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Identity
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Identity
Ahead of Season 7: Top-Ranked Black Mirror Episodes to Rewatch
If you're into mind games, thrillers, and stories that keep you on the edge of your seat—with twists you never see coming—chances are you're already a Black Mirror fan. Since its debut in 2011, this sci-fi anthology has built a cult following for its bold, thought-provoking, and sometimes chilling takes on technology and society. Over six seasons, it's delivered unforgettable episodes that are equal parts entertaining and disturbing in the best way. Now, with Season 7 officially out and starting to make the rounds, some fans feel it hasn't created the same buzz as earlier seasons, but we think it's just a matter of time before everyone catches up and dives in. So, what better moment to revisit some of the most iconic episodes that defined Black Mirror? Whether you're new to the series or looking to rewatch the best of the best, this list is for you. Swipe to see the top picks, and tell us in the comments: which episode is your all-time favorite? The Entire History of You – Season 1 Episode 3 White Christmas – Season 2 Episode 4 San Junipero – Season 3 Episode 4 Metalhead – Season 4 Episode 5 Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too – Season 5 Episode 3 Beyond The Sea – Season 6 Episode 3
Boston Globe
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
‘Black Mirror' showed us a future. Some of it is here now.
Here's a look back at a few themes from past episodes that seemed futuristic at the time but are now upon us, in some form or another. Down the rabbit hole we go: Advertisement 'Be Right Back' Season 2, Episode 1 Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up AI imitations, companion chatbots and humanoid robots When Martha's partner, Ash, dies in a car accident, she's plunged into grief. At his funeral, she hears about an online service that can help soften the blow by essentially creating an AI imitation of him built from his social media posts, online communications, videos, and voice messages. At first, she's skeptical, but when she finds out she's pregnant, she goes through with it. She enjoys the companionship she finds by talking with "him" on the phone and starts neglecting her real-life relationships. She soon decides to take the next step: having a physical android of Ash created in his likeness. But as she gets to know "him," a sense of uncanny valley quickly sets in. Advertisement The same year that this episode aired, 2013, the concept was also the focus of Spike Jonze's Oscar-winning movie "Her." These days, AI companionship is quickly on the rise. Services such as Replika have millions of users. Replika started when its founder, AI leader Eugenia Kuyda, lost her best friend. After his death, she fed their email and text conversations into a language model, and in a way resurrected him via chatbot. Last year, Kuyda told the Verge that being "married" to your chatbot isn't necessarily a bad thing. In January, a New York Times story titled "She Is in Love With ChatGPT" explored the depths that people are bonding to their artificial companions, the lengths to which these partners can be customized and the ways these relationships can isolate users from their real lives. "Within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an AI," Bryony Cole, host of the podcast "Future of Sex," said in an interview for the article. 'Metalhead' Season 4, Episode 5 AI control problems, drones and autonomous robots When this episode aired in 2017, Boston Dynamics had already created its four-legged mobile robot referred to as a "dog," a muscular Terminator-like entity that inspired the episode. In 'Metalhead,' Maxine is being hunted in a postapocalyptic hellscape by similar robot dogs that have seemingly malfunctioned and are now fixated on tracking and destroying humans. The sophisticated killing machines can't be outsmarted for long and are stunning in their ingenuity, relentlessness, and efficiency. Boston Dynamics has continued evolving its products, including the creation of humanoid robots that can even dance. The company's Spot model of a robotic dog has been available for purchase for a few years, but when the New York Police Department implemented the machine in 2021, fierce backlash ensued, quickly cutting its run short. Now, the city's fire department uses two for precarious missions. Advertisement But most of all, the episode serves as an allegory on increasingly urgent anxieties around autonomous AI and control issues as they relate to the use of drones, whether they're delivering packages or engaging in warfare. In March, Times tech columnist Kevin Roose made a chilling point: In the next year or two, there's a very real possibility that AI will end our species's monopoly on human-level intelligence — and that we are completely unprepared for it. 