The best Black Mirror episodes of all time
Read, revisit, then maybe pop your smartphone on airplane mode for a while Black Mirror first thundered onto our screens in 2011, before Cambridge Analytica, before fake news, before elections begun to be derailed by algorithms. Since then, the corrosive potential of technology explored in Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones’ prescient sci-fi anthology series has gone from fantasy to dark reality. The arrival of season five yesterday on Netflix, coincides with newspaper stories that could once have been the basis of Black Mirror tales: facial recognition-assisted policing, YouTube Nazi uprisings, the list goes on. From humble beginnings on Channel 4, the show’s become a burgeoning international sensation, a fact reflected by its bigger budgets and glitzier casts each season (Miley Cyrus, The Avengers’ Anthony Mackie and Fleabag “hot priest” Andrew Scott are just a few of the stars of this latest outing). But what are its standout episodes, the stories that tapped deepest into our troubling (and sometimes tender) relationship with the digital devices we can’t stop swiping on? Here are our favourite seven episodes so far – read, revisit, then maybe pop your smartphone on airplane mode for a while.
Channel 41/7Deep down, Black Mirror isn’t really about technology – it’s about the way we use and misuse it, the catalyst in stories about relationships both broken and blossoming. A prime example of the show’s human focus is dinner party drama The Entire History of You, penned by Peep Show’s Jesse Bain (the only episode not written by Brooker). In the near future, people have devices called “grains” built into their heads, capturing everything they see and do, like a fancy GoPro cemented into their skulls. This becomes the backdrop to the tale of Liam (Toby Kebbell), a husband who fears his wife is having an affair with a friend at the party. Featuring a pre-Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker, it’s among the series’ most emotionally harrowing: a highlight of its opening season, when its budgets were small but its ambition was big.
Netflix2/7Both a homage to Star Trek and a critique of the toxic fans drawn to shows like it, USS Callister is as bombastic and adventurous as Black Mirror comes: Jesse Plemons (Breaking Bad) plays a reclusive video game programmer who takes his workplace frustrations out on colleagues in a Trek-like simulated world, using their DNA to create sentient digital clones of them. It touches on misogyny within sci-fi communities, male entitlement and toxic fandom in a way that predicted the fallout around Star Wars: The Last Jedi, released a few days earlier, and found Black Mirror boldly going where no show had gone before.
Netflix3/7Bandersnatch wasn’t a completely ground-breaking experiment, but it was certainly something new for Netflix and prestige TV storytelling: what if audiences could control a character’s destiny, steering their fate from scene to scene? This choose-your-own-adventure tale was rooted in a faithfully recreated 1980s vision of Britain, and centred on a young video game designer whose grip on reality unravels. It earns a place here for its innovation, proving seven years into Black Mirror’s reign that it could still offer the unexpected. Shout out to all my people who, like me, had a near-meltdown choosing Stefan’s cereal.
Netflix4/7The best of this season’s episodes, Striking Vipers is up there with Black Mirror’s finest instalments. It’s a premise that’s so surprising and unusual that to tease any details here would be cruel on those who haven’t seen it yet, when all that needs to be said is that it raises an enthralling question: could virtual reality help create an entirely new sexual orientation? Black Mirror has been dismissed by some critics in the past as heavy-handed: “iPhone, but make it scary” to quote one meme. The quieter, more nuanced season five feels like a rebuke to that, leaning more heavily into characters and their relationships, dialling back the terror. Striking Vipers, about a father who makes a startling discovery playing a new VR computer game, is that approach at its most affecting.
Netflix5/7The most beloved Black Mirror instalment is, oddly, the most un-Black Mirror. Breaking from the bleakness of a show that, for two seasons till this point, had been unrelenting in its techno-nihilism, San Junipero was a romance about a young couple (Yorkie, played by Mackenzie Davis, and Kelly, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in a beach resort town that’s revealed to be a simulated reality. Instead of banging a digital drum about how scientific advances will tear us all apart, this neon-hued heartwarmer of an episode, full of Eighties flourishes and emotional relationship drama, explored how technology might be used to keep love alive after death. Don’t pretend you didn’t cry.
Channel 46/7Right at the other end of Black Mirror’s storytelling spectrum is this merciless thriller: a lean, mean 42-minutes in the company of a disorientated woman who wakes up with no memory of who she is, pursued by killers controlled by a television signal. Its third act reveal, flipping viewers’ sympathies, is a classic Black Mirror move used in plenty of other episodes (Shut Up and Dance, White Christmas) but never as ruthlessly as in White Bear, a pulse-quickening comment on voyeurism, Twitter lynch-mobbing and the way violence and retribution becomes entertainment on our social media feeds.
Channel 47/7Paralysed with grief, Martha (played by Hayley Atwell) orders a robotic recreation of her boyfriend Ash (Domhnall Gleeson), recently killed in a car accident. What happens next asks fundamental questions of the things technology can’t replicate or replace. The ultimate soullessness of Ash’s synthetic double drives her to the brink, resulting in a clifftop final scene that’s brutally poignant. As I said, Black Mirror isn’t really about technology – in this classic episode, lit up by captivating performances from the then-emerging Atwell and Gleeson, tech’s a vessel to explore painful themes of mortality, mourning and moving on.
Now read:
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