Let’s be honest, the best bit about Black Mirror is rewatching it. That’s when you notice the good stuff – the clues, hints and little nuggets that point to a grand twist or underlying meaning. Twenty-seven episodes and one interactive movie down, creator Charlie Brooker is still obsessed with the fine details.
And NME is too, which is why we asked Brooker (very nicely) to take us through the five new episodes of season six, starting with Netflix parody nightmare Joan Is Awful and finishing with Demon 79, the not-very-Black–Mirror (but still brilliant) existential mystery. Executive producer Jessica Rhoades, plus cast members Anjana Vasan, Paapa Essiedu, Samuel Blenkin and Myha’la Herrold, helped to fill in a few gaps. Be warned, heavy spoilers below.
Episode one – ‘Joan Is Awful’
Logline: “An average woman is stunned to discover a global streaming platform has launched a prestige TV drama adaptation of her life – in which she is portrayed by Hollywood A-lister Salma Hayek.”
It was originally about a newspaper story
Netflix parody Streamberry wasn’t always the focal point of the episode. Brooker says that when the idea first popped into his head, he imagined it in print form: “Joan was going to find herself on the front cover of a newspaper… but for minor things like her colleagues not liking the way she chews her food and stuff.” Ultimately, Brooker made the change to global TV behemoth because he “couldn’t work out how that was a story.”
The Dropout inspired Charlie Brooker
One of the things that convinced him to mix up the plot was binging another TV show. Amanda Seyfried’s true crime chiller follows Elizabeth Holmes, an American healthcare professional who develops new tech that puts millions of patients at risk – and ends up losing everything in the blink of an eye. “I was watching the show and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s dramatising stuff. That’s a better sort of story. And then you can get into the deepfake AI stuff.”
Salma Hayek wasn’t their only choice
If, like us, you experienced an ecstatic thrill upon hearing the flawless acting icon tell her lawyer to “take your paragraph eight and shove it up your arse… I hope you get paper cuts in your haemorrhoids and die”, then you probably can’t imagine another actor in the part. But there might have been.
“It was ‘Hollywood A-Lister’ [in the script], because you don’t dare to think you’ll get Salma Hayek,” says Brooker. “The first draft was a little bit more vanilla. The things she was required to say were a little bit more tame because we didn’t want to scare her off.” Then the BM team met with Hayek on a Zoom call. “It was one of the most hilarious and bizarre Zoom calls I’ve ever had! About 12 seconds in, she was pitching lines… Her one basic note was, ‘I want it to be more outrageous’. She was game for anything.”
Episode two – ‘Loch Henry’
Logline: “A young couple travel to a sleepy Scottish town to start work on a genteel nature documentary – but find themselves drawn to a juicy local story involving shocking events of the past.”
You might think Brooker hates true crime, but he doesn’t
Part of the episode’s charm is its willingness to bite the hand that feeds it. Loch Henry is filled with nods to how modern true crime docs, like the ones Netflix has perfected with Making A Murderer and Wild Wild Country, are “tacky”, not “well made” or “high-end”. It feels like the work of someone who really hates the genre. Not so. “I really like watching true crime documentaries, even though I feel on some level I shouldn’t, says Brooker. Rhoades, a bit more diplomatic, adds: “I think that for us, you can both be a huge fan of true crime documentaries and, you know, understand that we’re all a bit ghoulish.”
There’s loads of hints that Janet’s the murderer
As we mentioned, combing back through Black Mirror episodes for clues you missed earlier is fascinating. Loch Henry stars Myha’la Herrold (Industry) and Samuel Blenkin agree with us – and they have favourites too. Blenkin’s is the interview scene with young filmmaker Davis, girlfriend and co-director Pia (Herrold) and Davis’ mum Janet, who turns out to be one of the killers they’re investigating. “She says: ‘I haven’t been on camera before,’” despite the many murder videos disguised as old Bergerac tapes sitting on the living room shelves. “Then she says: ‘Well [your dad] wasn’t filming for broadcast. Can you imagine!’ Monica does that scene so well. That’s really the one for me.”
Herrold’s pick is a bit subtler. “It’s when Pia and Davis go to pitch their film [at Streamberry] and [producer] Kate Cesar asks, ‘Do you have a personal element to the story?’” she says. “And Davis is like, ‘Oh, my dad [died shortly after arresting one of the killers]’, but the personal element becomes even crazier [because his mum and dad were also killers].”
The cast have ideas about what happens next
Despite his mum’s unmasking, her subsequent suicide and Pia’s accidental death while escaping Janet on the Scottish Highlands, Davis still decides to make his movie. And he wins a BAFTA for it. The closing scene shows him crying in a hotel room post-ceremony, clutching a glass of bubbly and the handwritten note left by his mother. So what happens next?
