Black Mirror: With a new frame (Of Mind) this time

“But they are not humans?” Says he.

“Neither are you!” replies she before banging the door on him and jumping out of an alternate reality.

Don’t worry, we won’t disclose names or plots or endings. No spoilers here. Except for one.

Black Mirror Season 7 is much more uncomfortable and, hence, much more important to watch- as a poignant reminder of the future we are carelessly embarking upon. If you see it from a technology lens you will shrug away some things to start with- DNA swabs as biometric ids, immersive virtual games, drones delivering packages- well, al that is already here in some way. These are not possibilities lying safe and harmless in some distant future. But some things – who knows already alive in some clandestine lab or in the secret basement of some tech magnate- do jolt you for their novelty, bizarreness and power. A lot looks not just plausible but possible. There are some really ingenious plot-points in some episodes where you can’t help but utter ‘How do the writers, makers, directors here even think of all this!’. And the very next moment you shudder at the same line- ‘If they can, someone else might too. Or has already.’

So, what’s new this time?

Well, episode 1 ‘Common People’ (directed by Ally Pankiw, written by Charlie Brooker) feels uncomfortably familiar or common to anyone who has felt trapped in a software AMC license drama or an airline seat-Sudoku or has bought an OTT subscription at the promise of being liberated from ads. Huh! What fools we customers are! To be naïve enough to believe in all the hollow marketing. To be surprised when the rug is pulled off beneath our feet and watching everything promised to us being shamelessly snatched away. Unless. You buy that premium tier. Unless. You upgrade to the next money-sucking level. A story that starts with a couple’s feet entwined happily ends with the same feet in a very different state when the story, and the tech-capitalist torture, ends. Plugging in one’s brain to a Cloud- that can be everything except a boon for humanity as those slick and smarmy salespeople tell you. Remember that. It may come in handy 5-10 years from now.

Episode 2 ‘Bete Noire’ ((by Charlie Brooker and directed by Toby Haynes) is, thankfully, something that seems many many years away. Quantum computers creating parallel realities- one will take some time to wrap one’s head around it. Or wait! Are deep-fakes, AI-fabricated content, hallucinating models, garbage-fed bots, jail-broken algorithms, misinformation, disinformation, synthetic audios and videos, compromised search engines etc. not glimpses of that nightmare that we are ignoring at our own peril? Don’t we believe in data more than we believe in people? And we have not even begun interacting with Holograms of them?

Speaking of the ‘flesh-and-blood’ish avatars of people who are not here anymore, how would you like walking inside a classic movie of the Black&White era? Or better still, how would you like your favourite star- alive now- to be part of that movie- as a transplant of just one character, with everything, every part of the set and story staying as it was? Gotcha! That’s a great marketing pitch for both the stars and audience of today – who are completely starved of good stories. But would stories stay as rugged as the cardboard of a movie-set when you mix in reality in any form? Don’t the plots of our own lives change when we just change one small choice, take one different turn, pick one new door, and speak one unscripted sentence? Episode 3 ‘Hotel Reverie’ (directed by Haolu Wang, written by Charlie Brooker) takes us beautifully inside a reverie of our own with many questions about our own roles in the well-designed and seemingly-predictable stage of life.

Roles! Characters! Now that’s the stuff that games are all about. And the way story-lines, motives and goals in many video-games are changing- apart from all the technology magic happening now- spurs us to believe that what Episode 4 ‘Plaything’ (directed by David Slade, written by Charlie Brooker) shows is relevant in more than one way. Games were, once upon a time, just about crossing one level and then the next and then the next one. We have come a long way – past all the ammunition, car-chases, hunting, scoring, defeating, killing, winning – but when will we reach the question that the arrested nerd-guy (who by the way, reminds me of Mahesh Bhatt for some reason) here asks so confidently and so kindly – humans had to fight when we were cavemen, but why are we using that savage operating system even now? Why can’t we co-operate? Would be need a super-intelligent and extremely-sapient global AI mega-grid to make us do that?

That’s an episode with a vague ending, if not exactly a happy ending that we stopped hoping for while watching Black Mirror. The next episode surprises you with one more mixed-bag. Episode 5 ‘Eulogy’ (directed by Chris Barrett and Luke Taylor, written by Ella Road and Charlie Brooker) makes you wonder if AI is all that mean, wicked and horrific as it is painted to be. Left on its own, trusted with intimate conversations, and guided with humans as collaborators, can AI actually help humans get past their prejudices, misunderstandings and conflicts? What if we looked at our photos, listened to those songs and wandered through long-lost memories with an AI’s eye and ear by our side? Would walking inside our photos help to look at our near ones in a new way? In a better way?

Looking at anything though needs one’s head to be out of the phone, to start with, at least in 2025. In Episode 6 ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’ (Which moves forward after the story point left in a previous season of this series) (directed by Toby Haynes, written by Charlie Brooker, Bisha K. Ali, Wiliam Bridges and Bekka Bowling) , we see a sight not uncommon to behold today. The only difference is that heads are bent backwards with a nubbin plated on one’s temples in this world instead of necks stooping headlong into phones in our world. But zombies completely lost - they both are- be it the people glued to their phones today or the humans glued into a different universe in this episode.

I thought this last episode is just one chore- something to be ticked off to mark the series properly finished. But I was, oh so wrong! Such a brilliantly-written story- the scenarios that pop out of dead-ends, the twists that character-arcs take, the parallels drawn with our reality today- all so staggering and well-fleshed-out. Why are we better or worse than ourselves in an alternate world? Who is the real person? Where? Why robbing someone never stops with humans- from a hunter’s game in the primal world to spices in Silk routes to lands and mines and banks after then and all the way to credits in a video-game? If we can be more confident or more selfless or more initiative-taking in a game, what stops us from doing that on a normal Monday?

As you could have gathered, Black Mirror Season 7, in my opinion, is full of all these questions. It’s not so much about the frailties, flaws, foibles and fears of technology as it is about the struggles and dark corners of humans. No matter which episode you pick, every time a villain is born it is only because s/he was bullied, ignored, insulted, exploited or forgotten by a fellow human. Our consciousness can be connected to an AI grid or outsourced to a subscription-platform in the future- but in every era this consciousness is ultimately what matters. It is much much more than we ever dare to realise. The dark ‘unknown’ window – that we have studied in management classes under the Johari Window concept - is scarier than any AI, tech-monster or start-up that we can create. Humans can go to any length and any depth- and the danger is we don’t know which side and how far. That’s the real ‘black’ in Black Mirror. Technology, eerily enough, makes us confront philosophy, spirituality and humanity with a closer look. And as this season reminds us- there can be happy endings too. If only we are brave enough to look in the mirror. It can be a crystal ball. Who knows!

P.S. To start with all the ‘brave’ stuff, there is even a ‘Plaything’-related game this time flashing on Netflix. Thronglets. But watch that episode first. It’s a Dare!