Black Mirror- Known to leave audiences feeling dirty, Series 5 leaves you feeling surprisingly clean

TV Reviews- Black Mirror Series 5 (2019)

Everyone's favourite show that makes them feel bad for watching is back, but this time with a new twist: audiences are left with very little reason to feel bad. Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror has a history of turning technology and pleasant storytelling on its head and often leaves the audience with pie on its face and a lesson to be learnt about humanity. Though I appreciate the screen pun, I've always felt that the show should be re-titled 'Grey Mirror' because the show is at its best when it is morally grey. The shows best episodes display the advantages of new technology and then turn it on its head and shows you the dark under belly, leaving the audience to engage and discuss the many shades of grey in the world we live in. However, the latest series seems to forget all of this and offers three quite black and white worlds with very little for the audience to engage with or feel bad for.

'Striking Vipers' tries its best to pretend to be a Black Mirror episode and attempts to question how technology will affect sexuality and relationships, however nothing bad per-say actually occurs. I would say that this episode is the best in the series at attempting to be morally grey as it poses two questions for audiences to ponder on. Is fucking an online avatar played by your friend cheating? And, does fucking an online female avatar played by your male best friend make you gay? My problem with the episode is the fact it ends up answering both questions without any consequences. Is it cheating? Yes, because the concluding shots show that the agreement the couple results to is the protagonist's wife gets to also go out and cheat too. Yay (eye roll). Is this really the conclusion to the story that a struggling marriage gets to continue living unhappily, but for one day a year they get to cheat and be happy. The only thing grey about that is whether this is good storytelling or not. To further my point, the two friends meet up to kiss and see whether there are 'fireworks' in real life, which there are not. Leaving there to be little discussion of sexuality left on the table other than speculating whether they were actually telling the truth; again, cheap storytelling. Both of the above story lines just result to one point, having perfect online sex in the body of a really gorgeous avatar with another exceedingly gorgeous avatar is better than realistic and often not perfect sex. Which could have been explored so much better in an episode focused on that and the problems of porn in giving un-achievable expectations for sex. That episode, which Striking Vipers is pale attempt at, would have left the audience feeling dirty and put them in the firing line rather than questing whether the couple make the best marriage decisions.

'Smithereens' literally makes all decisions for the audience clear: the problem of addictive social media isn't on the people that consume it or the person that invented it, but the business people that abuse it. This is not a revolutionary episode or concept that gets you thinking on the interesting story, but instead you are left wondering how Andrew Scott's performance is wasted on such a weak narrative. The twist, if you can call it that, is predictable from the moment Scott's quick fuck tells her story, and his reasoning to speak to the CEO just feels cheap and boring. But, more over his reasoning just doesn't make sense other than the fact Brooker wanted to set up this dialogue between the consumer and the CEO of a social media company. The message of the story is don't tweet and drive, a message that has been propounded into our heads for many years. It's just excessively boring and offers nothing of worth of discussion because the story is so black and white. You can't sit and debate with your friends 'oh I think it is okay to tweet and drive', 'the business people making these things addictive are doing good' or 'Scott's character had perfect reasoning to abduct an intern and get a conversation with a CEO for no pay off' because none of them are true.

'Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too' is another episode that falls short of what Black Mirror could and should be. The story offers a clearly defined bad guy in Cyrus's Aunt that the audience isn't even allowed to attempt to see any grey in the narrative. The casting of Miley Cyrus, who has a history of being Hannah Montana that has exceeding parallels to Ashley O, is an aggressive shot fired at Disney and other big labels/organisation that are in control of artists. The best of Black Mirror shows you both sides of the story, but this episode spends no moment trying to humanise or explain the Aunt's side other than being greed. The Aunt is shown as manipulative and in the final moments a selfish mess crying on the floor on how 'she doesn't want to die'; she comes across as a bad comic book villain and when we have just had deep and interesting characters such as Thanos take the big screen, it feels a step backwards to have a cruelly underdeveloped bad guy such as the Aunt. What makes it worse is that this caricature of greedy manager is seen in so many different kinds of media, A Star is Born for a recent example, that it just feels lazy. You would think that if any show was going to show the other side of that well told story it would be Black Mirror. Again, the audience come out of the episode unscathed with all hate directed to business people's manipulation, again. The only thing that may make people feel bad is the tepid shots at stan culture which really is a type of fan mindset that has been demonised and on the decline since 2013.

All three episodes are pale imitations of what Black Mirror can be. None of the new pieces of technology were exciting and innovative; we got rehashes of VR, Alexa's and Twitter all of which have been better explored in previous and better episodes (Playtest, White Christmas and Hated in the Nation are the obvious examples but all three ideas are seen in other episodes). This leaves the series with very little to discuss especially when none of the episodes give any big talking points/debates because they are so black and white that everyone will inevitably have the same opinion. Charlie Brooker, for series 6 please just explore the grey world we live in while discussing our fear of new technology. I for one will go back to watching Years and Years on BBC, as it seems to be doing a much better job, while I wait for Brooker to remember what the point of Black Mirror is actually all about.