Horrific dives into the past, modernist AI nightmares, and so much more.
With "Black Mirror" Season 6 available to watch now on Streamberry — er, we mean,
Netflix — here's an explanation of all the twisted endings.
Joan seems to have it all — everything, that is, except control over her own life.
A nice apartment, a loving boyfriend, and a position of authority at her workplace,
but none of it feels like something she chose.
When she is forced to fire a dedicated employee and evades responsibility for it, her morale
couldn't be any lower.
That is, until she sees a show seemingly targeted directly at her on Streamberry titled "Joan is Awful."
"Well, we're watching it."
"No, we're not watching 'Joan is Awful,' whatever the hell it is."
"Just hit play."
Curious at first, and then horrified, she discovers that "Joan is Awful" is based directly
on her and her actual life.
Joan immediately spirals as she sees all of her worst moments slightly exaggerated for
dramatic purposes in the capable hands of the person playing Joan, Salma Hayek.
With the current anxiety around AI and ChatGPT potentially replacing creatives, "Joan is
Awful" couldn't have dropped at a better time.
Joan is forced to learn that she has signed away her likeness to Streamberry simply by
signing their massive user agreement when she first subscribed.
She teams up with Salma Hayek — who signed over the rights for her own likeness to be
used as a digital creation in the show — to get back at the people that have tarnished
their images.
Storming the Streamberry HQ, they discover that a quantum computer has been using AI
to render these targeted reality shows.
And in the big twist, they find that their reality is in turn a show for the original Joan.
"Source Joan lives in reality.
When Source Joan watches the TV show 'Joan is Awful' she sees you playing her.
That show is the fictive level we're on right now, here."
The episode has a happy ending by the time the credits roll, but it doesn't reduce the message.
By preying on relevant fears of intrusive technology and the worrying question of whether
even our private lives are secret, "Joan is Awful" takes a meta approach to storytelling
that will make most viewers squirm.
But there's also hope.
Joan ultimately takes control of her own life rather than worry about what others expect
of her, and we see the quantum computer destroyed and Joan back in the captain's seat of her reality.
In and of itself, the world of true crime can feel like a "Black Mirror" episode.
Novice journalists with good intentions, a desire for fame, and an unwarranted level
of faith in justice contribute to a massively popular genre that is regularly criticized
for retraumatizing survivors of violent crime.
While there's often nuance to the conversation in real life, it isn't nuance that filmmakers
Pia and Davis in "Loch Henry" are looking for when they start digging into local lore
around Iain Adair .
Iain was a serial killer who lured tourists into his basement to be tortured.
He ultimately wounded Davis' father and, according to his mother, Janet, caused health problems
that led to Davis' father's eventual death.
Yet, things are not all as they seem.
While Davis is in the hospital recovering from a car crash, Pia pulls out one of Janet's
VHS tapes labeled "Bergerac," a long-running British crime show from the 1980s focused
on particularly unsettling cases.
On the tape, instead of an old BBC detective drama, she discovers horrifying footage of
Davis' parents torturing a couple to death with Iain Adair.
"Ken gave me that.
We had such fun together."
Pia attempts to flee but suffers a fatal injury, while Janet, who knows her secret is out,
dies by suicide, leaving the rest of her gruesome home movies for her son.
Though Davis' documentary wins awards, the lens of true crime has been refocused on him.
Alone, with the most painful things that have ever happened to him up for public consumption,
Davis has gotten what he wanted but paid a terrible price for it.
David and Cliff are astronauts in deep space, with technology that allows them to transport
their consciousness into robotic forms back on Earth to help them cope with the lengthy
time away.
When David's Earth robot is destroyed and his family killed by a cult that's convinced
mechanical life is an abomination, Cliff and his wife Lana invite David to use Cliff's
link for an hour every week to help him cope.
Of course, that situation starts getting weird.
David develops a crush on Lana, who rejects him, but Cliff's desire to control Lana, their
son, and even David's grief process leads to tragedy when David returns to take Cliff's
family away, just as he lost his own.
Having it all might make a person feel invincible, but, in the end, we can't control what life takes.
Cliff's arrogant belief that he can control the situation blows up in his face and, with
his power gone, he and David become true equals for the first time.
Though the episode ends on an open-ended note with David kicking a chair to Cliff and inviting
him to metaphorically and literally sit at the same table, it's clear that neither has
anything left to live for.
Whether they continue on or don't no longer matters.
Whatever they do, they'll have to do it together.
Set in 2006, "Mazey Day" takes on classic horror genre tropes by matching the hunger
of a werewolf with the unscrupulous behavior of mid-aughts paparazzi.
Protagonist Bo takes a photo that ruins an actor's life and leads to his death by suicide.
While she's told this is not her fault, it forces her to leave the business.
That is, until the starlet Mazey Day vanishes off the face of the planet after leaving a
film mid-shoot, driving up interest in photos of her.
After following her to a rehab clinic, Bo and her fellow photographers are shocked to
discover Mazey Day isn't suffering from standard celebrity dramas — rather, she has been
transformed into a werewolf.
"We gotta go."
"Just a couple more."
Though Bo and her peers attempt to flee, the werewolf makes short work of them until Bo
is able to get in a single shot that grounds the beast.
Bloody, naked, and weeping, Mazey Day begs Bo to kill her, but Bo opts instead to hand
her a gun so that she can catch it all on film.