'White Bear' and 'Shut Up and Dance' Season 2, Episode 2 and Season 3, Episode 3 Online vigilantism and social media spectacle These two episodes arguably deliver the most memorable twist endings of the series. In both stories, protagonists are being tortured in one way or another, and viewers, compelled to feel sympathy, don't learn until the end that these characters are, in fact, being punished for crimes against children. Themes around vigilantism, the genre of true crime, the appetite for spectacle and desensitization to violence — and technology's affect on it all — wind their way through. These episodes, from 2013 and 2016 respectively, foreshadowed the rise in online vigilantism. A Times investigation published last month illuminated the evolution of vigilante pedophile hunters on loosely moderated social media platforms, a movement that has accelerated over the past two years. The analysis found that these hunters chase, beat and humiliate their targets — with a surge of violent content posted in just the past year. The content caters to young men, and commenters often cheer on the violence and even suggest new methods of torture. Advertisement This phenomenon of pedophile hunters stands out because it adopts 'a social media influencer model, using real-life violence to build a following online,' the report states. 'Arkangel' Season 4, Episode 2 Child tracking and behavior monitoring There's a popular meme about millennial kids that reads: "We memorized phone numbers. We memorized driving directions. No one knew what we looked like. No one could reach us. We were gods." That freedom to exist unmonitored seems unthinkable today. In this episode, Marie is shaken after briefing losing her young daughter, Sara, in their neighborhood, so she signs up to have a cutting-edge device implanted into Sara via a service called Arkangel. The implant includes location tracking and medical data collection, as well as an audiovisual feed from Sara's perspective that allows Marie to blur whatever she deems too distressing for her daughter (such as sexual or violent images). What unravels from there is a story of a relationship manipulated, warped, and destroyed by the technology. In the end, Marie's compulsion to monitor and interfere in Sara's life as she comes of age ends up being the reason their relationship falls utterly apart. These days, just about everyone is tracked, including (and maybe particularly) children and teenagers. Apple's Find My Friends app and Apple AirTags, which are intended to help locate objects such as keys and bags, are common ways to monitor a person. A simple Google search will serve up numerous lists titled "the best GPS trackers for kids." Likewise, we now have smartwatches that monitor heart rate, oxygen levels and more. Last year, Google-owned brand Fitbit introduced a smartwatch specifically for children. There's also Gizmo, Wizard Watch and TickTalk. Advertisement In 2020, Times columnist Jessica Grose warned parents about these tools, arguing that they hamper little ones' road to independence, preventing them from feeling truly free. Yet, the digital umbilical cord is becoming harder to sever even when children go to college. Apps such as the popular Life360 allow parents to get updates and alerts about the granular details of a young adult's behavior. 'I cannot take it anymore,' reads a post on Reddit about Life360, prompting hundreds of replies and thousands of up-votes. 'It's not worth the crying and panic attacks you will cause your child.' 'Fifteen Million Merits' Season 1, Episode 2 Screen dependence, inescapable ads and AI followers In this episode, a fan favorite that helped establish the series, Daniel Kaluuya stars as Bing, a young man who lives in a society where people must cycle on stationary bikes to earn merits, a type of currency, in order to pay for everyday costs (insert all metaphors about the grind here). He also lives in a room that's encased by screens on which he can play video games and watch shows. The screens wake him up every morning. If Bing tries to look away from an advertisement — and doesn't have enough merits to skip it — he's met with a piercing sound and a voice that repeats 'resume viewing' until he opens his eyes. The plot point serves as precursor to the subscription tiers that many streaming services employ today, in which you can only opt out of ads for a price (and sometimes not at all). As for ads pausing until they have your attention, that's increasingly the case, too. Advertisement But it's the episode's virtual talent show, 'Hot Shot,' with its artificial audience, that has come back around. During the pandemic, virtual audiences were installed for 'America's Got Talent' and 'Britain's Got Talent,' and artificial crowd noise was applied to televised sporting events, dividing viewers. Now, nearly 14 years after the episode aired, there's an app called Famefy that allows users to assemble millions of AI bots that simulate devoted followers and cheering fans. It's an immersive alternate reality that replicates being social media famous, even if no one is real but you. In an interview this month on Times columnist Ezra Klein's podcast, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt — author of the hugely popular 'The Anxious Generation' — called Famefy 'one of the most disgusting apps I've ever seen.' 'This is the most 'Black Mirror' [thing] I've ever heard,' Klein, using stronger language, replied. This article originally appeared in
USA Today
