
‘Black Mirror’ Season 4 Review: The Dark Anthology Series Returns to Netflix
Posted on Friday, December 29th, 2017 by Chris Evangelista
Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s dark, twisted, technology-driven Twilight Zone riff, is about return to Netflix for yet another season of woe and punishment. There’s a cold cosmic justice at work in Black Mirror; a sense that any transgression, no matter how mundane, will be met with the bleakest of punishments. It can often make for an unpleasant experience. Yet Black Mirror explored exciting new possibilities last season, with the acclaimed San Junipero – an episode that revealed that hopefulness was also a possibility in the Black Mirror universe. Best of all, it was an episode that wasn’t obsessed with conveying a twisted moral – it simply used the Black Mirror premise to tell a story about two characters and the results were stunning.
Black Mirror season 4, sadly, does not have an episode that resonates as much as San Junipero did last season. The show once again continues down a dark, unrelenting path – which is to be expected, since that was the built-in methodology long before San Junipero came along. But how does Black Mirror season 4 stack up as a whole? The good news is that the latest season of Black Mirror goes off into new, unexpected directions and has fun playing around with style and form. The six episodes that occupy the latest season all vary in plot, tone, and message, which is a welcome change compared to previous seasons, which had a tendency to blur together.