With Mazey crying and holding a gun to her head and Bo's finger hovering over the shutter,
the parallel between these two very different kinds of "shooting" couldn't be clearer.
While this might seem like a departure for the series, the fact is that there is nothing
more "Black Mirror" than commentary on the toxicity of paparazzi culture.
Indeed, this episode only pulls overarching themes together more than ever by revealing
that humanity's various dystopias can't be blamed on technology alone.
Taking place in England 1979, "Demon 79" centers on Nida, a South Asian woman working in a
shoe store.
She's regularly forced to deal with racist aggression as her coworker expresses open
resentment toward her and her culture.
Nida copes through violent fantasies of destruction and mayhem but leads a relatively quiet and
unassuming life.
That is, until she accidentally splashes a rune with her own blood, inadvertently summoning
the demon Gaap, who tells her that she needs to kill three people to avoid the apocalypse.
"Let's stop it happening, you and me.
All we have to do is deliver three sacrifices in three days.
It's only three killings."
Noting that there is a surplus of truly reprehensible people surrounding Nida, Gaap coaxes her along
as she targets who she will kill.
A well-meaning policeman stops her just short of her goal, and, well, just as Gaap promised,
the apocalypse happens.
Still, things aren't all bad as Gaap invites Nida along to endure nothingness with him,
implying that it might not be so bad if at least they're not alone.
While "Demon 79" is a farce based on nuclear anxiety, late '70s xenophobia, and unaddressed
mental health issues, its heart shows us a bleak level of horror where even basically
"good" acts might not save us from humanity's worst in the end.
While Nida has a relatively happy ending, there is no denying that her time on Earth
in this episode is majorly defined by other people's racism, without which neither the
murders nor the apocalypse would happen.
This season of "Black Mirror" features several Easter eggs and references to past episodes.
The most notable of which hinge on its in-universe streaming giant, Streamberry — a stand-in
for Netflix itself — from the catchy name down to the flashy logo and user interface.
In "Joan is Awful," there is a moment of foreshadowing for the following episode when the documentary
"Loch Henry: Truth Will Out" appears alongside a number of other self-referential films and shows.
These include documentaries like "Finding Ritman," calling back to the lead antagonist
of "Bandersnatch," and "The Callow Years," a nod to Michael Callow from the first episode,
"The National Anthem."
Besides a handful of other Streamberry in-jokes, there are a few references to the White Bear
symbol that first appears in the Season 2 episode of the same name.
First, in "Beyond the Sea," the anti-robotics cult members that attack David's family scrawl
the symbol in blood on a wall.
And in "Demon 79," the symbol appears on the rune that Nida finds and accidentally splashes
with a drop of her blood.
During her vision of the future, politician Michael Smart's Britannia party logo also
bears a striking similarity to the mysterious glyph.
You probably recognize him.
He's all set to be our next MP."
"Well, with a little luck and a following wind."
Speaking of Smart, his name appears in a news scroll in "Loch Henry" that announces his
robot police dogs, foreshadowing the bleak future seen in the Season 4 episode "Metalhead."
Meanwhile, the TV series "Sea of Tranquility," another recurring "Black Mirror" reference,
makes an appearance in "Joan is Awful" as one of the shows available for streaming.
And in "Mazey Day," Bo outs the star of "Sea of Tranquility," Justin Camley, by taking
photos of him meeting a lover at a hotel.
These aren't nearly all the references to prior episodes to be found in Season 6, and
for some fans, part of the fun of "Black Mirror" is trying to catch them all.
As always, the anthology format of "Black Mirror" explores the interactions between
technology and humanity taken to their extremes.
This season achieves this by shaking up the timeline a bit more than it has before, implementing
just as many nods to modern life as ever while also delving into the past in three of its
five episodes.
While "Joan is Awful" shows a woman forced to see the immediate echo of everything she
does on a TV screen, "Loch Henry" warns of the potential hazards of dredging up the past,
followed by three episodes that are trips to the yesteryear of the "Black Mirror" shared universe.
By starting with a tale set so firmly in the present, as many "Black Mirror" episodes are,
then using the last episodes to travel backward as the show never has before, this season
pointedly refuses nostalgia for any perceived "good old days" before technology came along
and ruined everything.
Instead, it fleshes out a central theme that technology is essentially benign and it's
the hand in which it rests that determines whether it achieves good or ill.
It's important to note that characters that are against technology run amok, such as the
cult in "Beyond the Sea," are completely detached from reality.
This adds an overall sense that learning from our mistakes with tech might be a healthier
approach than denying its benefits outright.
Much of this season revolves around a slightly more optimistic view that, even in the worst
possible outcomes, there is always a silver lining somewhere.
As of this video, Netflix has not officially greenlit a Season 7 of "Black Mirror," but
considering the ongoing hype around the series, it seems unlikely that the plug will be pulled
anytime soon.
"It confirmed their innermost fears and put them in a state of mesmerized horror, which
really drives engagement."
Series creator Charlie Brooker told Tudum that any season of the series will have to
subvert expectations, even if that means subverting his own at times.
"I've always felt that Black Mirror should feature stories that are entirely distinct
from one another, and keep surprising people — and myself — or else what's the point?
It should be a series that can't be easily defined and can keep reinventing itself."
With six seasons in the bag, this approach is clearly what's kept fans coming back for more.