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
The 5 best 'Black Mirror' episodes, ranked (including 'U.S.S. Callister')
The 5 best 'Black Mirror' episodes, ranked (including 'U.S.S. Callister') Show Caption Hide Caption 'Black Mirror': Paul Giamatti, Issa Rae headline new Netflix episodes A look at the six new episodes in Season 7 of the Netflix sci-fi anthology series "Black Mirror," featuring Paul Giamatti, Issa Rae and Rashida Jones. Are you ready to stare into the "Black Mirror" again? Netflix's dark and cynical sci-fi anthology series, all about the dangers of technology, returns for a seventh season (now streaming) to warn us to get the heck off our phones and turn off all those A.I. chatbots for our own safety. The new season has the series' first sequel episode, a tragedy tied up with those oh-so-familiar subscription fees and a sentimental hour featuring none other than Paul Giamatti. But do any of the new episodes rank among the series' very best? Since 2011, "Mirror" has offered 34 usually depressing stories designed to make us take a hard look at our digital future. And while most have been thought-provoking and striking, a handful stand out far above the rest. In honor of the seventh season's debut, we ranked the five best "Mirror" episodes of all time. Don't worry, "U.S.S. Callister" and "San Junipero" are still on the list. But some of the others may surprise you. 5. 'Metalhead' (Season 4, 2017) Most episodes of "Mirror" are extremely psychological, intimate and intellectual. "Metalhead" is all of those things, but also a rip-roaring piece of physical horror, a jump-scare bonanza that will leave you chilled even in the moments you don't have to think too much. Filmed in a stark black-and-white palette and set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by insatiably violent robot "dogs," "Metalhead" is one of the most thrilling and tense episodes of the series. That it still manages a heart-wrenching twist in its final moments only speaks to the maturity and depth of the writing. 4. 'The Entire History of You' (Season 1, 2011) One of the few "Mirror" episodes penned by someone other than creator Charlie Brooker (a pre-"Succession" Jesse Armstrong), "History" represents everything that "Mirror" does best, the Platonic ideal of the anthology series. In a world in which people have implants that allow themselves to rewatch their memories like episodes of a TV show, a couple (Toby Kebbell and Jodie Whittaker) is rocked by jealousy and distrust. The overarching theme of "Mirror" (technology is scary and bad) is illustrated by the eerie and intrusive memory recorders, but the sci-fi element only serves to amplify the flaws of the characters. The episode is fundamentally a story about relationships, good and ill. 3. 'San Junipero' (Season 3, 2016) Romantic, gratifying but also deeply tragic, this retro-futuristic episode starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis is Emmy-winning and beloved by fans for a reason. It is a deeply resonant love story with a technological twist: Two women meet and fall in love in a digital afterlife designed with our nostalgia-obsessed culture in mind, except one of them isn't looking to make her stay eternal. You might call it a happy ending when Mbatha-Raw's Kelly chooses the virtual heaven instead of a natural death so she can stay with Davis' Yorkie. But when the camera cuts to the stark, gray, electronic servers that contain the entirety of their world, their fate is also revealed to be deeply sad. Their afterlives and love is virtual, ephemeral and fragile, tied to the fallibility of human technology. How long could their "forever" end up lasting? 2. 'U.S.S. Callister' (Season 4, 2017) The only "Mirror" episode ever to get a direct sequel (Season 7's new "U.S.S. Callister: Into Infinity," now streaming), "Callister" is perhaps the most culturally relevant and insightful installment of a series that is built on those qualities. A lonely and deeply cruel programmer creates sentient digital clones of all the people in his office he perceives to have wronged him, so he can torture them inside a "Star Trek"-like video game. An apt "Trek" parody, meditation on fandom and toxic masculinity and acting showcase for stars Cristin Milioti and Jesse Plemons wrapped up in one, the episode fires on all phasers, as its space-faring characters might say. This season's sequel is a fun continuation with returning stars, but it doesn't match the depth of the original. 1. 'Be Right Back' (Season 2, 2013) Harrowing is the only word to describe this devastating episode, a cruel and heart-rending version of the "be careful what you wish for" story. Hayley Atwell stars as a woman whose boyfriend (Domhnall Gleeson) dies in a tragic accident, and amid her inescapable grief tries a service that digitally recreates her love based on his online presence. What starts out as essentially a ghost chatbot turns into a full-blown android, but Atwell's character quickly discovers that this construct can never be anything more than a facsimile. She cannot recreate the man or the love she shares, and she suffers all the more for having tried. Atwell's performance is an undeniable force, making the story all the more wrenching and affecting.
