There was a time when Black Mirror was ahead of the future, so that the series created by Charlie Brooker It ended up becoming, simultaneously, an audiovisual success and a prophecy of the technological apocalypse. In the tradition of legendary titles like The unknown dimension and the stories of JG Ballard, the great dreamer of domestic dystopias, Black Mirror it warned about possible scenarios in which comedians could lead a government, we would be slaves to television and our reputation would be based on the score received in an internet profile.
Brooker, a scathing and corrosive as acid screenwriter, warned of a terrifying abyss opened by computers, the rise of communication via the screen, social networks and the development of disciplines with an ethical limbo such as genetics or artificial intelligence. Then time passed, the prophecies were fulfilled (more or less), and we ended up saying that reality has ended up looking like a chapter of Black Mirror. It’s not exactly like that, but we’re getting closer and closer.
However, Black Mirror in 2023, now that the sixth season has just arrived on Netflix, it is progressively losing contact with those first episodes that have been broadcast since 2011 on Channel 4. At first, Brooker wrote little and without excess -three chapters per season, three horrifying dystopias because they seemed possible-, and after a third imperial season, things began to show fatigue from the fourth. The fifth, released in 2019, is usually cited as the weakest, and over time the idea has strengthened: Black Mirror lost punch, it did not predict the pandemic or the new drug of ultra-short videos about bullshit or volatile digital assets.
So the new season includes a novelty: instead of looking to the future, it seeks to generate fear from the past. A sudden reflection would be the following: Is nostalgia our new source of discomfort and discomfort? Is the fear of the future, and therefore the search for security in the past, the main cause of discomfort?
In Black Mirror there was already a retro episode, the mythical San Junipero of the third season -which many fans indicate as the best of all-, but there the eighties fantasy was transformed into a disturbing image of the future with a final script twist, which exposed a technology capable of defeating death.