‘Black Mirror’ Review: Sixth Season Of Netflix Hit Is All Over The Sci-Fi Map

The sixth season of “Black Mirror,” Charlie Brooker’s award-winning anthology series that Netflix turned into an original in 2016, might be the most inconsistent in the show’s history. At first, it’s tempting to dismiss it entirely as a production that’s past its sell-by date, especially given how much the world has changed in the four years since the last installment. Those feelings surface most of all when the season feels like something put together after Brooker put some hot-button topics on a whiteboard and worked back from there. There’s a bone-deep cynicism in the worst episodes of this season that feel like they’re trying to say something more than actually working from an interesting story. When a show like this starts foregrounding theme so blatantly, it becomes hollow. But then Brooker and his team find some of that classic “Black Mirror” magic again.

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Two of the sixth season’s five episodes are undeniably worth a look and stand if not with classics like “The Entire History of You” and “Be Right Back,” they’re at least not far down the ladder. They remind viewers what “Black Mirror” can be—inventive, topical, and even moving. You can skip at least two of the chapters this season entirely, which might make the installment a failure when considered as a whole venture, but don’t skip them all.

The best of the season is “Beyond the Sea,” the kind of emotionally driven sci-fi that should appeal to fans of Christopher Nolan’s brand of genre storytelling. Set in the late ‘60s, it stars Josh Hartnett and Aaron Paul as a pair of astronauts who have a special link back to Earth. They can basically send their consciousness home into an avatar when they’re on break from their mission in deep space, essentially splitting time with family and among the stars. When tragedy strikes one of the astronauts on Earth, the grief threatens to derail everything they’ve worked for. The always-solid Kate Mara co-stars as Paul’s wife.

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Directed by John Crowley (“Brooklyn”), “Beyond the Sea” centers on character instead of concept and does so largely through the excellent work of Aaron Paul, who gives his best performance in years. He essentially takes on a dual role, and nails it without being showy, finding the core of a man who finds a way to reclaim something tactile that he’s lost not only by being stranded in space but by being traumatized at home. It’s a great chapter of “Black Mirror” in that it plays with themes instead of merely pounding them over the viewer’s heads, and leads to a brutal, unexpected (and arguably a little unearned) ending. It didn’t need to be 80 minutes, but it’s still the stand-out.

Coincidentally, the second-best episode of the season also looks to the past to comment on the present and future. “Demon 79” was inspired by not only British horror of the ‘70s but the political thrust of the National Front, a far-right party whose politics of hate can still be seen in the country today. Once again, the episode succeeds on multiple levels. One need not consider the episode as “commentary” to appreciate it as a tightly constructed horror film, this one directed by Toby Haynes, who helmed much of the excellent first season of “Andor.”

Anjana Vasan plays a department store clerk in Northern England who has been having thoughts of violence. The microaggressions around her fuel these murderous fantasies, including the painting of an NF symbol on her door and her racist boss asking her to eat lunch in the basement. That’s where she discovers an ancient object with a glyph on it that calls forth a demon named Gaap (the great Paapa Essiedu). He tells her that she must commit three murders, sacrifices that will stop the end of the world, and shows her visions of what will happen if she doesn’t. It’s a smart, vicious little film that arguably chickens out on a better ending, this episode was once reportedly going to be a part of a spin-off series called “Red Mirror,” an anthology with more of a horror focus. Based on the success of this one, it might not be that bad of an idea.

Things get more mixed with the already-divisive “Joan is Awful,” one of several chapters this season that seems to be pointing fingers back at not only the people financing “Black Mirror” but those who watch it. Annie Murphy (“Schitt’s Creek”) plays a tech exec who has a pretty ordinary life with her partner Krish (Avi Nash). Her ex-boyfriend Mac (Rob Delaney) is back on the scene, and she has a rough time firing an employee played by Ayo Edebiri, but one wouldn’t consider her existence worth making into a TV show. So she’s stunned to find a hit Streamberry (the Netflix stand-in here) series that directly mimics her day-to-day existence, down to her private conversations. She discovers that those Terms of Service things that everyone clicks through give Streamberry the right to cast Salma Hayek as Joan and replicate everything she does.

It’s not a bad idea—and almost envisions the issues around the writer’s strike if you think about the suggestions around A.I.-created programming—but it’s little more than an idea. Brooker and his team don’t dig into what the concept here might say about how everything becomes content, and how we watch other people’s lives every day on streaming services. The cast, which also includes Himesh Patel and Michael Cera, is having fun, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this biting of the hand that feeds Brooker is a little toothless.

A similar shallowness hangs over “Loch Henry,” which likely came from a note about how there’s a lot of true crime on Netflix being on that aforementioned whiteboard. With a twist that’s incredibly easy to see coming and almost nothing substantive to say about our international true crime obsession, it’s a misfire. True crime is dangerous. Yeah, what else is new?

Davis McCardle (Samuel Blenkin) brings his girlfriend and filmmaking partner Pia (Myha’la Herrold) to his Scottish hometown to make a movie about a local egg collector. One of several plot inconsistencies immediately emerges from the fact that Davis never told Pia that Loch Henry is famous for something headline-grabbing: a serial killer who terrorized tourists and even led to the death of McCardle’s cop father. Pia convinces Davis to make a film about the crimes instead, and, of course, they discover a few things that they don’t really want to know. This one doesn’t add up to much.

Finally, there’s the depressingly inert “Mazey Day,” a chapter that wants to be a commentary on celebrity culture and the paparazzi but doesn’t know what to do with itself. Zazie Beetz plays a photographer at the end of the line after one of her tabloid shots leads to an actor’s suicide. However, she can’t pass up the opportunity to get one final big payday by chasing down troubled superstar Mazey Day (Clara Rugaard), who herself is responsible for a hit and run. At a brief 40 minutes and with an inane twist ending, “Mazey Day” feels nearly incomplete, like a first draft that was rushed to production to meet a deadline.

So where does this leave “Black Mirror” in the 2020s? There’s no denying the cultural impact the show once had has lessened, and yet there are reasons to think it could be reclaimed or at least maintained on this level. Focus on the rich storytelling of chapters like “Beyond the Sea” and “Demon 79” instead of the moral messaging of “Loch Henry” or “Mazey Day” and there’s reason to keep looking. [B-]

“Black Mirror” Season 6 is now available on Netflix.