international milieu continues into Season 4 with Black Mirror's most lavishly mounted episode yet. 'Crocodile' is a noirish thriller set amid the snow-draped mountains of Iceland and concerns a drugged-up couple who accidentally mow down a cyclist.
Andrea Riseborough gives a suitably chilly performance as Mia, a woman who, years after, resorts to desperate measures to keep the killing a secret, but the standout performance is from Kiran Sonia Sawar's decent-hearted insurance investigator, whose 'memory dredger' device is the key to uncovering Mia's crimes.
While its script is resolutely old-school Black Mirror, 'Arkangel' definitely takes the series into fresh territory, geographically speaking. Directed by Jodie Foster (yes, her!), these 51 minutes are 100 per cent American (even the show's other US-set episodes have been partially lensed in the UK and have included a few Brit actors going American). Instead of taking place in a bustling, culturally diverse metropolis, and featuring chic, ultra-contemporary housing, it's set in one of those faceless small towns so beloved of indie filmmakers.
It's a cautionary tale of overprotective parenting, with mother fitting her young daughter with a tracking device (think of Apple's Find Your Friends app, but way more invasive). But that kind of protection is difficult to give up, and as the girl grows, the mother, it seems, has trouble snipping those apron strings.
As impressive as those episodes are, the shiniest light of the season – Season 4's 'San Junipero', if you will – is the Jesse Plemons-headlined 'USS Callister'. You'll have seen the promos and the photos and might assume that this is some Orville-like Star Trek pastiche, and part of it is, and that's partially the point.
Yet there are some crucial elements to the episode that the trailers haven't spoiled, and we won't here. Suffice to say, it's half-Trek piss-take, half-traditional Black Mirror nightmare that features one of the series' most hateable and hissable characters at its centre.
If 'USS Callister' is Black Mirror as its most glossily Hollywood, then 'Metalhead' is the series at its most punky and lo-fi. Filmed entirely in black and white and coming in at a lean 40 minutes (compared to 'USS Callister's roomy one-hour, 16-minute running time) it's a shamelessly low-concept horror piece about a lethal mechanical dog that's terrorising Maxine Peake. And, well, that's it.
There's no real point here beyond the setup, no satirical barbs or ominous tech warning, just a simple Predator-meets-Terminator-meets-Cujo mashup that's the most off-piste episode Black Mirror's ever done.
We're on more familiar ground with 'Hang the DJ'. In a seemingly future-world where couples are matched by an online program that sets the time period in which they can be together, it's actually one of Black Mirror's sunnier episodes. Georgina Campbell (Broadchurch) and Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders) have a winning chemistry and there are some proper laugh-out-loud moments in this one. That said, it's probably the most Marmite episode of the lot, so prepare to love it or loathe it.
Brooker has dropped in various Easter Eggs these past few seasons, suggesting, to bionic-eyed viewers, that Black Mirror's stories all take place in the same fictional universe, but none have been so wallopingly in your face about it as the final episode here, 'Black Museum'.
A portmanteau 70-minuter – Brooker has described it as "like a 'Treehouse of Horror' Simpsons episode" – it's a delightfully gruesome and often blackly comic instalment that feels, once again, like fresh meat for the six-year-old show. And it features a season-stealing turn from Douglas Hodge as the tech med professional-turned-museum curator, the brilliantly monikered Rolo Haynes.
Two seasons into its Netflix relaunch, it's clear that the move to the streaming goliath has allowed Brooker to be even more narratively ambitious. Without being shackled by a 45-minute running time, these episodes are allowed the freedom to play out at the length they need to be, and it's hard to see how, without Netflix, he'd have been given the notes to act out his Star Trek fantasies like he does in the peerless 'USS Callister'.
There's usually been a duff episode in every Black Mirror season before this ('Men Against Fire' from Season 3 has few fans, while Season 2's 'The Waldo Moment' was the show at its most heavy-handed, even if it prophetically nailed a post-Trump world), but there's no dropped stitch here.
It's still vigorously inventive and thought-stirring, but it's also bolder and more eclectic than ever before. And despite the occasional concessions to the US market, it still feels thrillingly ours. We should be properly proud.
Black Mirror season 4 will be available to watch exclusively on Netflix from Friday, December 29.
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