Black Mirror, season 7, review: Charlie Brooker is back on five-star form
In truth, Brooker has moved away from the 'iPhones but bad' blueprint of the early years, but this thrilling seventh series opens with an episode so achingly ' Black Mirror ' that it could have been created by an (exceptionally sophisticated) AI programme.
Common People has every hallmark – a sweet, middle-class couple (in this case Rashida Jones and Chris O'Dowd) who want the simple things in life, a near future where things have gone slightly awry and a life-changing piece of technology that is made accessible to all before revealing itself to have some serious caveats. It's iPhones but bad, essentially.
And it's brilliant. What starts out as a neat slice of Twilight Zone sci-fi – Jones's Amanda has her life saved by some experimental brain tech – turns into a thumping critique of the US healthcare system and our increasingly deadening subscription culture, as well as a meditation on love and loss. You might be able to come up with a hundred 'Black Mirror ideas' in the pub, but Brooker can execute them with panache, heart and soul – and Common People isn't close to being the best episode of the series.
There's a sense that Brooker has created these episodes with the handbrake off, allowing himself not one but two spin-offs. The much anticipated USS Callister: Into Infinity is, in truth, an indulgence (and a 90-minute one at that), but an enormously satisfying one, and Plaything, while not a straight sequel, exists in the same universe as interactive episode Bandersnatch. Brooker has even inserted 'himself' into it, in the shape of an early Nineties video-game journalist working for PC Zone. A hallmark of this refreshingly analogue series is its tangible love for physical, retro technology – floppy disks and all.
Yet, for all that he's known as a professional misanthrope, Brooker has surpassed himself with two beautiful love stories – both, to my mind, superior to the slightly overrated San Junipero. Eulogy is a 21st-century Krapp's Last Tape, with Paul Giamatti magnificent as a man forced to confront his past via a series of digitally enhanced old photographs.
Hotel Reverie, meanwhile, cements Brooker's reputation as TV's Alan Ayckbourn, able to marry high concepts with emotional truth. In it, Issa Rae stars as a modern-day Hollywood star who is digitally implanted into a Casablanca-esque Golden Age movie, where she takes the lead role opposite Emma Corrin's blushing 1940s beauty.
It shares DNA with the recent Westworld – indeed most of this series is preoccupied with whether androids dream of electric sheep – but more than that it brings to mind The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The direction, by Haolu Wang, is sensational.
If the previous two series felt curiously flat, this one fizzes with invention, humour and love, and finds the joy in the darkest of corners. Brooker's back.
Series 7 of Black Mirror is on Netflix now
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