“You think into the future about the way that Davis is going to deal with it,” says Blenkin. “When somebody’s story gets taken away from them it makes it harder to process the trauma because the trauma is there for everyone to see. How do you go about reclaiming that – and being able to live with the fact that you have profited from your own pain. It’s a very strange and very difficult cycle. I don’t know how I would cope and I don’t know how Davis is gonna cope. Maybe he’ll just become really cynical and start making more documentaries. Maybe he’ll just keep rolling on with his life.”
Episode three – ‘Beyond The Sea’
Logline: “In an alternative 1969, two men on a perilous high-tech mission wrestle with the consequences of an unimaginable tragedy.”
It was all shot on the Kent coast
The sprawling countryside manor where Kate Mara’s character Lana and her two children live (along with the robot ‘replica’ of her spaceman husband Cliff, played by Aaron Paul), was filmed in the seaside town of Whitstable during last summer’s heatwave. Rhoades informs us that the cast were sweltering in chunky “cardigans”.
It was inspired by post-COVID life
The idea for Beyond The Sea, in which Cliff and his rocket ship-bound co-pilot David (Josh Hartnett) use hi-tech android bodies to spend time on earth, came out of Brooker’s own experiences beaming into work via web uplink during lockdown. “It’s the ultimate working from home episode, the ultimate Zoom call,” he says. “ It was an idea that had been rattling around for a while in my head… inspired by the pandemic.”
Episode four – ‘Mazey Day’
Logline: “A troubled starlet, Mazey, is dogged by invasive paparazzi while dealing with the consequences of a hit-and-run incident.”
If you love Twilight, you’ll be happy
As you’ll know by now, the big twist of Mazey Day is that – major spoiler alert – Mazey turns into a werewolf, somehow developing the condition because she ran over and killed another werewolf at the top of the story. As twists go, it’s barking mad. What isn’t mad, it turns out, is a social media theory doing the rounds that argues the episode’s central song, Muse space rock smasher ‘Supermassive Black Hole’, was chosen because it also features in the werewolves v vampires film franchise Twilight.
“Somebody pointed [the link] out to me,” says Brooker, speaking before season six’s release. “They asked me if it was winking at [Mazey’s fate], which it wasn’t necessarily…”
“The wink was something that, if it happened, it happened very subconsciously for all of us,” adds Rhoades. “And so now we kind of love that the wink is in there.”
There’s a reason it’s set before iPhones
A recent viral tweet pointed out that some famous filmmakers – Scorsese, Tarantino, Spielberg – predominantly make period movies these days. The reason stated in the tweet is that mobile phones didn’t exist during the settings of these movies. It’s very hard to create tension if your protagonist can just whip out the internet and Google answers to the mystery that’s confusing them.
Similarly in Mazey Day, the titular actor’s secret might be very hard to prove in 2023. Photographic proof could have been Photoshopped, or even conjured by AI. “It’s a terrifying future of disinformation that we’re on the brim of,” says Brooker, “and we’re about to plummet down into that abyss… That’s one of my favorite things about Mazey Day. It [the early 2000s] was the last exact moment before we all had smartphones, before everyone was a paparazzo and had a camera in their pocket.”
Episode five – ‘Demon 79’
Logline: “Northern England, 1979. A meek sales assistant called Nida is told she must commit terrible acts to prevent disaster by Gaap the Demon.”
The original Gaap was a punk
If you had a sassy demon looming over your shoulder, telling you to murder three people or the world will implode, what would you hope it looked like? A pitchfork-toting, scarlet devil? The tallest member of disco funk divas Boney M? What about, as was in the original draft of Demon 79, a punk-rocker?
“Sometimes people say that Black Mirror has gone too American since it went to Netflix,” explains Brooker before revealing why he made the switch to a besequinned pop star. “Demon 79 is about as British as it fucking gets… I made a late-70s playlist and walked around listening to it. Then Boney M popped up and and I remember thinking: ‘Oh that’s a strong visual look, isn’t it?’”
We asked the actors about the ending
When Nida (Anjana Vasan) fails to commit the killings required of her, Russia fires its nukes and the apocalypse begins. As a result, Gaap (Paapa Essiedu) fails his satanic training, dooming him to “eternal oblivion”. In a romantic twist though, the jumpsuit-ed hellhound asks Nida if she’d like to join him. She agrees. They walk off, hand in hand, while the building explodes around them. But what happens next – do they live happily ever after?
“It’s all relative, isn’t it?” says Essiedu. “Is ‘eternal oblivion’ being vaporised by a nuclear bomb or is it being able to hang out?… In some ways it’s a love story, you know. I think Gaap’s found someone in Nida, you know. Obviously, he had a task to complete, but it was very solitary task.”
Vasan adds: “I was obviously invested in Nida’s journey – and I was like: ‘Has she just manifested all of this or is it real?’ So I don’t want the ending to be a cop-out.”
The post ‘Black Mirror’ season six post-watch guide: trivia, set secrets and more appeared first on NME.
